Villa Flora

“Your house will soon be a museum,” Felix Vallotton wrote in a letter to his friend, the collector Hedy Hahnloser, as early as 1909. The foundations for this were laid by the Winterthur collector couple Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser at the beginning of the 20th century. Between 1906 and 1936, they built up a collection of international appeal that includes, among other works, Cézanne's “Plaines provençales”, Van Gogh's “Le Semeur”, Bonnard's “Effet de glace ou la tube”, Vallotton's “La Blanche et La Noire”, as outstanding works of classical modernism. The couple often traveled to Paris and bought the works that their artist friends recommended to them. They maintained long-standing friendships with many artists at a time when modern art was still controversial in Switzerland. Visiting the legendary Hahnloser Collection was a privilege granted only to friends of the family, artists and art historians. For decades, the Villa Flora, the collector couple's residence, was shrouded in the aura of the inaccessible and the mysterious. In 1995, the pictorial treasures were made accessible to the public in the Villa Flora. However, in 2014 the city of Winterthur can no longer support the museum financially as it has done in the past. The Villa Flora is frozen, its future uncertain. The film tells the story of the collectors Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser through conversations with their descendants. They tell anecdotes, their children play in the garden with the toys of their great-great-grandmother Hedy and play the pianola of their great-great-grandfather Arthur. The lives of the people with the art in the Gesamtkunstwerk Villa Flora are revealed in all their richness and beauty.