Heinz Berggruen

Heinz Berggruen (6 January 1914 – 23 February 2007) was a German art dealer and collector who sold 165 works of art to the German federal government to form the core of the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, Germany.

Berggruen was born in Berlin on 6 January 1914 to assimilated Jewish parents: Ludwig Berggruen, a 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. After 1933 he continued his studies at the universities of Grenoble and Toulouse. He contributed free-lance articles to the Frankfurter Zeitung, the forerunner of today's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He got around the restrictions on Jewish contributors by submitting his pieces through a colleague and signing them with his initials, H. B. rather than his full, Jewish-sounding surname He fled Germany in 1936.

He immigrated to the United States in 1936 and studied German literature at University of California, Berkeley. After working as an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, in 1939 he became an "assistant to the director" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There, he helped to prepare an exhibition about the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Later, he met Frida Kahlo, too, and claims to have had a short love affair with her in New York in 1940.

That same year he says that he bought his first picture for $100. It was a watercolour by Paul Klee, and he bought it from a Jewish refugee in need of money.

After the Second World War Berggruen returned to Europe as member of the U.S. Army and worked briefly on the American-sponsored paper "Heute" in Munich (located in the same building where the novelist Erich Kästner worked). 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. He soon became an important dealer in Picasso prints, as well as in second-hand Picasso paintings.

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