ERNST BEYELER (1921–2010)

ABC reports that Ernst Beyeler, whose early eye for undervalued Picassos and Impressionists helped him assemble one of Europe’s most famous art collections, has died, according to a statement made by the Beyeler Foundation earlier today. He was eighty-eight.

The son of a Swiss railway employee, Beyeler became a widely respected art patron after World War II by acquiring hundreds of works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, 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 $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.

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 forty-five-hundred-dollar price in installments to make Wassily Kandinsky’s masterpiece Improvisation 10 his first major acquisition.

“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 sixty years since, more than sixteen thousand paintings, drawings, and sculptures, including Picassos, Monets, and Vincent van Goghs, changed hands at his Basel gallery. He kept the Kandinsky painting, and today it could be worth twenty-five million dollars at auction, according to published estimates.