Art from a handy box
Ensuring the safe and sustainable transport of artworks. Journeys can sometimes be arduous. All the more so for a traveller who is more than 200 years old. The Hasenkamp Group, a family business from Cologne founded in 1903 that specialises in transporting and storing valuable and sensitive assets, has a solution.
A picture by Caspar David Friedrich can travel through Germany and Switzerland comfortably this year. During the Transport Logistic trade fair in Munich and until 2 July, the painting, entitled ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, a famous rear-view figure painted by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), will enrich an exhibition on the ‘Harbingers of Romanticism’, being put on at the Museum Georg Schäfer in the Bavarian town of Schweinfurt, located around 280 km north of Munich.
After that, it will be shown in Winterthur (Switzerland) from 26 August to 19 November. From there it will then return to its traditional home in the Hamburger Kunsthalle in time for a major anniversary exhibition designed to mark the 250th anniversary of the painter’s birth. It opens on 15 December this year.
The Hasenkamp Group is in charge of transporting the picture between the various exhibition venues. The group uses ‘Arca’ for the job, a transport crate developed in-house that is fully recyclable and climate-positive.
Thomas Schneider, the managing partner of the Cologne-based logistician, said he was pleased to be able to transport such a famous painting in the firm’s new picture box. “Protecting the painting and keeping the environmental impact of packaging and transport as low as possible is our aim – and the museum’s requirement too. It fits together well.”
A Japanese tree growing in a German woods
The 140 x 136 x 33 cm ‘Arca’ box is built in lightweight construction from the wood of the fastest-growing deciduous tree on European plantations. Originally from Japan, the Kiri tree from the Paulownia genus reaches a height of up to 6 m in the first year and stores an above-average amount of CO2 (35 kg per year), which is why it is also called the ‘climate tree’.
The box system, which was introduced this spring after two years of development, weighs only half as much as conventional boxes for artworks. Another positive environmental aspect is that two thirds of the necessary truck journeys are eliminated, because Hasenkamp uses sensors to maintain constant museum climate conditions all along the supply chain, which helps avoid trips to the museum to acclimatise the box. Transport emissions can thus be reduced.
Markus Bertsch, the head of the ‘19th Century Collection’ at Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, pointed out that “together with the Hasenkamp Group we’re now treading new paths with this new paintings box from the point of view of sustainability, and thus meeting the challenges posed by the transformation of the exhibition industry.”
I wonder if the ‘last generation’ was aware of that. The painting was the subject of a protest on the last day it was shown in Hamburg. Climate-protection activists pointed out that the landscapes Friedrich painted 200 years ago could soon be lost forever.