Art Comeback of a Basel original Louis Schlumberger comes from a family that collects art, not makes it, as his father said. The son rebelled, first became an artist without means - and then fell ill. At 62, he is back and successful again. Mark van Huisseling
a scandal or breach of trust: In the bestseller "Die Frau des Geliebten der Mutter" (The wife of her mother's lover), Marie-Louise Staehelin described how she was married off as a young adult to the industrialist Nicolas Schlumberger, her mother's lover, "to keep the money in the Basel moneyed aristocracy " (Blick) - "city palaces, galadiners, inbreeding" was how the newspaper summarised the "cinematic life" of the author of the exposé. Nicolas was Louis' grandfather's brother. His father, a lawyer by profession, spent his professional life at Bankverein, the Basel-based bank that took over Bankgesellschaft from Zurich and became UBS; a military career was also important to him. His second son's life plan, on the other hand, gave him little pleasure. Louis was considered an enfant terrible at the University of Basel, where he dropped out of law school, and then at the University of St. Gallen, which he left without a business degree. "Because of his homosexual orientation and anti-military stance, the family conflict developed into a full-blown drama," writes art critic Dominique von Burg in a text about him. "The escape to London enabled him to study art history at Sotheby's Institute of Art," it continues. For the sake of completeness, it should read "The escape and the family" - thanks to the family lawyer, Louis had got an appointment with a Sotheby's boss and was subsequently allowed to apply for one of the scarce, highly sought- after training places (vitamin B is said to have been irrelevant for admission). His final thesis centred on early works by Jackson Pollock, which continue to influence his work to this day. "A Schlumberger doesn't make art, he collects it," is how Louis paraphrases his father's words. The French-Portuguese-American couple Pierre and Maria "São" Schlumberger, a distant relative, built up a collection of works by modern artists, including Mondrian, Rothko, War-
hol and Rauschenberg - with the fortune that Pierre Schlumberger earned as CEO of what was once his family's company and is now the world's largest oil industry service provider. And in Basel, father Schlumberger told his son that it was not too late to achieve something in life after all - if he came back to Basel to work at Bankverein. left London, but once again failed to fulfil his family's expectations - he moved to Zurich, into a council flat (1.5 rooms, 520 francs a month rent). And made ends meet with odd jobs so that he could paint at night. "He created works that were directed against some of society's constraints," writes critic von Burg. The following years can be casually summarised as what society largely didn't care about. Or, in other words, for the longest time he earned too little to live and too much to die, in classic artist fashion. After the death of his grandmother in 2000, he inherited; not very much, but enough to free him from existential fears, he says. His work had already attracted the Suddenly in demand Louis Schlumberger subsequently attention of an artist from Geneva, who was able to appoint Schlumberger as a Swiss representative at the Crans Montana Forum Universelle, an NGO with the aim of "building a better world". Furthermore, thanks to the Forum, he was accepted as an art student at Chelsea College and completed his Master of Art at the age of forty. Business was also going well, his large oil paintings were suddenly in demand - in 2002 he sold "Worlds of Seeming and Being", as he describes them, for 160,000 francs. But it seems that the hungry years before had caused damage: "Grave health problems abruptly interrupted his career in 2003," it says in his CV. According to Wikipedia, Crohn's disease belongs to the group of chronic inflammatory bowel diseases. The disease is categorised as a complex barrier disease of unknown cause.
Louis Schlumberger: Winter group show at the Art Forum Ute Barth. Zurich. 7 December to 31 January
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n the painting "The Poor Poet" by the German painter Carl Spitzweg, a writer is depicted in his barren attic.
parlour. There is no bed in it; a mattress is leaning against the wall, on which the poor poet in a dressing gown is leaning. He is holding a few pages of manuscript in his left hand. If Louis Schlumberger were a writer, you could imagine him like this. But he is a painter. He is also a Schlumberger, a member of the large, wealthy family of entrepreneurs and art collectors with a Basel branch. New works by him can be seen this autumn. The 62-year-old exhibited in London in October and in December the winter group show of the Art Forum Ute Barth, the Zurich gallery that represents him and to which he is contributing some new abstract paintings, opens. This may not yet be the rise to painting royalty. But it is at least his entry into the art world or, more precisely, his re-entry. After all, Schlumberger had already been this far once before, more than twenty years ago. In between lies a family dispute that almost destroyed his life plan. And an illness that almost ended his life (perhaps it was the other way round). An unhappy family in its own way "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The first sentence from "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy is often quoted, but that doesn't make it any less true. The Schlumberger tribe from Mülhausen in Alsace can be traced back to the early 16th century. The first Schlumberger only came to Basel a good 300 years later, bringing with him a recipe for a small white bread called "Schlumbergerli", which is still popular in the city today. The line that produced Louis was discontinued at the end of the 1980s
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