Picasso: Bacchanalia with goat and onlookers (1959)
An exemplary cooperation between museums has brought 91 extraordinary works from the Rupf collection to Budapest. A decade ago, the Museum of Fine Arts lent its collection of drawings by the Hungarian-French impressionist Pál Majovszky for an exhibition in Bern, where they were shown together with works from other collections. The partnership formed with the Rupf Foundation as a result are to be thanked for the museum's current exhibition: Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky - Masterpieces of the Swiss Rupf Collection. Budapest is the third city the travelling exhibition is visiting, and it has been reworked by the Hungarian curator Judit Geskó.
A foundation does not just oversee a collection, it validates its founders earlier ideas. Hermann Rupf was born in Bern, the son of a haberdasher. Before he joined the family business, he spent time in Paris at the beginning of the 1900s. He was in his 20s.
Paul Klee: Stage Scene (1937)
In Paris, Rupf joined with bohemian society and formed a friendship with the art dealer and gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of the most important figures in the Paris art world at the time. They attached themselves to avant-garde painting, and Rupf went from gallery to gallery buying the works of artists whose names were hardly known (yet), sometimes before the paint was even dry.
Rupf later returned home to Bern, married and took over the family business. But he continued, together with his wife, to collect the newest art.
With no heir to leave their collection to, the Rupf's set up a foundation to oversee the 300 works in 1954. The collection includes Hans Arp's organic abstract sculptures, landscapes of the Fauvist André Derain, Lyonel Feininger's expressionist works, Kandinsky's colourful abstractions, painting and drawings of Paul Klee (who became a close friend of the couple), the works of the surrealist André Masson, and the works of the great cubists: Fernand Léger, George Braques, Juan Gris and Picasso.
Since it was established, the collection has grown three-fold to include works by other modern masters such as James Turrell, Max Bill, Meret Oppenheim and Joseph Beuys.
