Everything seemed ideal to turn the German castle into a large private museum. Then Germany passed a law that had the perverse effect of making it impossible to leave any art that might fall under the cultural preservation rules in the country.
The new law caused Hall and his wife to completely revamp their exhibition ideas, as the Financial Times explains in their profile of the couple:
“We had an art truck turn up the week the law was passed, and all those early works were gone,” recalls Andrew, who is chief executive of Astenbeck Capital Management and goes by “Andy”. The Swiss warehouse that received the scores of artworks, he says, saw a veritable traffic jam of trucks arriving from Germany. “The law is totally stupid. The idea was to prevent the flight of artworks from Germany, but it had the exact opposite effect. Crazy.”
In addition to scrapping a show of Baselitz and his contemporaries’ early works, the Halls stopped a shipment of about 140 of their Warhols headed for Derneburg’s official opening, since the law applies to foreign-born artists as well, and to whole collections judged significant. Despite verbal assurances from government officials that their art would be allowed out, Andy says the law was so murky that his lawyers could not allay the couple’s fears. “I just don’t want to be the guinea pig,” he says. “It’s not a risk I’m prepared to take with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art.”
