Migros patronage

In spring 1957, Gottfried and Adele Duttweiler unveiled a relief made by the sculptor Otto Charles Bänninger. The relief adorned the facade of the Migros Market in Oerlikon and is a classical representation of a family. Opinions about the new artwork were divided.

On 23 May 1957, the expectant crowds push shoulder to shoulder on the market place in Oerlikon. The local brass band plays a patriotic piece, then Gottlieb Duttweiler takes to the lectern to “mighty applause”. He is pleased, so he begins, that he can speak here in Oerlikon “to those of the working people. It is always nice when the working people show an interest in art.” Migros wants “happily, but in a modest way, to take over the patronage role formerly held by the rich”.
And now Adele Duttweiler plays her part: she pulls on a rope and removes the flags that hide the relief on the new Migros Market. It shows “a family ringed by the band of love with a child standing in its centre”. According to Duttweiler, this represents “in a sympathetic manner, the family, to whom Migros is deeply indebted”.
At dusk, the crowds disperse “to the sounds of cheerful march music”; the invited guests move towards the aperitif reception, “and the thousand others return to their own stoves at home”.
The next day, the art critics of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung write that “a certain embarrassment” of the artist is noticeable in the sculpture: “The nervous rhythm of the broken-up façade pattern belongs to the world of consequent abstract, geometric modernistic, the world of the calculated constructive, and stands in sharp contrast to the form world of Bänninger, who is rooted in classical figurative inheritance.” The Brückenbauer, of course, looks at it differently: “Everyone who passes the façade or enters the building, is reminded in the middle of everyday life about what is most important in life.”