Heinz Berggruen - Biography

Heinz Berggruen (6 January 1914 – 23 February 2007) was a German art dealer and collector who founded the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, Germany.

Biography

Berggruen was born in Berlin on 6 January 1914 to Ludwig Berggruen, a Jewish businessman who owned an office supply business before the war, and Antonie Zadek. He attended the Goethe-Gymnasium in Wilmersdorf and graduated to the Friedrich-Wilhelms (now Humboldt) University in 1932 where he read literature and art history. After 1933 he continued his studies at the universities of Grenoble and Toulouse. He 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. He fled Hitler's regime in 1936.

He immigrated to the United States in 1936 and studied art at University of California, Berkeley. After working as an art critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, in 1939 he became an "Assistant director" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In preparing an exhibition about the Mexican painter Diego Rivera he met Frida Kahlo, too, and later had a short love affair with her in New York in 1940.

That year he bought his first picture for $100. It was a watercolour by Paul Klee.

After the Second World War Berggruen returned to Europe as member of the U.S. Army and worked briefly with the novelist Erich Kästner on the American-sponsored paper "Heute" in Munich. 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. During this time he got acquainted with Pablo Picasso in Paris, who spontaneously had confidence in Berggruen and so he became Picasso's art dealer.

His renowned art collection, valued at $450 million in 2001, included 165 masterpieces by 20th-century masters such as Braque, Matisse, Klee, and Giacometti, with a unique group of 85 works by Picasso.

Berggruen 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 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. In 1990, he lent a good part of his collection to the National Gallery in London. In 1995, he finally left the art collection in a generous gesture to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. For this he was awarded the honorary citizenship of Berlin and the Federal Cross of Merit (Grand Cross 2nd Class) of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz, Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband). In 1996, after 60 years in exile, he took an apartment in Berlin and opened an art museum in front of the Charlottenburg Palace. The collection, then comprising 118 works, opened to the public in 1997. In 2000 the collection of 165 works (including 85 Picassos), valued at €750m, was sold to the PCHF at about a quarter of its value. Berggruen later talked his fellow Berliner Helmut Newton into giving his photographic collection to the city.

From 1939 to 1945 Berggruen was married to the US-American Lillian Zellerbach; since 1959 to the German actress Bettina Moissi. His children include John Berggruen, owner of the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco; Olivier Berggruen, curator at the Kunsthalle called Schirn Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany; and Nicolas Berggruen, a playboy financier and art collector.

Berggruen died at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 23 February 2007. At his own wish he was buried in the forest cemetery in Dahlem, in Berlin.

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