Bröhan acted especially aggressive against Johst in 2015 with regard to the purchase price for his collection of 7,000 design classics to the city of Hangzhou.

More information on Torsten Bröhan you’ll find → here.

Many Chinese and international media outlets had reported about the sale of  his collection for € 55 millions. Johst proceeded likewise, considering himself on the safe side by referring to these articles. But Bröhan pushed through that Johst is not allowed to mention this sum. He made an affidavit in order to underpin his credibility before the responsible judge.

This is the wording of the affidavit:

“Knowing the penalty of perjury under the laws, I herewith affirm before the court in lieu of oath: …the alleged purchase price of € 55 millions … is wrong by more than 10 percent…“

Johst had to delete the corresponding text parts and bore substantial judicial costs arising from the proceedings. I report about this in → this article.

The following is generally valid: making an affidavit before a German court and lying thereby and causing damage to the opposing party is fraud and bears the risk of custodial sentence of up to five years or a fine.

Fraud is anything but a small offence. Who commits perjury has to be driven by substantial criminal energy.

Years later, in late 2018, when Bröhan still fought over the collection’s purchase commission with his former consultant Stephan Balzer, Torsten Bröhan had his lawyer Ralf Kemper present the following at court:

„…is the information provided that the purchase price agreed upon between Bröhan Art Design Ltd. and China Academy of Arts sums up to € 55 millions…“

After all – a purchase price of € 55 millions! Why did Bröhan lie when he sued Johst? Bröhan did not react to a respective inquiry until this article was published.

Back to the trial Balzer against Bröhan. In a terse letter to court Bröhan’s lawyer attempted to get his act together by claiming that the vendor hadn’t been Bröhan himself but Hong Kong based Broehan Art Design Ltd. and that expenses had to be deducted, blah blah… The judge saw through the stunt and was not impressed.

Meanwhile, the Berlin disctrict court has passed a judgement, Case No. 28 O 14/14: Torsten Bröhan has to pay a commission of € 5.5 millions plus interests to Stephan Balzer for the latter’s brokering of Bröhan’s collection of design classics to the city of Hangzhou. The judge sentenced that Bröhan owes Balzer more than € 6 millions. The decision is not legally effective yet. Bröhan’s lawyer announced that his client will appeal. Here you’ll find → Stephan Balzer’s press release on this court decision.

Journalist Marcus Johst is preparing to take legal action. He states in a general declaration: “The art world is full of big and small cheaters, that’s like folklore. But liars and fraudsters who try to harm others have to be unmasked and sentenced. This applies to the art market exactly as to any other economic sector.“

Der Beitrag Why did Torsten Bröhan lie about the purchase price for his collection’s sale to the city of Hangzhou? erschien zuerst auf Torsten Broehans million dollar secret.

We took the reported purchase price from ChinaDaily.com and HangZhou Weekly but were not able to check this information. Now a court has forbidden us from publishing this figure.

Why are we no longer permitted to cite the purchase price for Bröhan’s collection? Because, according to an angry letter from Bröhan’s lawyers, the sum is incorrect. The strange thing about this legally binding court judgment is that Torsten Bröhan did not even have to specify the correct sum, but simply stated that the actual amount differed by more than 10% from the amount cited, which Bröhan says is incorrect.

Why has Bröhan suddenly become so aggressive?

We have to wonder where this aggressive oversensitivity has suddenly come from, after the purchase price Bröhan is criticizing as incorrect had already been disseminated all around the world for years. Is there something in particular that Torsten Bröhan wants to hide?

From 2005 to 2011, Torsten Bröhan tried to sell his collection of design classics to museums and institutions all around the world, even hiring an agent – the German consultant Stephan Balzer – for this purpose. For a long time, his efforts were in vain. Until the Chinese Academy of Art (CAA) came and snapped up the opportunity. The city of Hangzhou paid the enormous bill.

PR wave for Hangzhou with the “Bauhaus collection”

In announcing the purchase of the Bröhan collection, the municipal government of Hangzhou set off a proud wave of PR. And the news of this fantastical purchase price, which Bröhan says is incorrect, spread around the world. Has Torsten Bröhan ever taken legal action against this before? We don’t know.

Four years later, everything is different: Bröhan is reacting angrily to our reports and having parts of them banned. What is the reason for this odd behavior?

