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A Collector's Eye: The Berggruen Collection
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16255 |
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THE ARTS
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3 / 1989 |
2,084 Words |
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Mavis Guinard
Mavis Guinard, a writer on the arts, lives in Switzerland. |
Because "the joy of collecting is not just the hunt and the acquisition but sharing the pleasure with others," Heinz Berggruen, a collector who does not keep his paintings in a vault but rotates them around his Geneva home, lived last summer with bare walls. "I finally put up some wonderful photographs of Picasso taken by his friend and mine, Andre Villers, and enjoyed those instead," Berggruen says.
Meanwhile, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ninety Klees that Berggruen had given to the New York museum "as the nucleus of a future Klee collection" were on display. And in Geneva's Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, his collection of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti and, above all, Seurat, was being shown for the first time and possibly the last in its entirety. "Six years ago, Geneva offered me hospitality," Berggruen says. "I felt I wanted to share my collection with them."
As the inaugural show of the new GenevArt Foundation--set up to introduce twentieth-century works to a city that has so far missed the boat on modern art--the Berggruen collection attracted half of its visitors from other countries. Leading museum directors and world-famous collectors made a point of seeing it.
The Berggruen collection proved small, beautiful, and coherent. The hundred works shown in Geneva represented a very personal collection started after World War II. A successful art dealer in Paris and New York, Heinz Berggruen did not hang on to unsold works, nor did he collect what he offered in his gallery. Buying for himself, he says, was a different thing. "I was my own best client." His gallery in the Latin Quarter concentrated on the
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