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Ingvild Goetz is one of the world's leading art collectors.
Their private museum in Munich was one of the first buildings by Herzog & de Meuron in 1993.
There she shows museum exhibitions, for example with Cindy Sherman or Matthew Barney.
She cooperates with the most important museums in the world, Andy Warhol once portrayed her.
In 2013 she donated her exhibition house to the Free State of Bavaria, and around 5,000 works were also loaned.
Until now it was assumed that the daughter of the mail order company founder Werner Otto found fulfillment in art alone. But on the eve of her 80th birthday, she looks back on experiences that are perhaps even more important to her. And which no money, no exquisite eye can bring back: her memories of trips to a world that no longer exists. Now Ingvild Goetz has written them down - in a book for their closest circles. WELT AM SONNTAG gave her insight.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
Between 1961 and 1965 you and your best friend traveled around the world on your own.
To places where European women had never set foot: They visited indigenous tribes in the Amazon, New Guinea and Swaziland, the slums of Rio and Calcutta, the alleys of Jerusalem and Cairo.
They were completely free of fear, simply traveled according to curiosity.
Where did you get the courage from?
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Ingvild Goetz:
The urge to experience these places was just too great! After the war Germany was so narrow, small-hearted and narrow-minded. I never felt comfortable. In Hamburg there was no happiness, just prejudices, and if you changed your clothes, you were addressed in an angry way. My friend Ann and I really wanted to get out of there. I always said: This planet won't lose me, I'll land somewhere! It was naive, but I trusted people who hadn't waged major wars. For me, jungle tribes couldn't do anything bad at all. Everything else could only be better than what had happened in Germany. And we have only found ourselves in a threatening situation once, in Ethiopia. We ended up in the wrong corner of town. Fortunately, a patrol in the jeep saved us.But my girlfriend and I were also incredibly lucky that we fit together like this. We just laughed away problems.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
You took your first long-distance trips with your father. He took you on a business trip to Bangkok and Hong Kong in the 1950s: the cornerstone for your future trips. Wasn't he ever afraid for you? After all, it was very unusual back then for women to travel alone - especially to the other end of the world.
Goetz:
No, not at all.
Nor did he urge me to use the time differently.
He always said: I would have liked to have made these trips too!
Only once was he angry because I was hiding from him that we were traveling from Chile to the Amazon, to indigenous tribes who had never seen white women.
We landed at a mission station on a seaplane and annoyed the nuns with our airy dresses - we hadn't thought that this might be inappropriate.
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WELT AM SONNTAG:
A boy from the local tribe offered you dirty water to drink and pulled you into a hut with a leper.
Didn't you notice at the latest that you were generally a little inexperienced?
Goetz:
We were incredibly naive, but nothing ever happened to us!
I couldn't refuse the water, it would have humiliated the boy.
But I was actually afraid of the leper because the disease was still contagious.
My girlfriend and I always took turns making such high-risk courtesy gestures.
In New Guinea, she had to eat the rat meat.
Brazil, 1962: Ingvild Goetz in a favela in Rio de Janeiro
Source: Ingvild Goetz private archive
WELT AM SONNTAG:
Today there are no longer such undiscovered areas.
If you want to go to remote places, you book yourself in luxury lodges.
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Goetz:
It didn't cost anything back then.
We traveled in cargo planes that had no doors or seats, they flew so low that you could almost grab the tops of the trees.
Some were in a desperate state.
In New Guinea, shortly before landing on a mountain, the pilot told us that two planes of the same type had crashed that morning.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
From today's perspective, some would argue that such actions were a different kind of colonization.
Couldn't you just have gone to the Riviera?
Goetz: It
has nothing to do with colonization.
We wanted to get to know completely different people!
Other traveling women prepared themselves carefully, such as Princess Therese of Bavaria, who was on the trail of Humboldt as a zoologist.
Or Alexandra David-Néel, who had studied Sanskrit and toured India, Tibet and Lhasa.
But we had no higher intentions.
We wanted to be completely immersed in this life that was so different.
We didn't want to lecture or criticize.
We loved being accepted and tried to empathize with other ways of thinking.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
Often you only got to certain places by chance.
Or thanks to the help of local whites.
Goetz:
Yes, we were only able to attend the big Sing-Sing festival in New Guinea because a white couple gave us their seats in a small cargo plane.
It would have been terrible to miss how around 50 tribes in the country performed war and love dances for one another!
We didn't know anything about it when we arrived, we only heard about it from a roommate in our hostel.
After all, we only found out on site what was available, how to get where and where to sleep.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
Apparently it was the same with the straw hut in the South African wilderness, a kind of haystack with a hole in it.
Two guards at the door were supposed to keep the lions off.
You slept on dirty sheets with heaps of cockroaches crushing them.
Goetz:
Yes, that was terrible!
The guards hoped that they could finally fight a lion, but only insects, bats and cockroaches flew in our faces, which we could not see without a light.
I would have preferred a lion.
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WELT AM SONNTAG:
You are both very elegant in all of your photos.
Dress and shoes go together, sunglasses and updo fit perfectly - they look like a photo shoot.
No trace of functional clothing.
Goetz:
No way! This is what we set out to do: We wear nice clothes and deliberately not pants, which was unusual anyway. Of course, we only put on our thick boots when we were in the jungle or on impassable paths. Clothing was a matter of respect. The Indians in particular feel offended and humiliated by the rotten look of the tourists. The shirt gives people dignity, they are worn even in the poorest slums. India has been our most terrifying trip in this regard. In Calcutta, people died before our eyes on the street, they huddled against the train tracks to get something. The women - albeit often in the cheapest synthetic materials - are always beautifully dressed. Therefore the Indians cannot understandwhen tourists come today with jeans and T-shirts - even though they traveled for a lot of money.