Der Beitrag Angry mail from Torsten Bröhan – what is the millionaire design collector trying to hide? erschien zuerst auf Torsten Broehans million dollar secret.

We spoke to Prof. Michael Erlhoff, founder and former director of the Cologne International School of Design, and Prof. Egon Chemaitis, Professor for Design at Berlin University of the Arts (UDK Berlin) until 2011 and, since 2007, professor of the Master’s course at the CdK (Chinese-German Academy of Art) in Hangzhou, a collaborative project by the CAA and UDK Berlin that was launched in 2006 and ends in 2015.

The two conversations took place at different locations in spring 2015. Here we contrast the different viewpoints on our questions.

What do you think is the significance of the “Bauhaus collection” in Hangzhou?

Michael Erlhoff: I think the Hangzhou municipal government was a bit naive in making this purchase. For example, I can’t help wondering what Olivetti posters from the 1950s are doing in this collection. They may be pretty, but what do they have to do with the Bauhaus?

Egon Chemaitis: In my opinion, the exhibits currently on display are very useful for learning and teaching purposes. Perhaps it is even a great blessing that it is not exclusively a Bauhaus collection.

What exactly did you see in 2011?

Michael Erlhoff: Only some of the items purchased, around 150 pieces. For example, there was one of the kettles by Peter Behrens, a Rietveld chair, a bit of Bauhaus graphic design, and so on. And minor errors with regard to attribution and presentation, which I already referred to in my article for the design magazine Stylepark.

Egon Chemaitis: Around 140 to 150 exhibits were on display – mainly seating furniture and tableware (porcelain, silverware, service sets) and smaller lamps. But I’m not entirely sure any more. The exhibits ranged from the end of the nineteenth century to well into the twentieth century, with porcelain by Gropius, pieces by Wagenfeld, and a service set by Gerhard Marcks that I had never come across before. There were also lots of chairs, but no upholstery. For example, the famous red-and-yellow chair and the zig-zag chair by Rietveld. There was also work by Josef Hoffmann, Wiener Werkstätten. Everything was presented very nicely on pedestals and was lit slightly from below. This was pleasant for approaching the exhibits for the purposes of study, as I did with the Master’s students there. As regards the errors in the presentation, they were oversights that I don’t think are all that bad.

What might the purpose of the collection purchase have been?

Michael Erlhoff: Maybe the competition with Korea, where apparently there was also interest in the Bröhan collection. That may have driven up the price. In China there is immense interest in German design and German architecture. And design in general is seen as an important growth factor for the economy. I would estimate that around 350 design academies have opened in China over the past 15 years.

Egon Chemaitis: The goal for educating designers in China needs to be to understand the principle of modernism: the focus here is on the function, as well as a formal use of forms that is based on geometry and accommodates any manufacturing technique. It would be interesting to see whether China could successfully use this to arrive at its own design philosophy. Modernist design is something that can be seized upon by the Chinese design community – as the beginning of modern design. Later periods such as post-modernism would be more difficult to convey without knowing the historical context. This was a US reaction to modernism as an imported culture. The Chinese need to look at that first. They didn’t go through a modernist period.

How did the rather audacious attribution “Bauhaus collection” come to be used by the Chinese press and even CAA President Xu Jiang himself?

Michael Erlhoff: The CAA is China’s oldest art college. And Hangzhou is rich, but as a location it needs to raise its status in relation to Beijing and Shanghai, which is only an hour away by express train. Furthermore, the Academy President Jiang Xu, who studied Art in Hamburg, is a nephew of the former President of China Jiang Zemin. This Xu is a highly prestige-conscious person who celebrates the topic of design in a very grandiose way. There is vain competition between the cities for influence and money. German design is incredibly highly regarded in China and the term “Bauhaus” is a synonym for it. That is probably how the “Bauhaus” label came to be used by some people and by the media when this collection was bought for a large sum of money.

Egon Chemaitis: In China, Bauhaus is code for modern design. It is about an image, not a specific attribution. The criticism of the name “Bauhaus collection” comes from a western perspective.

Your personal impression?

Michael Erlhoff: I found the items in the exhibition boring.

