European Diary, The Art Newspaper

Art junkies and professionals travel to Basel each June, and. as a member of both camps, I added Berlin and Athens like bookends to my Grand Tour this year. Europe was awash with events last month—although sadly no press were allowed at one of the most eagerly anticipated openings of the season, the new CCC Moscow gallery backed by Roman Abramovich and Daria Zhukova.

A boogie with the Berggruens

In Berlin the Berggruen brothers, Nicolas and Olivier, sons of the late, legendary art collector Heinz Berggruen and his wife Bettina, celebrated the approval of their museum's ambitious extension plans, encompassing an 800 sq. m former house for army officers and their families adjacent to the current building. The extension will house 70 masterpieces by Picasso. Klee, Matisse and Cézanne which the collector, who died in February 2007, left to his family. The existing museum, opposite Charlottenburg Palace, was designed by Friedrich August Stüler to house the stables of King Wilhelm IV. The great and good of Berlin, London and New York enjoyed sipping champagne to toast the creation of the "Museum Berggruen Council", a 200-strong group of supporters of the arts and friends of the Berggruen family. Grandees invited to the council include Lord Rothschild (below. with Nicolas Berggruen), Friedrich Christian (Mick) Flick, dealer David Lachenmann and others, who all decamped to the incredibly hip Paris Bar for dinner and clubbing.

There were six museum directors in the German contingent, including the brilliant Udo Kittelmann, recently appointed general director of the National Museums in Berlin: several international collectors; and the elite of the city, including Germany's former president, Richard von Weizsäcker. Also present was New York dealer Venetia Kapernekas, who had just co-curated with Olivier Berggruen an exhibition called "Seven Line Drawings: exquisite works by Picasso from the Berggruen family". "In the overheated atmosphere of Chelsea [New York) I wanted this to be like a little shrine," said Olivier. "I did it as a homage to my father. Picasso was as interesting as Matisse in line drawing—with Picasso you have the sudden break of the line."

The big shots at Basel

From the 30-degree heat of Berlin to the cool Swiss drizzle of Basel, where Victoria Miro gave a dinner for Conrad Shawcross at St Alban-Eck, which both his father, writer William Shawcross, and his mother, academic and writer Marina Warner, attended. At the Kunsthalle everyone was swarming like bees around honey over Mr Abramovich and Ms Zhukova. At the fair, at Tony Shafrazi, actor Owen Wilson, hiding under a baseball cap looked baffled by the throng. The evening led me to Veronika, a restaurant by the Rhine where Jose Kuri and Monica Manzutto of the Mexican gallery Kurimanzutto hosted a dinner.

Waving the rules

Finally to Athens, where the contemporary art collector Dakis Joannou had mounted an exhibition of 100 works called "Fractured Figure —Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection" , co-curated by Jeffrey Deitch and the Swiss artist Urs Fischer (who had several spectacular works in the show). The show runs until 31 July at the Deste Foundation, which awards an annual prize for young Greek artists. Dakis is fiercely loved by the artists whose work he buys: he started collecting—with a Koons—in the mid- 1980s, and now has 40 works by the artist, forming the centrepiece of an extraordinary collection of all the most important contemporary artists since the mid- 1990s.

Koons was at the show with his wife Justine, and they partied late into the night at Dakis's fabulous house in the centre of Athens, with the likes of Ashley Bickerton, Gert-Rudolf Flick and his wife Corinne, Larry Gagosian and Simon de Pury. Next morning saw the launch of Dakis's new yacht Guilty, a collaboration between Italian boat builder Ivana Porfiri and Koons, who created the exterior "camouflage" skin. Dakis said Koons told him "this needs a camouflage skin on the outside, like World War I ships, not to hide but toconfuse the enemy." He took the idea back to Porfiri, who had independently come to the same conclusion.

She sent Koons a 3-D computer model, and he worked on it for over a year, covering the yacht (which is 35.3 metres long and 7.4 metres wide) with pop camouflage in black, white, two blues, yellow and purple, each colour sprayed on separately. The result looks like an abstract object or a graphic drawing hovering on the sea. The interior is furnished with Campana Brothers pieces produced by Edra. Guilty is perhaps a response to Dakis's first boat which was called Protect Me From What I Want. Seeing a Sarah Morris work which depicts the word "Guilty" in large red letters, Dakis bought it and named the new boat after it. It now hangs over the bed in the master guest suite.

Bettina von Hase