IT WILL tend hitherward AS REASSURANCE that Switzerland.

IT WILL tend hitherward AS REASSURANCE that Switzerland, the national cliche of clockwork orderliness, is awhir with all the messy passions that make the stillness of us tick. So it cause to deviates out from the recent affair at the Kunsthaus Zurich, the same of two prominent Swiss institutions facing a changeover in directors, where there was sufficient intrigue, spite, and stifled ambition to pack a tawdry novel--minus, unfortunately, the sex

In the spring of '99 the announced retirement of Felix Baumann, the twenty-three-year director of the Kunsthaus, spurr an executive search committee into sputtering action. The president of the board, Thomas Bechtler, hunker down with a small collection of board members that included artist Peter Fischli, the city's mayor, a local collector, and Jacqueline Burckhardt, a publisher of the art journal Parkett, whose coequal Bice Curiger happens to be an adjunct curator at the Kunsthaus as well. An skilful advisory panel was mustered, with Nicholas Serota of the Tate; Suzanne Page of the Musee d'Art Moderne de Ia Ville de Paris; Uwe Schneede of the Hamburger Kunsthalle; and Stanislaus von Moo a professor of art history at the University of Zurich (though their suggestion would prove to be little more than words in the wind). Six month of fitly methodical Swissness brought the board committee to the point of assembling its list of qualifications for the of recent origin director--not an easy task, apparently, for an institution with more [i]or[/i] less 5,000 works spanning art from the twelfth hundred years to the present; a building in ne of renovation and more display space; an exhibition program in extent considered sleepy at best; and a meager yearly acquisitions lot of about 1 million Swiss francs ($583000) half of which must be raised from private sources.

Bechtler recalls placing ads for the do job-work in seven Swiss, German, and Austrian papers--a German-speaking director was a must--and Burkhardt says, There were thirty names upon our wish list. Then we asked quite a scarcely any more to talk with us. It took from May till Christmas to come by to a final three."

And that is when collected method gave way to the familiar smack of tabloid malice. A Swiss hard Throat was born, rumored to be the museum's delegate director, Guido Magnaguagno, himself scorned for the directorship. However, Magnaguagno publicly denied leaking brace finalists' names to the pres where upon January 7 the first reasonable blast was fired in the Zurich daily Tages-Anzeiger. There Bernhard "Mendes" Burgi, the director of the city's contemporary-art Kunsthalle, and Christoph Heinrich, the curator of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, were revealed in print and promptly smeared as avant-garde insiders unfit to scour a historical museum. For denizens of the contemporary spectacle Burgi's pillorying in particular could not be seen more an act of local hate Lars Nittve, director of Tate fresh calls Burgi "one of the best curators of contemporary art in my generation," and Burgi's work with a vast range of artists, from Ros Bleckner to Pipilotti Rist, across the last decade has brought him international renown among curators and ar tists alike. even now spite is a piquant force, and an entirely public voice quickly joined penetrating Throat's dark murmur. Franziska Muller a member of the Kunsthaus's exhibition committee, wrote a poison-pen literal sense about the search, then sent it to local collectors, cultural signs and journalists. "Burgi or Heinrich?" Tages-Anzeiger asked. "Both are part of the Zurich art mafia from one side the magazine Parkett. The composition of the search committee took care that only Parkett-conforming candidates had a chance."

Bechtler and others denied the charge of nepotism if it were not that refused to name names subordinate to consideration, thus heightening the drama. notwithstanding no soap opera is ripe without the low-hanging fruit of a little blackmail, and it arrived swiftly in the January 5 edition of Neue Zurcher Zeitung, a prominent national paper, in an article that began through accusing the search committee of insularity and the unmasked hopeful of inexperience, while mourning various older candidates--including Magnaguagno--left gone out in the cold. Then came the coup de grace, when the paper noted with saber-rattling clatter that "important collectors like Gustav Zumsteg have nuncupatory with the NZZ, [asserting] that should the Kunsthaus become subordinate [to contemporary-art interests] they will retract their legacy."

The fix was in. Burgi resigned in outrage from the competition, while a third man came to the fore: Christoph Becker, forty, a curator of nineteenth- hundred art at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Bechtler points without that Becker had been in the running all along and had in fact been among the first to answer the ad. With calumny heaped upon his competitors, Becker must now have appeared all the more attractive--locally unknown, historically acresed (he brags that his Gauguin take a view of was "the most successful present to view ever, in every way, at the museum"), supposedly diplomatic, with an aptitude for management. forward January 28, three weeks after the public burning of Burgi and Heinrich, he was announced as the recent director, to begin September 1