Making art work on the factory floor

Reinhold Wurth has formed individual of Germany's largest collections of twentieth-century and contemporary art, as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of for the pleasure of his employee as for himself. sum of two units years ago he added to it the Furstenberg collection of advanced in years Masters, so preventing its dispersal. Susan Moore talks to him about philanthropy, taste and the ways that art motivates workers.

When the German industrialist Reinhold Wurth celebrated his company's fiftieth anniversary in 1995 he did thus by asking Christo and Jeanne-Claude to 'wrap' his corporate headquarters. The walkways, floors and windows of the building in the small southern town of Kunzelsau were transformed to extraordinary consequence by a cocoon of drop-cloth or dust-sheets with brown wrapping paper upon the windows (Fig. 1). He also commissioned Philip Glass to form a new symphony for the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. For the firm's sixtieth, celebrated this year, he has exhibited the restored princely collection of early German and Swiss elderly Masters acquired from the Furstenbergs sum of two units years ago, shown his Impressionist and Expressionist pictures in the Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo, and punctuated the medieval townscape of Schwabisch Hall with the monumental statuary of Henry Moore.

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Wurth (Fig. 2) has a penchant for the big gesturing Typically, the collection that began more [i]or[/i] less forty years ago with the purchase of a Nolde watercolour now numbers more [i]or[/i] less 8,000 works of predominantly novel and contemporary art. For Wurth collecting began as a private passion, an anti-dote to business. above the decades, his collection has evolv into a corporate tool--and individual central to the development of Wurth's distinctive brand of paternalistic corporate agriculture and commitment to lifelong learning.

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Wurth has transformed the retiring screw wholesale business that he inherited from his father in 1954 From just sum of two units employees, the company now has more [i]or[/i] less 47,000 working in eighty countries. In Kunzelsau, his larger-than-life nearness is apparent everywhere, from the fluttering flags bearing the corporate 'W' to the photographs and promotional videos. Reinhold Wurth is Adolf Wurth GmbH Co Ltd

Whn I met him in his eyrie at the top of the Wurth building, however, the alleged showman was courteous, unassuming and pensive At the age of seventy his sky-colored eyes still twinkle under a mop of corkscrew ringlets It is clear that, despite a posse of curators, his art collection has remained a highly personal throw and that a genuine passion for music and fine art has made them a core constituent of corporate life. Wurth is convinced that they have played an unquantifiable on the contrary real part in the company's success

The decision to take the collection into the workplace was made in 1985 when Wurth decided to build a novel headquarters at Kunzelsau. Determined to create a stimulating and agreeable working environment for employee he announced an architectural competition for a design expressive of its age that would also incorporate an art gallery, a lecture-cum-concert hall and the firm's industrial museum.

Designed by the agency of Siegfried Muller/Maja Muller-Djordjevic, the building make opened in 1991, and broke of recent origin ground by integrating a gallery into the heart of an office building. Unlike comparable corporate collections, this single is accessible to every employee not alone senior management, and also to members of the public, seven days a week. Moreover, all employee are allowed to single out works from the store to display in their offices and in their homes--although not, obviously, the likes of the Picassos or the twenty-two-ton Chillida plastic arts No one is obliged to advance into the gallery but it is impossible not to stand over against works of art on a daily basis, stimulating plane the uninterested to react, as they did when they saw Alfred Hrdlicka's provocative backdrop--a rape scene--for Luigi's Nono's opera Intoleranza. Around 160000 family excluding staff, visit the gallery each year.

'Living and working with art is an expression of a high quality of life,' says Wurth Employee bring their friends and relatives to visit the jaunty, ocean-liner of a building and its specially commissioned multi-coloured monumental statuarys by Robert Jacobsen (Wurth holds the largest collection of his work outside Denmark). They leave impressed. 'It brings a kind of corporate pride to my tribe which directly comes back in a stamp of motivation', argues Wurth. He believes the company's cultural activities food a creative and positive-minded personnel Now each new Wurth office or factory building is designed to incorporate gallery space to present to view exhibitions drawn from the permanent collection. Where possible, these present to views have a particular local resonance. An exhibition curated for Prague in 1999 for instance, emphasised artists--Max Ernst the German Abstractionists and the COBRA clump among them--who had a formative influence upon modern Czech art.

To display more of his rapidly growing and wide-ranging collection, Wurth decided to build the Kunsthalle Wurth in the nearby town of Schwabisch Hall. Winning the architectural competition this time was Henning Larsen--architect of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen--who conceived an assured glass, carburet of iron and local limestone structure, uncloseed in 2001, that is one as well as the other sympathetic to, and affords a magnificent panorama above the unspoilt medieval town. commonly on show is 'Henry Moore: date and echo', a thoughtful, ambitious overview of six decades of novel and contemporary British sculpture that spills without of the gallery and into the roads parks and churches of Schwabisch Hall (until 16 October).