Auteur/autrice : Michael A Strebel

This contribution was presented by Sinergia team members Émilie Widmer and Stéphanie Ginalski, together with Claire-Lise Debluë, at « The Key for Art Market Power » conference (online, 2-3 Nov 2020). Its aim is to tackle the issue of art market power through the lens of the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, the Zurich Art Society, which we consider a key – and yet largely overlooked – entity of the Swiss art market. More specifically, we analysed the power relations within the art society itself and investigated the weight of economic actors in the early 1930s – a critical moment for the internationalization of the Swiss art market (Guex 2011).

In 1932, Peter Meyer, editor of the well-known avant-garde journal Das Werk and a leading figure of the Swiss modern architecture movement, publicly condemned the increasing influence of members of the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft (ZKG) belonging to the financial elite. According to Meyer, the latest general assembly of the ZKG had witnessed a genuine coup d’état staged by fellow members, who managed to amend the statutes of the society and to change the voting rules. This coup d’état was carried out by close collaborators of the executive committee’s president, Adolf Jöhr, who was also the general-director of the Swiss Bank Schweizerische Kreditanstalt. These collaborators were bankers, clerks, and legal consultants working in the financial field, and were described by Meyer as “financial praetorians”.

How come bankers and fellow legal consultants belonging to the financial elite gained such widespread influence within the ZKG? What does it tell us about the power structure of the artistic field and the pivotal role of certain intermediaries in the organization of the local and international art market? To answer these questions, we addressed the two-following issues. First, considering power struggles within fine art societies is crucial to assess the weight of each group of actors in the process of decision making. Based on the knowledge we have of the ZKG’s early history, we assume that fine art societies offer key sites for observing local elites’ divisions (including, but not limited to, artistic issues), while considering how and to what extent they agreed to adjust their mutual interests to shared goals. Second, drawing on Luc Boltanski (1973) notion of “multipositionality”, we took a close look at the variety of positions held by the ZKG executive committee members within the social field. More particularly, we sought to determine how “multipositionality” of financial elites (both inside and outside the ZKG) shaped the power balance between different categories of members and membership and how it affected the process of decision-making. The analysis focuses on the “Jöhr period” (1922-1940) and is based on the annual reports of the ZKG as well as on unpublished archival records.

Together with Andrea Pilotti, Roberto Di Capua, and Karim Lasseb, Sinergia PhD candidate Baptiste Antoniazza has drafted a new working paper on the evoluation of left politicians profiles in Switzerland. The paper aims to study the crisis of the representation of the Swiss working class through an analysis of the socio-professional profile of the local, cantonal and national elected representatives of the Swiss left-wing parties (Socialist Party and Radical left parties) from 1910 to 2016. The analysis, based on biographical data regarding around 1500 left-wing elected representatives subdivided in six cohorts from 1910 to 2016, shows some significant changes in their socio-professional profile which take place in the same period also characterized by important transformations in the electorate of the left-wing parties.

Our colleague Matthieu Leimgruber, project leader in the SINERGIA team  at the University of Zurich, has released a pathbreaking biography of Emil Bührle (1890-1956), a prominent – and controversial – «Armament King» and art collector from Zurich (see press coverage and research context here). This study follows the transformations of Bührle’s arms firm into one of the largest industrial conglomerates of its time, the reach of his social, political and cultural networks into the Zurich and Swiss elite, as well as the constitution of his world-class art collection. It provides a multi-faceted contextualization of a truly uncommon and meteoric rise all the way up the Swiss social ladder. It also widens the focus of previous studies on Bührle, which tend to focus solely on his arms exports towards Nazi Germany during World War II, as well as on his shady deals on the wartime art market. Beyond controversies about looted art and war profiteering, this study thus brings new insights on the connections of industrial, banking, political and cultural networks around the Kunsthaus Zürich, of which Bührle was the main benefactor from 1940 to his death in 1956. As a significant part of Emil Bührle’s art collection will soon enter from 2021 onwards into the Kunsthaus Zurich and propel this museum among the leading European institutions for impressionism, this new biography represents both a scholarly advance and a contribution to current public debates about the nexus between money, power and art.

→ Full Report (in German)

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Sinergia team members Michael Strebel, Baptiste Antoniazza, and André Mach have a new working paper on local elite networks and their most central actors. Recently, there has been a resurgence in prosopographical studies of (national) elites. In this paper, we complement this research with a long-term perspective on urban elites from different social spheres in three Swiss city-regions. City-regions are the main geographical hubs of power and the local level often serves as an entry point for accessing elite networks at larger scales. Assessing the evolution of local elite networks’ inclusiveness is thus crucial for our understanding of past and current inequalities and power structures. Using a positional approach, we identify academic, cultural, economic and political elites in Basel, Geneva, and Zurich from 1890 to 2020. In our analysis, we first assess elites’ multi-positionality in city-regional organizations. We observe a gradual disintegration of local elite networks over the course of the 20^th century and their almost complete disappearance to the present day. In a second step, we present the profiles of the core elite, i.e. the 400 actors that hold positions in two social spheres at the same time. Old Swiss men form a rather cohesive and exclusive core elite throughout the period and descendants of patrician families dominate Basel and Geneva’s (but not Zurich’s) local networks until the beginning of the 20^th century. These results have implications for our understanding of the functioning of local economies and for our conception of the local level as an entry point for newcomers to elite positions.

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