Material old but very curious, like no one did not spread. It is interesting that the fate of the collector twice escapes from the trains bound for concentration camps . At the age of 80 years, died in Geneva, the famous collector and owner of one of the best collections of works of art Ian Kruger (Kryuzhe). At one time, leaving a youthful dream of becoming an artist, Kruger listened to the advice of a friend - Italian sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti - and retrained in the collectors. Short, quick-tempered and irritable, he became one of the richest and most eccentric gallery owners today. Ignoring the tradition, he organized the strange impressions which African ritual masks side by side with paintings of XIII-XVII centuries and the best examples of modern art. On the establishment of the congregation, which some experts call the best in the world, it took more than 40 years.
Galleries Kruger in Switzerland and New York specializing in XIX-XX centuries and include works by such masters as Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Edgar Degas and Henri Matisse.
Yannick Jacob Kryger was born May 12, 1928 in a small Polish town of Radom in the family secured a Jewish businessman. By the way, my father, too fond of collecting art, but in a much more modest scale. His mother died when Jan was five years old, and, in his own memoirs, the boy raised "Mademoiselle", ie, a governess.
As a mother, father John passed away early in life. In 1942, when the future of the collector was 14 years old, his father, an ardent Polish patriot, died. John and his family were arrested, stepmother and younger brother were killed in the Treblinka concentration camp. Survivor Kruger twice escapes from the trains bound for concentration camps. A few months Jan hiding woods, before he was still caught and sent to Auschwitz, where he witnessed the execution of 8 000 people, carried out in one night. He worked at the chemical factory, IG Farben, then in a munitions factory, where the produced V-2 rocket. Then there was the Bergen-Belsen, where he was released on British troops in April 1945. All the subsequent life of Krueger tormented by memories of the years of imprisonment and up to the end of the day wore on his arm tattooed number.
After the war, Kruger has adopted a wealthy Swedish family, who knew his parents. Intending to make a career as an artist, he studied at the famous School of Art in Zurich. Finished it, went to Paris, where he met with the Italian Alberto Giacometti, Samuel Beckett and the Peggy Guggenheim, and in 1952 met Pablo Picasso.
Hearing criticism of his work by Henri Matisse, Kruger threw creativity and began his career as an art dealer. His authority in this area has grown with each passing day, and soon acquired a Kruger significant impact on the art market. In 1964, in Los Angeles, he met his future second wife - Mary-Anne Poniatowski, which, moreover, that had ancestors of Polish kings, was also a gifted artist. Together they scraped together 12 000 dollars to buy the first one - the classic landscape of Georges Seurat, who started one of the finest private collections in the world.
In 1976, Kruger met with Marina Picasso, granddaughter and heiress had already gone three years as the life of the famous painter, and became its sole agent.
Kruger contemptuous attitude to many contemporary art collectors, being sure that they are guided in the first place money. For Kruger art is a way to overcome the fears and horrors that he had a chance to experience in a Nazi prisoner of war.
"Collecting - a kind of psychotherapy - one day he said. - So I'm trying to close Pandora's box and reconcile with other people ».
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