The Art Newspaper

Würth show celebrates double anniversary

Collector marks 75th birthday along with 65 years of family firm

By Rita Pokorny. Web only
Published online: 26 April 2010

The German collector and industrialist Reinhold Würth will celebrate a double anniversary with a show at the Museum Würth in the town of Künzelsau-Gaisbach. “The Collector, the Company and Its Collection”, 25 April-9 January 2011, will mark Würth's 75th birthday and 65 years since the founding of the family business. Seventy-five paintings have been chosen from his 12,500-strong collection, one for each year of his life.

“When, after the death of my father in 1954, I had to take over the firm at the age of 19, I would never have dreamt that within only 60 years it would turn into one of the world’s leading wholesale screw business with over 58,000 employees”, he said. (See The Art Newspaper, January 2009, p34.)

The exhibition will compare the development of the firm with developments in art since 1935, the year Reinhold Würth was born. It was also the year Emil Nolde painted Wolkenspiegelung in der Marsch (Cloud Reflections in the Marsh), the first painting Reinhold Würth bought.

The show also includes work by Josef Albers, Hans Arp, Georg Baselitz, Marc Chagall, Christo (who wrapped up the Künzelsau office buildings in 1995), Max Ernst, Barry Flanagan, Henry Moore, Asger Jorn, David Hockney, Picasso and Gerhard Richter, amongst many others. Among the latest acquisitions on display will be works by Alex Katz—who has a solo show in the Kunsthalle Würth Schwäbisch Hall from October 2010 to February 2011, Niki de Saint Phalle and Katsura Funakoshi.