Remembering Angela Rosengart, 1932-2026

Angela Rosengart was 22 years old when Picasso first drew her likeness. The invitation to sit for him arose when she was accompanying her father, the Swiss dealer Siegfried Rosengart, on one of his regular visits to the artist’s studio. ‘Picasso said to me, “Come tomorrow, I’ll do a portrait of you.” I said, “Absolutely.” I can’t see how any woman would turn that down.’ The pencil sketch that Picasso drew that day in 1954 now hangs in the Rosengart Collection in Lucerne, alongside four other portraits of Angela that he made in various media over the next 12 years.

In that first work, the curls of Angela’s hair are echoed in the spiral forms of her necklace (a piece of jewellery she still owned decades later). Her hands are clasped and she looks nervous, almost uneasy. So was it hard to sit for Picasso? ‘I felt burned,’ she recalled, ‘like his eyes were going straight through me.’ She often remarked how she had the impression that she was being ‘X-rayed’, how at the end of each sitting she was ‘reduced to a pile of ashes’. None of which made it sound like an entirely pleasant or comfortable experience, but worthwhile undertakings rarely are.

Angela’s account placed all the emphasis on Picasso’s gaze, but her own eyes are part of the story. They are the focus of three of the works, in particular the slightly stylised lithograph from 1964, in which her eyes seem almost to glitter with curiosity as she looks out of the frame, making direct contact with the artist and so with the viewer. You feel both her own self-assurance, which is much greater than in the first drawing from a decade before, and also the strong bond of friendship between her and Picasso.

‘He was fascinated by her,’ says Georg Frei, president of the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation, who was a longstanding friend of Angela’s. ‘She was thoughtful, she paid attention and was always open to new ideas. There was a critical spirit in her. She was equally engaged as a dealer, as a collector, and also as the founder of her own museum. And Siegfried was the best teacher she could have had.’

Angela insisted that her career came about entirely by accident. In 1948, when she was 16, her father broke his leg skiing, and out of necessity took Angela on as his ‘apprentice’. Being a girl smoothed her path, she felt. ‘It must be difficult for a son to find his own way. A son wants to fight, but a daughter is loving the father: it’s a very easy relationship.’

Did Siegfried teach her the rules of the game, and did she find them hard to learn? ‘I had no role, I didn’t do anything,’ she said with her usual humbleness. ‘My father had everything in his hands: I stood beside him and I watched. None of the artists even realised that I was there. It was Picasso who — all of a sudden, I don’t know why — discovered that I was something interesting.’

When Siegfried died in 1985, Angela simply carried the work forward. ‘People just accepted me as the follower of my father,’ she said — but by then she was already a respected presence in the art trade, as she continued to be for the rest of her life. She rejected any suggestion that she was a ‘pioneering woman’ in her field. She simply focused on the work, dedicating herself fully to the gallery and its artists.

One commercial mantra that Angela inherited from Siegfried was this: buy like a collector, sell like a dealer. That is to say, you have to love art to buy and sell it. ‘Collecting is rooted in a personal or emotional response, while dealing requires a certain detachment,’ says Georg Frei. ‘When individuals such as the Rosengarts hold both positions, that can lead to a stronger and more credible vision. So what strikes me in the collection is the dialogue that runs through it. The works don’t sit in isolation; they speak to one another across time, medium, perspective. There’s a kind of quiet intensity, and it is special because it reveals a way of seeing, not just a way of owning.’

Angela used to tell a story of her father coming home from a meeting with a prospective client and saying, ‘You know, for one awful moment I thought he was going to buy the painting.’ The collection grew out of that attitude: all the mighty late Picassos, the many works by Paul Klee, the Monets and other Impressionists, the 20th-century modernists from Amedeo Modigliani to Marc Chagall and Joan Miró — their presence stems from the reluctance of father and daughter to part with paintings that they had grown fond of. So it was not that some works went unsold or were withdrawn from the market. It would be truer to say that certain pieces were adopted into the family like orphans. And you get a sense of that when you walk through the lovely high rooms of the old Swiss National Bank in Lucerne, where the collection is now housed: each work is here because Siegfried or Angela or both of them fell in love with it, and could not bear to be parted from it.

‘Their proximity to artists such as Picasso naturally opened doors,’ says Frei, ‘But the Rosengarts were effective because they were underpinned by a real sensitivity to the art. The museum is both Siegfried and Angela, a kind of heavenly duet.’

