Mismanagement, and a Scientology Scandal, Blamed in Munich Museum Chief’s Ouster

MUNICH — At a recent exhibition opening, a painting of a black baby was attracting an unusual amount of attention.

The work, by the German artist Jörg Immendorff, was part of a series of several cartoonish infants painted half a century ago. Visitors at the Haus der Kunst, one of Germany’s most important contemporary art museums, were peering closely at the painting’s title, taking photos on their smartphones and furrowing their brows in consternation.

As it turned out, the title of the 1966 piece contained a word now considered racially charged: “Negerchen mit Kerze” (“Little Negro With a Candle”).

“I think the artwork is nice,” said Asso Soumade, one of the evening’s attendees. “I’m just concerned about the title. At least they should have put an explanation on it. If Enwezor had been here, he would not have allowed that.”

Soumade was referring to Okwui Enwezor, the former artistic director of the museum who unexpectedly resigned last June, leaving a flurry of unanswered questions in his wake. Enwezor had worked on the exhibition, a major retrospective of Immendorff’s work, but he departed before it was mounted. (After the opening, the museum affixed a label saying that the title does not “connote a negative or discriminate impression vis-à-vis people of color.”)

Soumade said Enwezor’s time at the museum was “a fresh breath of air.”

Similar words have been used to describe Enwezor throughout his career. Considered one of the most influential curators active today, Enwezor was born and raised in Nigeria. Since the mid-90s, when he started a magazine about African art in Brooklyn, New York, Enwezor has fought to bring attention to African, Asian and Latin American artists, and many have praised his curatorial work at the 2002 edition of Documenta, an important exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, as challenging Western hegemony in the art world.

The mid-September opening at the Haus der Kunst was packed — a large crowd had come to see Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, deliver a speech about the artist. But Enwezor was nowhere to be seen. Just weeks before, he had given an interview to the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in which he called the short statement announcing his resignation “an insult” because it did not highlight the accomplishments of his tenure, and said that statements about the museum’s financial situation created the impression that his leadership had been a failure.

Officially, the museum had cited Enwezor’s health as the reason for ending his contract three years early. (Enwezor has cancer.) But critics of Enwezor say he mismanaged finances and personnel, and point to those as the causes of his early departure.

“Enwezor had too many scandals to handle at once,” said Isabell Zacharias, a spokeswoman from the center-left Social Democratic Party in the Bavarian parliament. “Enwezor is not a manager. He’s a great artist, but artists are not managers.”

The state of Bavaria is the biggest shareholder of the Haus der Kunst, and provides the museum with millions of euros every year.

An in-house scandal in 2017 revealed that the museum was under surveillance by the intelligence services for harboring Scientologists in its ranks might have seemed bizarre to outsiders. It caused a small uproar in Bavaria, where Scientology is considered a threat to democracy and where it is illegal for Scientologists to work in government or for state-funded organizations. Three Scientologists were fired, and the flap exposed fissures between Enwezor and some members of his staff. “Initially, I was baffled by it,” Enwezor said in a telephone interview. “But I think it’s very serious.” He added, “I know art is subversive and all of that, but not at that level that we should have had the equivalent of the FBI watching us.”

Enwezor and the supervisory board of the museum were accused of not acting quickly enough after discovering that Scientologists were on the staff. Employees had repeatedly complained about a human resources contractor, who some said hired other Scientologists to work in the museum, but had not seen management take any action. A group of them formed a workers’ council to protest the situation and sent a letter to the supervisory board accusing “the executive level” of tolerating “gross abuses.”

According to the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, workers also complained that Enwezor was distant and did not speak German. Some observers wondered how he could be an effective artistic director while curating the Venice Biennale in 2015 — no small task.

For his part, Enwezor still wonders whether the furor surrounding the Scientologists was part of a strategy on behalf of some on his team to “bring change about within the organization,” as he put it.

