Guy Weill, 92, Dealer of Trendy Menswear and Art Patron

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Guy Weill, 92, Dealer of Trendy Menswear and Art Patron
BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the Sun

August 23, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/38366

Guy Weill, who died August 17 at 92, was a Swiss-born
importer of trendy menswear whose Madison Avenue store
served as a gallery for his collection of Abstract
Expressionist paintings.

Weill, who began his career as an art collector while still
a teenager in Zurich by buying and selling sketches by
Picasso and Kirchner, was proprietor of British American
House, which specialized in importing the suavest rainwear
from Burberry, Daks, and Aquascutum. In the 1960s, he was
among the leading purveyors of Nehru jackets.
A passionate collector, Weill befriended many well-known
Abstract Expressionist painters, including Robert Motherwell
and Helen Frankenthaler, his daughter, Claudia, said.
Artists hung came in and out of the store, sometimes
swapping a sketch for a raincoat.

In the 1960s with the rise of Pop Art, Weill and his wife
abruptly switched their focus to Oriental art and began
amassing a substantial collection. In 2002, some of their
holdings were featured in a 2002 exhibit at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, "Cultivated Landscapes: Reflections of Nature
in Chinese Painting With Selections From the Collection of
Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill." The dozen works featured were
donated or promised to the museum.

Weill grew up in Zurich, where his family had dealt in
menswear for generations. The composer Kurt Weill was his
cousin. In 1938, he came to America, where he was drafted
into the Army. Fluent in several languages, he was attached
to military intelligence and worked as an interrogator of
enemy prisoners during World War II. In the run-up to the
Nuremburg Trials, he also interrogated Nazis, including
Hermann Goering, whom he quizzed about his preferences in
art, Weill's family said.

Weill returned to New York after the war and married
Marie-Hélène Bigar; their mothers had been schoolgirls
together in Alsace before World War I and met again in New
York when their children were married.

The Weills liked to vacation on Cape Cod, where Motherwell
and Ms. Frankenthaler would join them at their home in
Wellfleet, Mass., Mrs. Weill recalled.

The Weills collected art together but became disillusioned
as Pop Art's commercialism became predominant. It was while
visiting their college-age daughter in San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that the couple happened upon a
show of Oriental art that converted them. They donated and
sold off much of their Abstract Expressionism and began
collecting Oriental works, especially Chinese paintings.
Mrs. Weill became a gallery lecturer at the China Institute
and later for the Oriental collections at the Met.

Beginning in 1979, the Weills journeyed each year to China
and other parts of the Far East, where they traveled parts
of the old Silk Road. Weill exhibited his photos of their
travels at the Asia Society.
Weill was an ardent fan of the opera and liked to bring
along a little book to performances at the Met, where he sat
in the second row and sketched droll cartoons of the
singers, with notes about how they should be painted back
home.

Guy Weill
Born May 13, 1914, in Zurich, Switzerland; died August 17 at
his home in New York City; survived by his wife,
Marie-Hélène; three daughters, Claudia, Kathryn, and
Patricia; four grandchildren, and a sister, Marianne Lester.