Picasso’s portraits of Angela are part of a subset within the collection, one consisting of depictions of women. Many of the sitters are friends or lovers of the artist: Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walther, Jacqueline Roque, Alice Derain, Nusch Eluard — as beautiful on the canvas as she was in life. There are two portraits of Maar. In one she wears a red dress, and her expression is fixed and impassive, as in a passport photograph. The other jumbled and angular take on Maar, from 1941, is in shades of black and white, like a newspaper mugshot. For all the wondrous technique and the minute observation, there is a sense of detachment on Picasso’s part. It is as if he were saying to himself, ‘Oh, it turns out I don’t love you anymore.’

Among the highlights of the collection is Modigliani’s Cariatide, which Siegfried bought from the widow of the Polish poet, and Modigliani’s dealer, Léopold Zborowski. The title, and the fact that she seems to be supporting the capital of a column, make it clear that this is a drawing of a sculpture, not a woman observed. But somehow it is hard to credit that she is not flesh and blood; she is like some kind of Galatea figure, brought to life by a consumptive Italian Pygmalion.

The raised arms of the caryatid form a mandorla, a shape like an almond. Oddly, this form seems to be a hidden leitmotif of the entire collection. Angela’s eyes — indeed practically all the eyes that Picasso ever painted or drew — have the mandorla shape. It can also be seen in the juicy lemons strewn on the table in Henri Matisse’s Citrons et Saxifrages, in the billowing sails that crowd Fernand Léger’s Contraste de formes, in the visual pun that is Paul Klee’s Fisch-blick. Geometrically, a mandorla consists of two opposing and intersecting arcs. It is, in other words, the common ground at the heart of a Venn diagram. So it could be said to stand for overlapping fates and the crossing of destinies, for the kind of inevitable happenstance that seems to have informed Angela’s life and given rise to the collection. That may seem far-fetched and mystical, but as the epigraph to the exhibition catalogue says, quoting Klee, ‘To collect out of love, and with regard to the spiritual dimension — that is a good thing.’

And there are works in the collection that seem to make a direct address to some kind of transcendence. In Monet’s foggy landscape, Eglise de Vernon, Brouillard, the building seems to be floating on the face of the reflective water, like Noah’s ark. It is not so much a church as the ghost of a church. Picasso’s Paysage de Provence is part of this otherworldly group. What first strikes most people is that it is so unlike a Picasso: the work could quite easily be taken for a Cezanne. But perhaps the most intriguing thing about the painting is the spectral figure who sits in the foreground with his back to a gnarly trunk, like Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree.

Then there is Chagall’s Crucifixion scene, Christ with a Longcase Clock. It is not the religious imagery that makes this a work of beguiling spiritual power. It is the combination of archetypal symbols — the dying God, yes, but also the burning candle, the jaundiced moon, the sleeping or grieving woman — and, above all, the dreamlike anachronism of the Roman cross and the tall Victorian clock: redemption and eternity hewn from the same living material.

Paul Klee’s works, which fill the vault of the old bank, are all soul. In his Singer at the Comic Opera, the performer is rendered as a thin line drawing, but behind her, or around her, is a red miasma that could be read as a crimson angel or her own fiery aura. Either way, the painting seems to be operating on two separate astral planes. There is a whole group of drawings consisting of quasi-kabbalistic symbols, often strewn across the composition like paperclips spilt on a table. The two-dimensional forms in Instrumente für Spiel-Musik look more like clef signs and musical ornaments than anything you could play in an orchestra. They are interplanetary runes, an ancient alphabet scratched on a rock. So much of the art in the world looks more serious than it turns out to be. Klee is the opposite of that: at first glance you see the playfulness, but all is much more profound than it appears. The Rosengarts understood that better and sooner than almost anyone else.

Angela grasped it instinctively. Around the time she started working for her father, she bought a little Klee from the artist’s estate. This drawing, entitled X-chen (‘Little x’), cost her the bargain price of 50 Swiss francs — a month’s salary for her at the time. The picture is there in the museum. The ‘x’ of the title is formed by the body and head of the cartoonish figure, and is echoed in the crescent horns and the little quiff. What does that ‘x’ signify?

Angela described X-chen as a portrait of her child self, the six-year-old that she was when the work was created in 1938. ‘Children in general love Klee,’ she said. ‘It is a world that is very close to their world.’ Yet isn’t it more likely that X-chen symbolises the slightly older Angela, the teenager who was beginning her life as a collector and a dealer? The shape to the left of the composition looks like some kind of theatre curtain: apprehensively, ‘Little x’ is stepping out onto a stage, into a world of art. ‘I didn’t look left or right,’ she recalled. ‘I just continued. You know, a lot of things just happen.’

The Rosengart Collection is located at Pilatusstrasse 10, Lucerne, Switzerland. rosengart.ch