Cigarette factory closure prompts major art sale

Cigarette maker British American Tobacco has built up an impressive collection of modern art at its factory in the Dutch town of Zevenaar on the Rhine river near the German border over the last fifty years. Now the factory is closing and the artwork in the Stuyvesant collection is being auctioned off. But not everyone is happy with the way things have turned out.

Cigarette brands Peter Stuyvesant and Lucky Strike will no longer be made in the Dutch town of Zevenaar. The closure of the BAT factory marks not only the end of a major source of employment in the area but also the final curtain for an unusual piece of Dutch art history.

At the end of the 1950s, factory director Alexander Orlow started hanging works of art among the cigarette-making machines. The workers needed something interesting to look at to stave off boredom and increase their productivity, he felt. Orlow went for modern, avant-garde art - large, colourful and mainly abstract paintings.

It turned out to be the start of a major collection. In collaboration with the directors of the Rotterdam Boijmans van Beuningen museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, it has acquired over 1,500 pieces, 150 of which are often loaned to major exhibitions. But on August 15 this year, BAT announced that it would auction off the total collection.

The cigarette manufacturer had tried to find a buyer who would keep the collection together and accessible to the public, but had been unable to do so. “We are a commercial company and have to weigh up commercial interests against the cultural ones. Our shareholders and owners have expectations,” says Cees Foet, an executive at BAT Artventure, the foundation responsible for the art collection.

Sotheby's sale

Sotheby’s will stage the sale. Four Chinese paintings are to kick off the auction on October 4 in Hong Kong but the largest part will probably come under the hammer in Amsterdam at the end of this year. These will be followed next year by auctions in New York, London and Paris.

Behind the desk of Zevenaar mayor Jan de Ruiter hangs Ger van Elk’s The Long Island Expressway or Midtown Tunnel (1984), lent to him by the BAT Artventure Collection as has been known since the ban on tobacco advertising. De Ruiter has been trying to save the collection since 2006.

“I forced them to look for a buyer for the whole collection,” says De Ruiter. He spoke to the BAT executive in London and mobilised the Dutch state, the provincial government and the Mondriaan Foundation. He spoke to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum about the possibility of an annex in Zevenaar. He had calculations made on how much a Stuyvesant Museum would cost. Everyone was helpful but all his efforts failed.

What annoys De Ruiter the most is that an offer for the collection was “just under” the asking price. If BAT or the buyer had come to him, he would have been able to make up the shortfall through his own connections, he says.

“BAT did not really want to make a deal,” is De Ruiter’s conclusion. “And I’m annoyed with them about that,”. He knows that the Van Elk will be taken away for sale any day now.

Neither Sotheby’s nor BAT want to comment on the total value of the art (which includes paintings by Karel Appel, Corneille and Anton Henning), but it is believed to be between 15 and 25 million euros.

Cultural barbarism

The eye-catcher is the 1994 painting Bloodline: Family Portrait I by Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang who is hugely in demand. This is expected to fetch between 1.7 and 2.5 million euros in Hong Kong this week.

Meanwhile, back in the Netherlands, BAT's former adviser and an important collector of modern art, Martijn Sanders who has been responsible for the collection since 1998 says “I think it’s awful. Not only because more or less the oldest corporate art collection in the country is disappearing, but a museum is closing too.

“I would never have worked on this project if I had known how it would end. The budgets [to buy art] were very low, certainly in my time, but galleries and artists were happy to give their work to this collection. They made big sacrifices for this... Now that everything is being sold off while galleries and artists get nothing back, I see as a form of cultural barbarism,” says Sanders.