THE COLLECTOR WHO SHARED EVERYTHING, AND THE WILL THAT DIDN'T

 For years, anyone could walk into the Kunsthaus Zurich and stand in front of paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and Max Beckmann without paying a private collector a cent to see them. The works belonged to Werner Merzbacher, a Swiss businessman who built his fortune in fur trading and currency exchange, and who had quietly placed much of his collection on long-term loan to the museum since 2018 — an arrangement that asked nothing of the public and depended entirely on his own continued goodwill.


Merzbacher died in 2024. The goodwill, according to Swiss reporting, may not have survived him.


Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Vincent van Gogh, "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890). Reference image only.
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Vincent van Gogh, "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890). Reference image only.


Much of what Merzbacher owned had come to him through his wife's family — inherited by way of his grandfather-in-law, Bernhard Mayer, a name that appears nowhere on museum wall labels but sits quietly behind an Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, and German Expressionist collection substantial enough to land Merzbacher on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list in both 1996 and 2014. What he built from that inheritance, he mostly chose to share.


The Swiss publication Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that Merzbacher's will was "repeatedly amended" in the years before his death, in ways that appear to have benefited an unnamed asset manager rather than his own family. Instead of splitting the estate three ways — between his two children and the descendants of a daughter who predeceased him — the will was rewritten to divide it four ways, with the fourth share, reportedly worth hundreds of millions, going to the asset manager instead.


Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Paul Cézanne, "Still Life with Apples and a Glass of Wine." Reference image only.

Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Paul Cézanne, "Still Life with Apples and a Glass of Wine." Reference image only.


None of the paintings themselves have moved. They still hang, for now, exactly where Merzbacher chose to put them, in a public museum in Zurich, available to anyone who walks in off the street. What has moved is the question of who gets to decide whether they stay there — a decision that, for years, belonged entirely to one generous man, and now belongs to a courtroom.


Merzbacher spent his life choosing to hang his paintings where strangers could see them for free. His will, as currently written, chose something else entirely. SOURCES : ARTnews

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