The Bavarian State Paintings Collections received a donation of 58 top works from the 18th to 20th centuries by artists including Eugène Delacroix, Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, Georg Baselitz and Piet Mondrian from a former private collection assembled over many decades by the billionaire couple Christof and Ursula Engelhorn.
The Engelhorns contributed their private collection to the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne. The foundation has now donated it to the State Paintings Collections, as well as enabling the acquisition of a 1973 work by Dan Flavin, Untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection).
The Engelhorn couple supported Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne museum over 40 years with acquisitions such as Francis Bacon’s triptych Crucifixion and Joseph Beuys’ The End of the 20th Century. The space which houses the Beuys installation was dedicated to the Engelhorns in 2011.
Christof Engelhorn, a member of the family who owned the German pharmaceuticals company Boehringer Mannheim that was sold to Hoffmann-La Roche in 1997, died in 2010. His widow Ursula has a fortune estimated at $3.8 billion in the Forbes 2016 world billionaires ranking.
The collection donated to Munich also includes works on paper by Jacques Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingrès, Théodore Géricault, Honoré Daumier and Georges Seurat. The Bavarian State Paintings Collections plan to exhibit some of these at the Pinakothek der Moderne in November.