Collector Beyeler -- promoted Picasso Giacometti & Picasso -- dies at 88

GENEVA -- Ernst Beyeler, whose early eye for undervalued Picassos and Impressionists helped him assemble one of Europe's most famous art collections, has died, his Beyeler Foundation said Friday. He was 88. Beyeler died Thursday evening at his home near Basel, said the museum, which he created 13 years ago out of his sprawling gallery of masterpieces. Beyeler, the son of a Swiss railway employee, became a widely respected art patron after World War II by acquiring hundreds of works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and others. He presented them to the public in his Basel gallery and later in the foundation he founded near the German border. His art collection eventually grew to a value of at least 2 billion Swiss francs ($1.85 billion), according to the Swiss finance magazine Bilanz, thanks to Beyeler's taste for quality and his personal connections with painters such as Georges Braque, Marc Chagall and Alberto Giacometti. He also was a friend of Picasso. "Art must touch you and leave a strong visual and mental impression upon you," Beyeler once said in an interview with Swiss weekly magazine NZZ Folio. Born on July 16, 1921, in Basel, Beyeler discovered his passion for art after taking a job in an antique shop shortly after World War II. He then studied economics and art history at the University of Basel and started collecting Japanese woodcarvings. He exhibited his woodcarvings in 1947, showing an early understanding for what separated quality from tried and trite artwork. In his exhibitions, he sought to give paintings and sculptures enough space to have an impact on the viewer so that art and observer could interact with each other, rejecting the old-fashioned museum approach of stuffing as many works into a little room as possible. In 1948, he married Hildy Kunz, who became a constant companion in his art business until she died in 2008. Together, they mounted numerous art exhibitions featuring modern classics in the 1950s, drawing on debts and even paying a $4,500 price in installments to make Wassily Kandinsky's masterpiece "Improvisation 10" his first major acquisition, in 1951. "There are pictures we always wanted to live with," Beyeler once said, adding that it gave him a better feeling than having money in the bank. In the 60 years since, more than 16,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, including Picassos, Monets and Vincent van Goghs, changed hands at his Basel gallery. The Kandinksky picture, which had been confiscated by Nazi Germany in 1937 as degenerate art, led to an out-of-court settlement between the Beyeler museum in the Swiss town of Riehen and the heirs of Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers, the rightful owner. Jen Lissitzky, who inherited his mother's collection, tried in vain to recover the painting after he emigrated from Russia in 1989. Beyeler refused, saying he had bought the painting legally and in good faith. But he eventually agreed to undisclosed compensation to keep the painting at the Beyeler museum. Beyeler's success in the art trade lay mainly in buying such underrated works, from Monet's "Nymphs" and one of van Gogh's wheat fields to a Henri Rousseau painting of a "Hungry Lion Pouncing on an Antelope." When their prices increased dramatically, he was able to sell many of the works at considerable profit. The purchase of several hundred major art works from Pittsburgh collector David Thompson was one of Beyeler's biggest deals. He acquired between 1959 and 1965 some 100 works by Paul Klee, around 340 objects by Cezanne, Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, Braque and other major artists, as well as 80 Giacometti sculptures.