ROSENGART COLLECTION
Picasso, Klee & Classic Modernism Art in Lucerne
Angela
Rosengart got her start as an apprentice art dealer at the age of 16
under her father and the
Rosengart
Collection began with a Cézanne
still life Siegfried Rosengart received when the Tannhauser gallery in
Lucerne he had run for seventeen years closed. As art dealers the Rosengarts
gathered only works that they themselves would want to buy, so as it
turns out, the number of art works they couldn’t bear to part with
began to grow, even through the last 
Great
Depression which affected the world before the war. Another Cezanne,
then a Renoir, a Matisse,
a Roualt, the collection grew. After the war Angela, who had bought her
own art work, a Paul Klee drawing when a teenager, joined more closely
in working with her father. By the 1950’s she was co-owner of the
Rosengart Gallery and their interest shifted from Impressionists to Classic
Modernists, focusing on Pablo Picasso and Klee, at the time, hard artist
to sell. Who knew?
Angela
Rosengart’s father
became a close friend of Picasso especially and the back room of the
gallery
filled with his then unwanted works,
paintings, sketches and a photographic record of his life and work process.
Braque, Miro, Modigliani and Chagall, contemporaries and friends, also
found their way into the collection. The Rosengarts never thought of
themselves as building a museum. For a time a selection of the Picassos
were gifted to the city of Lucerne and on display as the Picasso Donation
Museum, but in 2008,
the
Picasso Museum closed and the works joined the rest of the collection
in the Sammlung Rosengart Luzern, the Rosengart
Collection Art Museum in a former bank building on Pilatusstrasse, three
blocks from the railway station and two from the famed iconic Chapel
Bridge on Lake Lucerne, to present the full scope of the works to the
public One of the most impressive collections of Picasso and Paul Klee
in private hands, with 32 Picasso paintings, mostly from his later period,
along with 100 drawings and other works, and 125 watercolors, drawings
and paintings of Klee take up three sedate floors of the neo-classic
Empire style building once belonging to the Swiss National Bank, along
with 21 other world renowned artists.
Visiting the Rosengart Collection
The Rosengart Collection is
open every day including holidays, from 10-6 April to October and 11-5
in
winter months. The entry for adults is 18 CHF, a bit higher than state
owned museums, but definitely worth a stop for the artistically curious
visitor to Lucerne. A small art shop is on the premises for sale of
books, cards and reproductions. If you don't want to buy your own Picasso,
you
can take home the little green paper you pin to yourself as an entrance
receipt. © Bargain
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Sammlung
Rosengart
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