Skip to content
Obituaries

Heinz Berggruen | Collector of Picasso art, 93

    Published 

Heinz Berggruen, 93, an influential collector of Picasso's artworks and longtime friend of the artist, died Feb. 23 in France, the Picasso Museum in Paris said Sunday. The cause of his death was not revealed.

Mr. Berggruen, whose Picasso collection was one of the world's biggest, with more than 130 works, also made significant gifts of modern art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

He was born in Berlin on Jan. 5, 1914. Of Jewish background, he had to leave Germany during the Third Reich.

He went to the United States in 1936, where he became a citizen and worked as a freelance art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, according to the Picasso Museum's biography of him.

After World War II, he settled in Paris. His collection included early pieces such as a 1907 study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and a portrait of Georges Braque done in 1909-10. Later pieces included Seated Nude With Lifted Arms, painted in 1972, months before Picasso's death. - AP