Heinz Berggruen; Telegraph obit (art collector)
Hyfler/Rosner
Last Updated: 1:42am GMT 05/03/2007 Telegraph
Heinz Berggruen, who died on February 23 aged 93, fled
Nazi Germany before the war and went on to build up one of
the world's most spectacular collections of modern art; in
2000 he sold the principal part of his collection, including
75 works by Picasso, to the German government for $200
million, about half its market value.
For four years, from 1991 to 1995, the cream of
Berggruen's collection - which also included works by Klee,
Giacometti, Braque, Matisse, van Gogh, Seurat and Cézanne -
was on display at the National Gallery in London, where
officials had hoped that it would eventually find a
permanent home. Berggruen had chosen the National Gallery,
he explained, because he had found it to be "most suitable
to my own spirit, my own taste".
But in 1996 he returned to Berlin, the city of his
birth, where he had been given a museum to house the
collection in a neo-classical villa opposite the
Charlottenburg Palace, with a flat on the top floor so that
he might be near his paintings. He took the decision to sell
the collection as a "gesture of reconciliation to the people
of Berlin", turning down more generous offers from other
countries. But he left the National Gallery with seven
Seurats, the most magnificent gift the gallery had received
in years, and the long-term loan of two more Seurats,
including Les Poseuses, and five Cézannes.
The Berggruen Museum, part of the National Gallery of
Berlin, fills a huge void in German national art
collections, since most early avant garde art had been
driven out of the country by Hitler as "degenerate" and much
Impressionist and post-Impressionist art had been seized by
the Soviet Army. His unique gesture of reconciliation made
Berggruen a celebrity in Germany, and his 90th birthday
celebrations were attended by a host of dignitaries,
including the former president, Richard von Weizsäcker, and
the culture minister Christina Weiss. Berggruen joked that
he had received so many honours that "with all these
decorations I could look like Hermann Goering".
Heinz Berggruen was born on January 5 1914 into an
assimilated Jewish family in the Wilmersdorf quarter of
Berlin, where his father owned a stationery shop. His
grandfather, Oskar Berggruen, had been a critic and
publisher, and young Heinz aspired to be a journalist. He
was educated at the Goethe Gymnasium in Wilmersdorf and read
History of Art at Humboldt University and at the
universities of Grenoble and Toulouse.
Returning to Germany, he worked as a journalist on the
Frankfurter Zeitung; but after the Nazis came to power he
found that as a Jew he could no longer publish under his own
name. In 1935 he applied for a scholarship to study Visual
Arts at the University of California at Berkeley and, the
next year, left for America with 10 marks in his pocket.
Despite a somewhat shaky grasp of English, at Berkeley
Berggruen managed to augment his scholarship by working as a
freelance art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. This
led to a job as assistant to the director of the San
Francisco Museum of Art. When the World Fair was held in the
city in 1939, he was assigned to look after the Mexican
painter Diego Rivera, who was there painting a mural.
Berggruen was chosen because he spoke fluent French and
could communicate with Rivera, who spoke Spanish and French,
but no English.
Rivera was married to the artist Frida Kahlo, and
introduced Berggruen to her having predicted: "You will fall
in love with her." At the time Frida was in hospital, being
treated for chronic pain resulting from a bus accident in
which she had been involved some years earlier. After she
was discharged she and Berggruen, who had recently married,
ran off to New York together to conduct a month-long affair.
Berggruen never bought any of her work; meeting "Frida the
woman", he said, had been enough for him.
After service in the US Army during the war he
returned, briefly, to Germany as co-editor of Heute, an art
magazine based in Munich. He then moved to Paris, where for
a short time he worked for the American delegation at
Unesco. But the job was dull and in 1947 he left to become
an art dealer, opening a small gallery in an alcove rented
from an art bookshop on the Place Dauphine, Ile de la Cité,
dealing mainly in Dada and Surrealist ephemera.
Although he had little money, Berggruen had a very
sharp eye, a phenomenal capacity for work and decided ideas
on the art market: "All one has to do is adopt the right
approach\u2026 not push anything, but learn to wait and,
above all, watch out for quality and act resolutely," he
wrote later.
His tiny gallery, situated under a flat occupied by
Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, soon became a favourite
haunt of prominent writers and poets, and he struck up
friendships with Surrealists such as Breton and Aragon. They
introduced him to artists whose work he could buy and sell.
Via the poet Paul Eluard, Berggruen acquired Picasso's Le
Dormeur for 5,000 francs, with a small Klee watercolour
thrown in as part of the deal. Alice B Toklas sold him a
group of early blue and rose period Picasso drawings.
His first exhibition was devoted to Klee's works; the
next two were devoted to Matisse, whose papiers découpés he
brought to the attention of serious art connoisseurs. Within
a few years he had moved to a smarter establishment at 70
rue de l'Université and graduated from ephemera to prints,
then drawings and, ultimately, paintings and sculpture.
By 1960 his gallery was known to art collectors on
both sides of the Atlantic as one of the best sources in
Europe for exceptional works by late 19th and 20th-century
artists. In 1980 Berggruen gave up his gallery to
concentrate on his own collection.
Though modest and softly-spoken, Berggruen was
famously good company and won the trust of many of the
artists whose work he promoted. He became a great friend of
Picasso, building up a collection of more than 130 of his
works, one of the largest in private hands. These ranged
from early pieces such as a 1907 study for the Demoiselles
d'Avignon and a portrait of Georges Braque of 1909-10 to
later pictures such as Seated Nude with Lifted Arms, painted
in 1972, a few months before Picasso's death.
Berggruen was an extremely generous man who, in
addition to his gift to the National Gallery, gave some 90
Klees to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and works by
Giacometti, Cézanne and Klee to two Paris museums, the
Pompidou Centre and the Musée d'Orsay.
As Germany's most high-profile Jewish returnee, he
vehemently disagreed with the view, put forward by the
former Israeli president Ezer Weizmann, that no Jew should
return to live in Germany. He believed strongly that
"understanding and tolerance are traditional Jewish virtues"
and that, 50 years after the collapse of the Third Reich,
"one can no longer turn one's back on the country of Dürer
and Goethe, Beethoven and Brahms, Gottfried Benn and Max
Beckmann".
Heinz Berggruen, who was twice married, is survived by
his second wife, Bettina, and by their two sons, and by the
son and daughter of his first marriage.