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. 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 Expressi...