Travels with my art, Art Review

Sixty years after he left Berlin, Heinz Berggruen took his stunning collection back to his hometown. But as Bettina von Hase discovers, the legendary dealer keeps a few precious pictures – and many memories – in Paris. Photography by Coco Amardiel.

When I arrive at Heinz Berggruen's apartment overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, the sprightly 90-year-old tells me that he has just been made an Honorary Citizen of Berlin, 'This honour has a 200-yulr-old history — the last recipient was the German president, the one before that Marlene Dietrich, hut she received it posthumously.' Berggruen's life has had a touch of Dietrich's celebrity since he sold his unrivalled collection of modern masters, including Picasso, Cézanne, Klee and Braque, to the city of Berlin for a song. Berlin was Berggruen's home until 1936, when he left the city as a young Jewish student, only to return 60 years later. His generous gesture towards the newly unified Germany had great significance for him personally and has given him a unique position in that country's cultural and intellectual life.

Berggruen's reputation as one of the greatest European dealers and collectors of modern art has been sealed by the continued success of the Berggruen Collection, which is housed in Friedrich Stühler's late- classical pavilion opposite Schloss Charlottenburg. It has been seen by 1.2 million visitors since it opened in 1996. Berggruen has a beautiful apartment above the three floors of exhibition space, but most of his time is spent in Paris with his wife of many years, Bettina. They are clearly devoted to each other; she calls him Barlein ('little bear') and fusses over him while he sits on a sofa sipping orange juice. He cuts an elegant figure — silver hair, deeply lined handsome face — and with his quick mind, dry sense of humour and impeccable manners he is the middle European par excellence, His passion for pictures is palpable, as fellow dealer Daniel Malingue describes: 'It's the same whether he's selling a Picasso or checking how his postcard sales are doing.'

'I think I made the right decision to bring my collection to Berlin', Berggruen says, ‘although not everyone understands it. It has to do with forgiveness and reconciliation. I am agnostic, but I recognise my Jewish roots and I feel that we should get on with each other after all those terrible years of Hitler's dictatorship.' Berggruen, who started his career as a journalist, wrote in his memoirs, published in 1996, 'You can drive a man from his homeland, but you can't take the homeland from the man' - a sentence which is the key to his compassion, but also to the focus and intensity of his art collection. For Berggruen, who felt displaced after leaving Berlin as a 22-year- old, pictures became a kind of substitute home, which perhaps explains his love for the work of Paul Klee: 'Klee takes you gently by the hand, as if he wanted to say "Here, look around, this is my world." It is a world of quiet contemplation, gentle sounds, poetry, music,' Berggruen wrote.

His own world was not quite like that, but rather filled with the excitement offered by Berlin between the wars before the horror set in. He was horn there in 1914, went to school at the Goethe Gymnasium and later became a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. A small volume of his essays from that time, Kleine Abschiede ('Small Goodbyes') was published to mark his recent 90th birthday. In 1936 he won a scholarship to California, where he became a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, and later assistant to the director of the San Francisco Museum of Art. It was during that time that he was asked to curate a show by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera and promptly fell in love with Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo. They began what was to be a short but intense affair.

“You have to know what you like. It’s not about “collecting”, it’s about being drawn to it”

'Frida was a most brilliant mixture. Her mother was native Indian, her father German-Jewish. She was rather European. I missed Europe desperately at the time and felt drawn to her like I felt drawn to Europe. That was incredibly exciting for me. She was unbelievably feminine, the way she dressed, the way she moved. It was wonderful.'