Egon Chemaitis: A reasonable presentation for an interim solution. In view of the items on display, I had the impression that the collection gets thinner the more it moves into the modern period (1950s to 1970s). The selection seemed rather arbitrary to me. For example, the Alessi Sapper kettle seems rather isolated, and post-modernism is not documented.

Der Beitrag Two professors and two opinions on the Hangzhou “Bauhaus collection” erschien zuerst auf Torsten Broehans million dollar secret.

Who exactly is this Torsten Bröhan? „As a young boy of 14 or 15, I was already interested in Bauhaus,“ Bröhan says and shows how well he can combine great feelings with great business deals.

Torsten Bröhan is primarily a friendly elderly gentleman who lives in Berlin and has written numerous reference books: “Glasskunst der Moderne [Glass art of the modern age]“, Munich 1992; “Avantgarde Design 1880-1930“, Cologne 2001; “Glass of the Avant-Garde“, Munich 2001.

The father of the design-crazy businessman was a famous art collector: Karl H. Bröhan (1921 – 2000), a Hamburg medical entrepreneur who sold his company in the middle of the 1960s, moved to West Berlin and from then on dedicated himself to his passion: art. Bröhan senior built up an impressive collection of 16,000 works from the Art Noveau, Art Deco and Functionalism movements, which he donated to the city of Berlin in 1981. This exhibits Bröhan’s treasures in a museum named after him.

Father Karl H. Bröhan already started hording animal pictures and cigarette inserts at the age of eight. Son Torsten tried to build on the legend. And the way it looks, he actually managed to do so. However not in Germany but in China.

Retrospection: 1983 Torsten Bröhan opened a gallery for design classics and became the pioneer for dealing in decorative art. In 1992, however, he had to close again and sell his stock.

Bröhan switched to consulting and made his expert knowledge available to important institutes such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert in London, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.

Bröhan, however, did not lose his business sense. In 1997 he was involved in the establishment of the Global Art Fund of the German DZ-Bank in Luxemburg as fund manager, where investors could participate in a top-class collection in order to profit from its appreciation. Quite astonishing gains were actually achieved: almost 40% within a short period of time! 2000 however the fund was closed.

On the occasion of the third auction of a design Collection by Sotheby’s in 2005, the New York Times wrote an enthusiastic profile to the German dealer, which paints a picture of a friendly expert in his field with a well developed business sense who keeps on building up collections in order to unload them at a profit.

The auction was meant to finance his Bröhan Design Foundation. There he wanted „to establish an online archive of 20^th and 21^st century design and promote innovation in contemporary design“, said Bröhan.

In 2008 the next homage to Torsten Bröhan appeared, this time in the Financial Times where he was allowed to advertise his next sale. Once again a Bröhan Collection was to be unloaded. This time, however, to a buyer who would have to build a museum specifically for it. Bröhan: “It should be in a large city, somewhere with enough of a cultural infrastructure to guarantee the largest possible flow of visitors.” To a large extent, this is obviously the collection that created such a furor in China a few years later as the so-called Bauhaus Collection (according to Chinese officials and media).

There Bröhan found a buyer matching his taste in 2010 – the rich Chinese city of Hangzhou. A design museum is built, that in parts is dedicated to the name Bröhan as reported by the weekly magazine Nanbu Zhoukan. And Bröhan is supposed be awarded an honorary professorship at the China Academy of Art, it says there. (Source: Nanbu Zhoukan, verification not possible)..

His father Karl H. Bröhan would certainly have liked this.

*We have asked Torsten Bröhan for a comment on this issues. So far, no such comment has been received.

(picture: Jan Frommel)

Der Beitrag May we introduce: this is Mr. Torsten Bröhan erschien zuerst auf Torsten Broehans million dollar secret.

The information service of the city of Hangzhou announced in February 2014 that this museum with 7,010 artworks, architectural designs and furniture is scheduled to be completed in 2015.

The paper China Daily quoted CAA president Jiang Xu in March 2011: „The arrival of the Bauhaus Collection is significant for Zhejiang and even China.“ The purchase is a milestone for the development of Hangzhou’s creative industry, thinks Chen Zhenlian, deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Hangzhou People’s Congress.

The goal of this permanent exhibition on 12,000 square metres and of a closed research institute should be the development of Chinese design students. A “doctoral branch” for Bauhaus research was planned, doctoral candidates were already being recruited.

