Making art work on the factory floor

Apollo, August, 2005 by Susan Moore

Reinhold Wurth has formed one of Germany's largest collections of twentieth-century and contemporary art, as much for the pleasure of his employees as for himself. Two years ago he added to it the Furstenberg collection of Old 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 so 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 effect by a cocoon of drop-cloth or dust-sheets with brown wrapping paper on the windows (Fig. 1). He also commissioned Philip Glass to compose 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 Old Masters acquired from the Furstenbergs two 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 sculpture of Henry Moore.

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Wurth (Fig. 2) has a penchant for the big gesture. Typically, the collection that began some forty years ago with the purchase of a Nolde watercolour now numbers some 8,000 works of predominantly modern and contemporary art. For Wurth, collecting began as a private passion, an anti-dote to business. Over the decades, his collection has evolved into a corporate tool--and one central to the development of Wurth's distinctive brand of paternalistic corporate culture and commitment to lifelong learning.

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Wurth has transformed the modest screw wholesale business that he inherited from his father in 1954. From just two employees, the company now has some 47,000 working in eighty countries. In Kunzelsau, his larger-than-life presence 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 thoughtful. At the age of seventy, his blue eyes still twinkle under a mop of corkscrew curls. It is clear that, despite a posse of curators, his art collection has remained a highly personal project, 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 but 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 new headquarters at Kunzelsau. Determined to create a stimulating and agreeable working environment for employees, 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 Siegfried Muller/Maja Muller-Djordjevic, the building opened in 1991, and broke new ground by integrating a gallery into the heart of an office building. Unlike comparable corporate collections, this one is accessible to every employee, not only senior management, and also to members of the public, seven days a week. Moreover, all employees are allowed to choose 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 sculptures. No one is obliged to go into the gallery but it is impossible not to confront works of art on a daily basis, stimulating even 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 160,000 people, excluding staff, visit the gallery each year.

'Living and working with art is an expression of a high quality of life,' says Wurth. Employees bring their friends and relatives to visit the jaunty, ocean-liner of a building and its specially commissioned multi-coloured monumental sculptures by Robert Jacobsen (Wurth owns the largest collection of his work outside Denmark). They leave impressed. 'It brings a kind of corporate pride to my people which directly comes back in a type of motivation', argues Wurth. He believes the company's cultural activities nurture a creative and positive-minded personnel. Now every new Wurth office or factory building is designed to incorporate gallery space to show exhibitions drawn from the permanent collection. Where possible, these shows have a particular local resonance. An exhibition curated for Prague in 1999, for instance, emphasised artists--Max Ernst, the German Abstractionists and the COBRA group among them--who had a formative influence on 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, steel and local limestone structure, opened in 2001, that is both sympathetic to, and affords a magnificent panorama over, the unspoilt medieval town. Currently on show is 'Henry Moore: Epoch and echo', a thoughtful, ambitious overview of six decades of modern and contemporary British sculpture that spills out of the gallery and into the streets, parks and churches of Schwabisch Hall (until 16 October).