Against the backdrop of the Scientology scandal, the Haus der Kunst was struggling with its budget, as it had been for years. In April, the museum hired Bernhard Spies to sort out its finances. In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Spies blamed the museum’s current 500,000-euro deficit on management mistakes made during Enwezor’s tenure.

Oliver Joerg, a member of the Bavarian parliament, wrote in an email that Enwezor’s exhibitions drew international attention but carried financial risks. “This is particularly true if, for example, visitor numbers fall short of expectations or exhibition partners drop out at short notice,” he wrote. “Postwar,” a huge exhibition at the Haus der Kunst from October 2016 to March 2017 of art from the two decades after World War II, was cited by Enwezor’s critics as an example of a show that did not pull its weight financially. It brought together more than 350 artworks from 50 countries; planning it took 3 1/2 years. It drew acclaim from critics, but costs were much higher than projected — 4.4 million euros ($5.1 million) instead of a planned 1.2 million euros — and ticket sales were much lower than expected. The Brooklyn Museum, which originally signed up to host the exhibition in the United States, pulled out unexpectedly.

“'Postwar’ was a debacle,” Zacharias, the center-left member of parliament, said. She added that after that exhibition, the supervisory board should have taken a closer look at the museum’s budget and questioned the financial wisdom of Enwezor’s future plans.

Enwezor said he knew from the beginning that the exhibition would not be a blockbuster, but he did expect a higher turnout. He expressed disappointment that an exhibition that explored Germany’s history and the global shifts that followed World War II did not entice more people. The letdown was especially cutting because the Haus der Kunst was built by Hitler in the 1930s to house Nazi propaganda art. “I wanted to engage the public in this conversation,” Enwezor said.

Enwezor said he was always aware that the museum needed more money to support his plans. But, he added, “It’s not like in the United States. It’s very difficult in Germany. Someone doesn’t write a check for $10, $20 or $100 million.”

According to public figures, 6 percent to 7 percent of the funding for the arts in Germany comes from private sources. Corporations, which can typically provide continuous and significant support, do not have as active of a presence in the German art world as they do in the United States.

The Haus der Kunst is funded and directed through a complicated structure in which three separate groups are shareholders, one of which is the state of Bavaria. Enwezor and his team did not manage to secure any large corporate donors, and even lost one that donated $500,000 annually. But they did secure 78 million euros in government funding for a planned renovation of the museum in 2020, and raised more than 4.3 million euros in donations between 2015 and 2017.

But it wasn’t enough. The costs of Enwezor’s projects outpaced the profits, and a deficit formed.

A lingering question on the minds of some observers has been whether racism or xenophobia were factors in Enwezor’s departure. Enwezor was hired at the Haus der Kunst with fanfare in 2011, but since then, the political mood in Germany has shifted and xenophobia is no longer the purview of fringe political parties. In Bavaria, in elections for the state parliament last Sunday, the populist Alternative for Germany, which has made anti-migration policies a focus of its platform, entered parliament for the first time with a 10 percent share of the vote.

When asked if he had experienced racism at the Haus der Kunst, Enwezor approached the question delicately. “I’ve enjoyed my relationship with the cities where I’ve worked, and I think there was a sensitivity to racial discrimination, but let’s face it, we live in a context where if you want to win an election, the easiest thing to do is to attack immigrants,” Enwezor said. “Blackness always seems to be at the lowest end of that totem pole. And that makes people more vulnerable.” Enwezor’s exit has not been the only change at Haus der Kunst. In the last months, the museum has announced the departure of Ulrich Wilkes, the head curator, and the addition of a deputy for Spies to help with a new department dedicated to fundraising.

A few weeks after the Der Spiegel interview published, Enwezor took a more diplomatic tone, reflecting on the goals he set out to accomplish and the role a museum can play in a society defined by political battles.

“Museums are places of the human imagination, and that means we want to be as open as possible in our engagement with that imagination,” Enwezor said, adding he was “proud to have been part of the conversation.”