During the Second World War, Berggruen, by now an American citizen, joined the US army and served in the US and in Europe. After the war, a boring job in UNESCO's arts department led to him setting up on his as a dealer. He had no money, so ‘my eyes were my capital'. He started by taking small steps, an approach he would recommend to all young collectors. 'You have to know what you like. It's not about "collecting", it's about being drawn to it. Start carefully, quietly, perhaps with prints — even Picasso did prints.'

a 1961 drawing of a bullfighter by Pablo Picasso, dedicated to Berggruen

a rare polychrome uli statue of a hermaphrodite god from Papua New Guinea

Berggruen has four children, two from his first marriage to Lillian and two with Bettina, all of whom are involved in art. His youngest son Olivier, curator of the upcoming Yves Klein exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, remembers his father 'instilling a love of art in us without ever forcing the issue; but he was insistent that we should develop our critical faculties'.

Picasso was by far the most compelling person Berggruen ever met: 'A more modern painter than Picasso doesn't exist. He was fascinating, quick, sensitive, approachable and had a great overview of the world.' Among the most popular works on show in Berlin are Head of a Faun (1937), a present from Picasso to his chauffeur, who then sold it to Berggruen; The Yellow Sweater (1939), with its fraught atmosphere; and the current postcard best-seller Dora Maar with Green Fingernails (1936). The collection is exquisite and shines rather than shouts. Among the 160 works there are 89 Picassos, 51 Klees, 14 Matisses, three Giacomettis, two Braques, one Henri Laurens and five African sculptures.

'The level of quality is very high, mainly in Picasso. He is relentless at buying good things,' says New York-based dealer William Acquavella. 'He's a very passionate buyer, a tough negotiator who knows the market very well. He knows exactly what he wants and he won't lose a picture if he has set his mind on it.' One picture Berggruen loves but was not in the market for is Picasso's Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice), which was recently sold for more than $100m. He took part in an informal sweepstake of 30 art dealers who all paid $5 to guess the correct price. guessed the lowest - $60m - which would still have been a record for the picture,' Berggruen says.

He has fascinating stories to tell about every picture he's seen and every person he's met in the art world — Kahlo, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Peggy Guggenheim, Nina Kandinsky, Matisse, Mirö, Man Ray. He remembers that Boy With a Pipe was bought in the 1950s by the Whitneys from a Zurich dealer, Walter Feilchenfeldt, for about $30,000, 'a huge price at the time'. It turns out that Feilchenfeldt helped Berggruen make his first big deal in 1948. The picture in question was a Picasso drawing, Le Dormeur, one of the highlights of the Berggruen Collection.

'A friend of Picasso's, the poet Paul Éluard„ wanted to sell it. He needed the money,' Berggruen says. 'I didn't want to negotiate with Éluard — I respected him too much — so I told him "1 love this drawing, but I just can't do it." So Éluard thought for a moment and then asked 'You love Klee, don't you?" 'Yes, very much," I replied. So he left the room and came back with a magical Klee watercolour. He said “If you buy the Picasso, I will give you this Klee as a present." Well, that was it, I had to do it, even if it meant stealing the money. I paid for both and later sold the Klee to Feilchenfeldt for the same price. My first Picasso ended up costing zero,' Berggruen laughs.

He sits in his drawing room surrounded by extraordinary works of art, dotted around in the way that other people might arrange holiday souvenirs: an Alberto Giacometti sculpture here, Diego Giacometti furniture there, a personally inscribed drawing by Chagall, eight Klees in the dining room, all installed in the inimitable low-key, elegant way that was a trademark of his gallery. He was Picasso's favourite dealer and staged ground-breaking exhibitions of classic Modernism. He was the first to see the genius of Matisse's late paper cut-outs, which he showed in 1953 when even Matisse's son dismissed them as 'desperate attempts by an old man to find a new form of expression'.

In 1980, however, Berggruen closed his gallery to devote himself full-time to collecting. He is still passionate about art and the art market, but rinds today's prices scary, particularly for contemporary art. 'Hirst and Koons: at best, it's an experiment; at worst it's playing about,' he says — not something that comes to mind when marvelling at the Berggruen Collection.

The Yellow Sweater, 1939, oil on canvas, 81x65cm, in the Berggruen Collection, Berlin