Big banking and famous art in Basel

BASEL, Switzerland – For the past two months, the Kunstmuseum in Basel has been host to an extraordinary exhibit thanks to its troubled artist and its troubled sponsor.
Vincent van Gogh’s landscape artwork forms the bulk of “Between Earth and Heaven: The Landscapes,” an exhibition presented by the Union Bank of Switzerland, also known as UBS.

From April 26 to September 27, the van Gogh exhibit showcases 70 landscape paintings from the late 19th century master.

As a student of history with a particular interest in modern Western culture, experiencing this showcase was incredible. Although the exhibit lacked some of van Gogh’s most well-known pieces such as “The Starry Night,” “The Potato Eaters” and “Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette,” it did a fantastic job of chronicling van Gogh’s landscape artwork.

“Between Earth and Heaven” includes dozens of landscape paintings that were collected from throughout the world: Honolulu, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Jerusalem and unnamed private collectors. This is what really makes the exhibit extraordinary. For these five months, the Basel Kunstmuseum is having the single greatest collection of van Gogh’s landscape artwork ever assembled under one roof.

Walking through the museum, the spectator gets an intimate look into the mind of van Gogh. From the beginnings of when he decided to become a painter, to his encounters with the vibrant and avant-garde culture of Paris, to his time in a mental institution, the artist’s sensitivities and experimentations are colorfully revealed here in Basel.

Throughout his entire life, van Gogh’s landscape artwork always seemed to reach for a simple ideal. Man should be like a child who appreciates and is fascinated by the Earth that sustains him.

Musing on the profundity of van Gogh’s artwork is an experience I am sure to remember for years. But the chance might never have come along without the help of UBS. The exhibit’s foremost sponsor has recently come into trouble with the U.S. government for refusing to reveal the names of some 52,000 American account holders suspected of tax evasion. They refused to reveal because of Swiss privacy laws.

Currently, the Swiss government and the American government are working on a negotiation that hopes to satisfy both countries. The USA-UBS ordeal could lead to the United States banning UBS from banking in the United States. This would be catastrophic for the company that not only handles some Swiss Social Security money, but also employs thousands of U.S. workers.

A UBS collapse would also prevent the bank from sending big money to big programs such as The Locarno International Film Festival, The Montreux Jazz Festival, the ice hockey Spengler Cup and The Players Golf Championship, to name a few.

The Swiss Federal Council member Micheline Calmy-Rey and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hope to meet near the end of July. Although their discussions will not likely touch on the artistic importance of the van Gogh exhibition in Basel, surely its sponsor, UBS, will be on the table alongside papers, pens and interests.