London
The flags flew at half mast in Peter Ludwig’s home town, Aachen, when he died unexpectedly on 22 July aged seventy-one. This chocolate magnate had both infuriated and stimulated the German art scene for nearly thirty years. An avid collector in most fields of traditional art and antiquity, he was suddenly converted to the contemporary in 1967 when he bought a Tom Wesselmann at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. From then on he bought in quantity, and not just in fashionable contemporary areas but also against the current. He dared to be sculpted by Hitler’s favourite, Arno Breker, and in 1988 accused West German museum directors of a conformist refusal to consider the art of Eastern bloc countries, permitting only art that conformed to the modernist orthodoxy. While Dr Ludwig was enormously generous with gifts and loans of works of art, he was never loved, partly because he demanded that his name be given great prominence (he withdrew his loans to the East Berlin museums when in 1990 they hesitated to rename the famous Altes Museum, the “Galerie Ludwig”); partly because he sold 144 top medieval manuscripts to the Getty Museum in 1983 after Cologne’s Schnütgen Museum had catalogued and published them. He failed in his 1980s dream to have a national museum created in his name. He made his mark, however, on more museums and created more, than any living collector in the world: Vienna (1979), Oberhausen (1983), Cologne (1986) Basel (1988), Saarlouis (1989), Budapest (1991), Aachen (1991), Coblenz (1992), Moscow (1995) and Havana. In July he had announced that he was setting up a museum of Western art in Peking. He is survived by his wife; it is not know what dispositions he has left for his collection and fortune.