Every artwork in the exhibit comes with a story or, more likely, several of them. Werner points out two later paintings of Immendorff’s, produced using a computer program and with the help of 10 assistants, after the artist had become paralyzed by the progressive neurodegenerative Lou Gehrig’s disease. “It’s really interesting to see an old artist do the job of a young artist: inventing a totally new technique for painting,” he tells me. Immendorff, Werner adds, “was, of all my artists, the closest to being a mental case. He really had a lot of schizophrenia, this man. But he was so fucking gifted.”
If Werner’s collection offers a window into Werner’s mind, his estate in Germany provides a complete map of it. The property is like a mini village, centered around a main house that began as a baroque mansion and was fashioned into a neo-Gothic castle by a plant taxonomist called Count Fritz von Schwerin. After the count died, in the 1930s, the house sat empty while the English gardens turned into a kind of Mittel-European jungle—one that Werner has been gradually taming over the past 10 years. In one meadow looms a magnificent 88-foot Penck totem pole, and nearby, behind a barn, is an area Werner calls his “cemetery,” where dozens of other sculptures are clustered together forlornly while he searches for the right place for them. Werner is, of course, extremely picky about these things, and a conventional spot—say, in a shrubbery-framed corner—won’t do. “It’s very complicated to put a sculpture in a wooded landscape so that it looks good,” he says. “I have 50 acres, and I can’t find a place for a sculpture.” The outbuildings include a three-story former forgery that now contains offices, a library, and a by-appointment-only gallery; an orangery Werner built from scratch around a set of antique glass doors he found at a Paris flea market; and two massive storage depots for his thousands of paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
Yet none of the main house’s airy salons are crammed with art. Instead,
Werner has on view a rotating assortment of paintings, Empire furniture,
Murano lamps, and African antiques he has assembled from dealers,
auctions, and markets. Several ground-floor rooms, deliberately
unfinished and constantly evolving, serve as Werner’s aesthetic audition
spaces, where he can quietly contemplate and compare artworks. Hergott
views the property as Werner’s
It can also be seen as the house that Werner’s arguments built. Looking at the remarkable property, one is more inclined to view the dealer’s zeal for conflict as part of a larger philosophy that values competition and disagreement in the creative process. Open antagonism, Werner believes, is absolutely necessary for art; he thinks it’s been too long since young artists had passionate supporters and fervent detractors. Today, with many immature artists gaining instant fame, thanks to their high prices, and then continuing their careers inside well-financed, PR-protected bubbles, perhaps it’s no surprise that the results are underwhelming. “Nobody wants to compete anymore,” Werner says resignedly. “And nobody wants to compare.”
