Heinz Berggruen, Influential Picasso Collector, 93

[DGH]

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Heinz Berggruen, Influential Picasso Collector, Dies at 93

By ALAN RIDING

PARIS [France], February 26 [2007] - Heinz Berggruen, a German-born
Jewish art collector who in the mid-1990's made a powerful gesture of
reconciliation by moving his modern art collection to Berlin
[Germany], died outside Paris on Friday [February 23, 2007]. He was
93.

Mr. Berggruen's death was announced by Anne Baldassari, director of
the Picasso Museum here, and by Mr. Berggruen's son Olivier.

Mr. Berggruen, who fled Hitler's Germany for the United States in
1936, made his name in postwar Paris as a gallery owner who enjoyed a
close relationship with Picasso and was also considered a specialist
in the works of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, Paul Klee, Hans Arp and
Giacometti.

Like many leading art dealers, he became a collector in his own right
and, in 1980, gave up his gallery in order to focus his energy on
enriching - and sharing - his collection. He continued to acquire new
art, but he also loaned works to major exhibitions and donated others
to museums in the United States and Europe.

But it was his decision to display a good part of his collection in
the city he had fled decades earlier that turned him into a celebrity
outside the world of art.

For Germany, the move not only symbolized a German Jew's willingness
to turn the page on the past, but it also filled a hole in Berlin's
art collections which had been largely stripped of so-called
degenerate modern art by the Nazi regime.

In a statement issued after Mr. Berggruen's death, Peter-Klaus
Schuster, general director of Berlin's State Museums, paid homage to
"his spiritual presence and the gracefulness of his personality."

"In a unique gesture of reconciliation, which he consciously
undertook, Heinz Berggruen returned to Berlin art that had been
despised and driven out by Hitler's Germany just as he was," Mr.
Schuster said.

Mr. Berggruen's collection, which focused on Picasso and his era, was
initially loaned to Berlin, which renovated a large mansion near
Charlottenburg Palace to house it. Then, in 2000, it was acquired by
Berlin's State Museums for 129 million euros, worth $120 million at
the time, which Mr. Berggruen estimated to be about one-tenth of its
market value.

Mr. Berggruen, who had a home in Paris, also kept an apartment on the
top floor of the newly renamed Berggruen Museum and was frequently
seen showing visitors around the paintings. "Every day, I say 'good
morning' and 'good night' and tell them to sleep well," he once noted
with a typical smile of pleasure.

Born in Berlin on Jan. 5, 1914, Mr. Berggruen was working as a
journalist for Frankfurter Zeitung, the forerunner of today's
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in the mid-1930's when he was informed
that, because of his Jewish surname, his articles would in future be
signed only by his initials, H. B.

Soon afterward, he left Germany for the United States, where he
studied art in San Francisco [California] and eventually became an art
critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. He joined the United States
Army in 1942 and found himself in Paris at the end of the war. It was
there that he opened an art gallery on the Rue de l'Université on the
Left Bank.

A turning point came in 1949 when the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara
introduced him to Picasso. "I was struck right away by his gaze," Mr.
Berggruen recalled later. The two men struck up a friendship that
placed the dealer in a privileged position to acquire works by
Picasso. In time, his Picasso collection exceeded 130 works.

Mr. Berggruen's taste also included late Impressionists like Van Gogh,
Cézanne and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as the modern masters of the
interwar years, including Braque, Miró and Klee. Works by many of
these artists also entered his private collection and are on display
in the Berggruen Museum in Berlin.

As he grew older, Mr. Berggruen, a soft-spoken and good-natured man,
seemed eager to be remembered as a collector. In 1988, he donated 90
Klee works on paper to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
although he later expressed fear that his donation would go unnoticed
in the museum's own vast collections.

"I gave the works without conditions, and I learned my lesson," he
later said. "One shouldn't give away anything until one is dead."

In 1990, he lent a good part of his collection to the National Gallery
in London. Five years later, rather then renewing this loan, he
decided to accept the invitation to show his art in a newly furbished
building in Berlin. This collection, comprising 118 works, opened to
the public in 1997 and was an immediate hit.

At the end of his life, Mr. Berggruen was again hailed in Paris when
the Picasso Museum here presented a special exhibition, "Picasso-
Berggruen: A Private Collection," with 150 works on display. "I am
neither French nor German," he told reporters at the time. "I am
European. I'd very much like to think there was a European
nationality, but I think I may be dreaming."

In addition to Bettina Moissi, whom Mr. Berggruen married in 1960, he
is survived by his four children, Olivier and Nicolas from his
marriage to Ms. Moissi, and John and Helen, from a first marriage, to
Lillian Zellerbach, and two grandchildren.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/arts/design/27berggruen.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin