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Germany Buys Berggruen Works - Heinz Berggruen - Brief Article
Art in America, Feb, 2001
Collector Heinz Berggruen recently sold to the German government 165 top-notch works of Impressionist and modern art for a bargain-basement price. Experts have valued the works at over $450 million, but Berggruen let the government have them for $110 million to be paid in 10 installments over a period of 10 years beginning this month. The renowned collection includes numerous pieces by 20th-century masters such as Braque, Matisse, Klee and Giacometti. Now 87, Berggruen was friends with a number of the artists whose works he collected, including Picasso; an important group of 85 works by the latter, covering all periods of his career, is included in the purchase. Although a number of institutions, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, offered Berggruen twice the sum for the collection, he wished to keep the works in Germany.
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Much of the collection has been on view for the past five years in Berlin, in a villa across from the Charlottenburg Palace [see "Artworld," Nov. '96]. The works, which will now be under the jurisdiction of the Berlin State museums, will remain at the venue in a permanent display titled "Picasso and His Time." Until now, Germany lacked an in-depth collection of early modernist art, largely because the Nazis condemned such work as "degenerate" and sold off many major pieces. Berggruen, who is Jewish, fled the Nazis during the war and lived for a time in the U.S. before opening a gallery in Paris. He said that he intended the collection to remain in Germany as a gesture of reconciliation with the German people.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