Ingvild Goetz in Chile
Source: Ingvild Goetz private archive
WELT AM SONNTAG:
When you arrived in Chile, you were dressed like cowboys and were a real eye-catcher.
And for your trip to Jerusalem you disguised yourself as nuns.
Goetz:
That was protective clothing!
We wanted to be able to move around freely without being hit on.
We laughed ourselves to pieces when we improvised the costumes in the shop, the hats looked like pots.
The men who showed us around were then a little irritated because as nuns we really wanted to go to a hashish cave.
We prevailed and took hashish that we smuggled into Egypt.
At the airport in Cairo it said that it reads the death penalty.
But we weren't afraid.
We were nuns - they weren't felted.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
You still had to keep men at bay there.
Goetz:
Yes, when we got on the back of the bus in Cairo, we were patted all over our bodies.
Fortunately, a girl got us to the front seats, because we didn't know that there were three classes on the bus, of which the rear one was only frequented by men.
The girl invited us to her house, there were pastries with almonds and rose oil.
Again and again it was the women who helped us.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
This runs like a red thread through your book, which you have now mainly written for your daughters and granddaughters: Women were treated badly almost everywhere.
Goetz:
They were considered inferior everywhere!
A cow was often worth more.
That really makes me angry.
I remember the pregnant woman in Indonesia who was packed with wood and carried a child in her arms while her husband, empty-handed, walked next to her.
I experienced the same thing in Spain in the 1950s: the women were harnessed to the plow and the men sat in the pub.
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WELT AM SONNTAG:
Were there any places where it was different?
Goetz:
Yes, in many indigenous tribes the women acted on an equal footing and appeared self-confident.
There was more equality in these societies than where religions predominate.
Almost all religions oppress women, that is what the narratives mean.
Apparently they are afraid of their intuition and their strength, which men do not understand.
Ingvild Goetz on the road
Source: Ingvild Goetz private archive
WELT AM SONNTAG:
You have also experienced extreme racial oppression.
Especially in South Africa, where apartheid was ruling back then.
Goetz:
That was a very bad experience.
On the bus we sat up next to the blacks, but they asked us to go because it wasn't us who would get in trouble, but them.
There were entrances and park benches only for white people.
In Johannesburg, a white priest told us that blacks are more like animals than humans.
I resigned from church after this trip.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
Many whites were evidently afraid of the ancient peoples they lived near.
When you returned from New Guinea, you had to give a newspaper interview in Australia because it was believed that cannibals still existed there.
The youngest Rockefeller son Michael, who was there at the same time, did not come home.
Goetz:
In New Guinea it was said that he wanted to buy the last of the shrunken heads for his ethnic collection.
Manufacturing alone was forbidden: the tribal enemy had its scalp stripped off, filled with sand and made to shrink by heating.
The ban was strictly controlled by Australia.
It was believed there that Rockefeller angered the tribal people and was killed.
Why is a white man allowed to buy shrunken heads if they are not allowed to make them themselves?
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WELT AM SONNTAG:
Many places you have been to have been destroyed today.
Under your notes about Bangkok, which you fell madly in love with as a young woman, you later wrote the following sentence: It is an ugly city.
Goetz:
It is terrible that the Khlong canals have all been filled in. Of course people need living space, but to destroy the beauty in this way? What might it look like in New Guinea, what happened to the huts and the people, to the untouched nature? I didn't go there again to avoid disappointment. Today, mass tourism is also penetrating the last corner of the world, where hordes of people come with their cell phones and only have in mind which photo they are sending home. They don't behave like guests, but like conquerors. Without empathy, purely voyeuristic.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
After the birth of your first daughter, you became more cautious when traveling, even if you continued to travel a lot.
But contemporary art became her great adventure.
Did you experience similar moments of happiness there?
Goetz:
Absolutely!
An intensive conversation with Roni Horn, Matthew Barney or Kiki Smith can really get me going.
When I used to visit studios in New York, I was so full of impressions and thoughts that I rarely accepted invitations in the evenings because I just wanted to think.
These encounters were incredibly fulfilling for me.
That's why I don't buy anything online.
The direct experience is just not there.
WELT AM SONNTAG:
What you say about traveling basically also applies to art.
More and more people want to take part, and there is art tourism around the globe.
Goetz:
That's a good comparison.
Art and travel are ticked off.
The tourists thunder in buses to dead temples from which all energy has drained.
In art, too, it is often no longer possible to perceive what it is actually about.
In many ways it has become an industry.
Shallow and superficial.
Ingvild Eva Regina Goetz
Source: picture alliance / dpa
Ingvild Goetz,
art collector
She bought her first work of art in 1969, a graphic portfolio by the British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Ingvild Goetz ran the art in progress gallery from 1972 to 1984, initially in Zurich, then in Munich and later also in Düsseldorf. From 1984 onwards she devoted herself to developing her collection, which is now
one of the largest collections of contemporary art in Germany
. Since 1993 Goetz has shown changing exhibitions in her
private museum in Munich
. In 2013 she donated the property and the house to the Free State of Bavaria, which continues it as a showroom for contemporary art. Ingvild Goetz will be 80 years old on May 5th.