Heinz Berggruen

Berggruen immigrated to the United States in 1936 and studied German literature at University of California, Berkeley. After working as an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, in 1939 he became an "assistant to the director" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.[9] There, he helped to prepare an exhibition about the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Later, in New York in 1940, he met Frida Kahlo with whom he had a short love affair.[10][11][12][13] That same year he says that he bought his first picture for $100 while honeymooning in Chicago.[14] It was a watercolour by Paul Klee, and he bought it from a Jewish refugee in need of money.[7][15] While living in California, Berggruen was a student of the painter David Park.[16]

After the Second World War Berggruen returned to Europe as member of the U.S. Army and worked briefly on the American-sponsored paper Heute in Munich (located in the same building where the novelist Erich Kästner worked). He then moved to Paris, where he worked in the fine arts division of UNESCO, run by his former boss at the San Francisco museum, Grace Morley. Within a few years, he opened a small bookshop on the Île Saint-Louis, specializing in illustrated books and later lithographs.[5] During this time he became acquainted with Tristan Tzara, who introduced him to Pablo Picasso in Paris.[17] He soon became an important dealer in Picasso prints, as well as in second-hand Picasso paintings.[18] His renowned art collection, which he valued at $450 million in 2001, included 165 works by 20th-century masters such as Braque, Matisse, Klee, and Giacometti, with a unique group of 85 works by Picasso.[19]

In 1977, Berggruen published Douglas Cooper's catalogue raisonné of Juan Gris.[20] He finally resigned as director of the Paris gallery in 1980 in order to devote himself to collecting and dealing. In 1988, he donated 90 Klee works 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.[8][21] That same year, he exhibited his collection at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva.[22] In 1990, he lent a good part of his collection to the National Gallery in London, where he exhibited works—including Seurat's landmark painting Les Poseuses (1886)—until 2001.[23][24][25] In 1995, the German government lent him an apartment in Berlin and gave him an art museum opposite the Charlottenburg Palace. The collection, then comprising 118 works, opened to the public in 1997. At the time, then German culture minister Ulrich Roloff-Momin described it as "the most meaningful art transfer in Berlin's post-war history."[26] In 2000, he finally sold the art collection to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation: the collection of 165 works (including 85 Picassos), which Berggruen valued at €750m, was purchased by the PCHF at about a quarter of that value.[27][28] It additionally includes over sixty works by Paul Klee, and twenty by Matisse.[29]

His tomb in Berlin

Heinz-Berggruen-Gymnasium in Berlin

For his achievements, Berggruen was named a Commandeur of the Legion of Honour by the French government, received the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1999, and was named an honorary citizen of Berlin. He additionally received the Jewish Museum Berlin's Award for Understanding and Tolerance in 2005, and was bestowed an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Adelphi University in 1993.[30][31][32][33] In 2008, a Berlin school was named the Heinz-Berggruen-Gymnasium in his honor.[34][35] An honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum, he additionally served on the board of the Berlin Philharmonic.[36]

In 2016, Berggruen's Klee collection was exhibited in its entirety to inaugurate the Met Breuer, and traveled to the National Gallery of Canada in 2018.[14][37]