PaperCity Magazine

December 2017- Houston

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81 quest line his walls, while neatly ordered flat files in his bedroom testify to the depth of the collection. Cataloging is still in process, so he can't cite the number of photographic images he owns. "Hun- dreds," he says, but a conservative estimate might be approaching 1,000. Many of the names are familiar in the museum world and to high-level collectors of contemporary photography: Lutter, Höfer, and Abramovic, as well as Uta Barth; Boo Ritson; Susan Derges, exhibited in Houston during FotoFest 2004 at Armando Palacios' New World Museum; Valérie Belin; Bettina Rheims; the visceral sewn-and-sutured photos of Annegret Soltau; and Luisa Lambri, who documented the Menil House interiors for a museum exhibition at The Menil Collection in 2004. The collection consists of portraiture, landscape, conceptual and abstract photography; it's designed to cover all elements. "Now, for example, a photographer might sew the photograph, she might collage the photograph, she might colorize the photograph. Photography is not a recordo anymore. This is no longer documentation — it serves as art in its own way," says Haukohl. H aukohl distills his collecting philosophy down to discipline, intellectual rigor, and restraint. "The point is that you want a collection to lead in a certain direction," he says. "You really want it to have some intellect and to have focus so that you learn something from it … I feel that connoisseurship is really the key element — intellectual curiosity and connoisseurship … and having the discipline to keep the focus of a certain collection. It's hard to walk through Art Basel, TEFAF, Frieze, FIAC, Art Cologne, and not buy anything because you are keeping the focus … you go to Art Cologne, you see lots of things that you would like, but maybe you come home with one." In the coming months, we can expect a significant announcement relating to both of Haukohl's collections: the lucky U.S. museum that will be the recipient of the bequest of his pan-European 21st- century female photography collection. A slew of top institutions are bidding for the honor; the gift also includes a travel grant and funds for 10 acquisitions to be made over the ensuing decade. Then the Old Masters step into the spotlight on a five-city European tour, from 2018 to 2023, organized by the National Gallery of Luxembourg, where the paintings are currently being conserved and photographed. The tour, titled "Beyond the Medici: The Haukohl Family Collection," opens October 19, 2018, at the Schaezlerpalais in Augsburg, Germany, which he describes as "a Baroque museum outside of Munich. It's absolutely beautiful, sort of a mini Versailles with small galleries in the palace." The exhibition proceeds to Aachen, the medieval German hamlet that was the center of Charlemagne's empire. Aachen's museum with Haukohl's collection on view is also the host for the tony VIP collector dinner that opens The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in March 2020. Come 2018, this private Houston collector, we predict, will no longer fly under the art-world radar. Above: Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl with Marina Abramovic's Cleaning the Floor, 2004. Above left: In the living room, a rare wooden sculpture represents a collaboration between Haukohl's's late father, a pathologist, and 20th-century master Henry Moore. His parents had traveled to England after World War II and met Moore. One day after lunch, the physician and sculptor went outside and raided the woodpile. The top, resembling a torso, was carved by Dr. Haukohl; the abstract anthropomorphic bottom, by Moore. Gio Ponti stool, circa 1954, collected by Haukohl's parents.

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