BERLIN (EJP)--- Germany’s most famous contemporary art patron, Heinz Berggruen, was buried last week in the city that honoured him perhaps more than all of its native sons of recent times – Berlin.

Berggruen, whose funeral took place on Thursday, was born in Berlin in 1914. He escaped Germany during the Nazi dictatorship, to try his luck in the United States as a journalist.

After the war, he returned to Europe as a correspondent for the American army. He eventually settled down in Paris where he began trading and collecting the works of his new found artist friends – the likes of Picasso, Giacometti, Klee, Rivera, Kahlo, Cezanne and Matisse.

After leaving the French capital, he made a permanent return to Berlin in 1996 with one of the world’s greatest collections of classical-modern which he bequeathed to the city in 2000.

Perhaps the failures of his first years as an art trader allowed him to expand his own collection, valued at approximately 800 million Euros, as one of the largest of its kind in the world. Kerstin Holzer, of the weekly Focus magazine quoted Berggruen as jokingly saying “I was my best client”.

Honorary citizen

Berggruen was not only a Commander of the French Legion of Honour, an award rarely bestowed to people not of French origin, the City of Berlin made him an honorary citizen in 2004 in thankful recognition of his gesture of reconciliation.

Since the city’s historically negative experience with several of its former honorary citizens, such as Hitler, the political wrangling involved at achieving consensus for bestowing such an honour today has made the conferral of such awards rare – and, thus, all the more prestigious.

Berggruen was the last of a long row of Jewish art patrons who had been responsible for making Germany a mecca of the fine arts. To date, there is no indication that such a legacy will be repeated any time soon.

Last summer’s long awaited reopening of Berlin’s Bode museum illustrated the important role German-Jewish patrons played in filling the nation’s museums with the best works of art available in the world. A recent symposium honoured the significant role these men played in pre-National Socialist Germany – which Berggruen may or may have not inadvertently been emulating.

Because his reputation only began to flourish a decade after the war, Berggruen’s merits were not mentioned at the conference. Nevertheless, his way of life, such as his morning strolls through the museum housing his collection, across from Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace, resembled those of honourees such as Eduard Arnold’s. Also Arnold enjoyed perusing past his vast art collection in his fabled Villa Massimo in Rome – which he bequeathed to the German nation as home of its Academy in Rome, to promote talented creative people by funding and housing them, exactly 100 years ago.

Significant

The symposium did not limit its remembrance to generous, voluntary expatriates, such as Arnold. It also remembered the significant collectors who remained in Germany and made a great portion of their art collections available to institutions that were open to the public.

Many would end up suffering directly or their heirs would end up enduring the brunt the brutality of the Nazi regime - Eduard Müller, Ismael Littmann Ludwig Darmstädter, Rudolf Mosse and Baron von Rothschild, to name few.

However, the biggest name to have made an impact on the German art circuit, prior to Berggruen’s return to Berlin, was James Simon – a favourite of the Kaiser – whose personal art collection and genius as a curator made the German capital’s Bode museum one of the finest in the world.

Berggruen’s importance to Germany could certainly have been measured by the ranks of those who attended his burial – an occasion which resembled a state funeral. Not only was the entire German leadership present, also Pablo Picasso’s granddaughter Diana Widmaier paid her last respects to one of her grandfather’s best friends.