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The heirs of Heinz Berggruen, an influential German-born Jewish art collector who died in February, have agreed to donate more than 50 works by Picasso, Matisse, Klee and Cézanne as a longtime loan to the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation said Monday. The paintings are now in Paris, Zurich and other cities. In the 1990s Berggruen, who fled the Nazis for the United States in 1936 and died in Paris at 93, lent more than 160 paintings by eminent modern artists to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which owns the museum and later bought them for less than $120 million.
The Guardian reported on his passing that Berggruen was a pal of many great artists:
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Heinz Berggruen, who has died aged 93, was one of the most prominent German art collectors of the 20th century. A friend of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Max Ernst and many other leading artists, he was also a journalist, author and art patron. His Picasso collection of more than 130 works included early pieces, such as a 1907 study for the Demoiselles d'Avignon and a portrait of Georges Braque from 1909-10, up to later ones, among them Seated Nude with Lifted Arms, painted in 1972, just months before Picasso's death. Berggruen's most notable legacy, the Berlin Berggruen-Museum, with its emphasis on Picasso, is widely seen as one of the most representative private collection.
