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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 |
2,085 Words |
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Mavis Guinard
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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 graphic works of modern artists. What he sought for himself were the telling works of a few chosen artists: an impeccable selection of major artists form 1870 to 1939, names that cause the most feverish activity at today's auctions.
Search for quality
Above all, Berggruen looked for quality. He likes to explain that as a dealer he had seen so many great collections with ups and downs, with "rubbish hanging next to marvelous things," that it made him wonder whether he could not form a collection admitting only art of the highest order. The result is this spare collection, which moves subtly from the breakdown of light in the paintings of Cézanne and Seurat to the breakdown of form in the works of Braque, Picasso, Matisse, and Giacometti.
An unassuming person, Berggruen feels that he has achieved his aim. "To upgrade--even though this may sound pretentious--may be difficult. I did sell things that did not live up to what I had hoped. Whatever I kept had the quality I am looking for."
The acquisitions were made over a forty-year period during which Berggruen sharpened a discerning eye to one now reputed by critics to be infallible. As an art editor, he come to know modern masters intimately; as an art dealer he was well placed to know what was appearing on the market; and as an art buyer he rarely hesitated to pay the price. Even today, though "there is too much hype, too much speculation, it is getting out of hand," he admits he would be prepared to pay what is necessary to obtain one or two more Seurats to fill spaces in his collection. "I am Seurat hungry," he
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