Heinz Berggruen

Heinz Berggruen (January 6, 1914 – February 23, 2007) was a German-born American 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. He was the father of John, Olivier and Nicolas Berggruen. Early life and education Berggruen was born in Wilmersdorf, Berlin to assimilated Jewish parents: Ludwig Berggruen, a businessman who owned an office supply business before the war, and Antonie (née Zadek). He attended the Goethe-Gymnasium in Wilmersdorf and graduated from 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. Career 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. Immigration to the United States Berggruen 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, in New York in 1940, he met Frida Kahlo with whom he had a short love affair. That same year he says that he bought his first picture for $100 while honeymooning in Chicago. It was a watercolour by Paul Klee, and he bought it from a Jewish refugee in need of money. While living in California, Berggruen was a student of the painter David Park.