China quite clearly wants to free itself of the copycat-industry image with this project and is looking for ways of strengthening its own creativity in the area of product design. The fact that China Academy of Art (CAA) of all places is now the custodian of this collection is inconsequential. The institute has existed since 1928 and is considered the most renowned art academy in the People’s Republic.

However, there are doubts whether this expensive purchase has any intrinsic meaning.

Is it possible that China’s future design elite is to be educated using a sub-standard design-hotchpotch? That is the fascinating question which we want to follow up here.

You will find our contact details here.

(picture: Michael Erlhoff)

Der Beitrag About this page – what we are doing and why we have made it erschien zuerst auf Torsten Broehans million dollar secret.

By buying the design collection of the German art dealer Torsten Bröhan (including Alessi kettle), the renowned China Academy of Art apparently bought itself out from under some unpleasant pressure – the Chinese economy’s demand for product designers.

The alleged Bauhaus teakettle has an untold number of fans around the world: This is the Alessis Melodic Kettle 9091, designed by the German designer Richard Sapper, who was born in Munich in 1932. The peculiarity about this piece (aside from the unusual design): its pipe sound is melodic.

As the German design expert Michael Erlhoff remarks smugly in an in-depth text contribution in the digital architecture and design magazine Stylepark, this Alessi teakettle in Bröhan’s Bauhaus Collection represents a number of misunderstandings in connection with the megadeal between the city of Hangzhou and Torsten Bröhan.

In the fall of 2011, Bröhan sold a design collection comprising 7,010 pieces to China, which since then has been celebrated as “Bauhaus Collection” in Chinese media. If it really is that – there are doubts about that.

For what Erlhoff got to see at a presentation of highlights from that collection in 2011, were originals or remakes from designers or architects respectively, which definitely could not be attributed to Bauhaus – such as the Dutch architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld, Josef Hoffmann of the “Wiener Werkstätten” as well as Peter Behrens, the all-rounder who primarily worked in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

And this is what Erlhoff writes in his article:

„Incidentally this collection contains, among other things, a number of strange – and plausible – misunderstandings. First of all – simply because the collection was bought like this, as a job lot, and has been exhibited accordingly – it contains not only Bauhaus material but also objects (unfortunately some of them not originals) by Gerrit Rietveld, Josef Hoffmann and Peter Behrens and as well as by Olivetti and others. A more tragic aspect, however, is a number of mistakes in ascriptions of provenience and in terms of understanding. For example: at the exhibition, the lid of the teapot from the famous crockery set designed by Walter Gropius for Rosenthal is the wrong way around, meaning that its real purpose, to be held in place by the thumb when pouring out the tea, is entirely neglected and inverted. But worse than this, one glass case contains a number of kettles and bears the date „1932“. It shows the kettle designed by Richard Sapper for Alessi. 1932 is not the date when the kettle was designed but the year of the designer’s birth.“

In 2011, Erlhoff took a close look at parts of the collection in Hangzhou when selected pieces were displayed to the public at an exhibition. And developed an interesting theory:

By all appearances, the Bröhan Collection was bought quickly and declared as a Bauhaus collection by Chinese officials, in order to serve a political purpose that usually – and not only in China – obeys economic pressures. The growing consumer goods industry of this giant country desperately needs people who can give their products acceptable shapes. Very desperately actually! 65,000 students apply to the Hangzhou Academy of Art every year, wrote Erlhoff. However, there are only 1,000 study places available there. This creates quite a lot of pressure.

A statement by Chen Zhenlian deputy director of the Standing Committee of Hangzhou People’s Congress, confirms the race with time: „As Hangzhou is dedicated to making itself a ‚creative city, it needs a first-class international art brand as a platform to communicate with other international cities.“

Our summary of the Erlhoff article for Stylepark?

With the purchase of Torsten Bröhan’s collection, the regional government communicated the following: We’re doing something! It is quite possible that in the rush nobody really took much notice of what the German Mr Bröhan had palmed off on his business partner.

Did the gentlemen in Hangzhou’s city government purchase an education political PR package worth many millions of Euros and attach a “Bauhaus” label to it, in order to free themselves from great pressure?

Der Beitrag China desperately needs designers. A teakettle is supposed to be the solution erschien zuerst auf Torsten Broehans million dollar secret.

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