How Klaus Hegewisch built one of the finest collections of prints and drawings in the world

It wasn’t the most likely route into art collecting, but it was certainly effective. In 1950, Klaus Hegewisch was a partner in a fruit and vegetable import business. He married his fiancée Helga that year, the daughter of a successful shipper who transported fruit from Latin America to Hamburg.

The two men joined forces commercially, and Helga was tasked with giving the company’s cargo ships a fresher look — boasting as they did a number of additional cabins for passengers. The pair began visiting Hamburg’s art academy, the Landeskunstschule, where they befriended teachers and students, and purchased pictures for display on board.

‘My interest in art was thus awakened,’ said Hegewisch later in life, by which point he had put together a stunning collection of prints and drawings. Spanning several centuries, it features some of the most important graphic works by the likes of Dürer, Goya, Ensor and Munch, as well as the collector’s modern compatriots Max Beckmann and Otto Dix.

The collection’s central figure is Picasso, who is represented by — among other pieces — a rare, early impression of his great etching Le repas frugal, a haunting image of an emaciated man and woman sitting in a tavern.

Hegewisch’s collection is being offered at Christie’s across three sales with the collective title ‘Spellbound’. The first takes place on 16 October 2025 in London, with the others scheduled for March and September 2026.

The title works on two levels. For one, it connotes that Hegewisch was enthralled by the art he collected. Second, it reflects the content of the imagery he was attracted to. ‘The mysterious and the dreamlike… interest me much more than unambiguous realism,’ he said. More on which below.

Hegewisch was born in Hamburg in 1919. His mother and father separated when he was a child, and money was tight. Young Klaus joined the city’s oldest sailing club, sparking a love of the sea that would last his whole life.

Drafted into the German navy at the start of the Second World War, he was soon promoted, and ultimately served as commander on patrol boats and minesweepers. As the conflict progressed, however, Hegewisch grew vocal in his doubts about the Nazi government — especially after bombing raids on Hamburg in 1943 left the city in ruins, and many of his friends and family bombed out or dead. He was interrogated more than once.

Even after the war had ended, Hegewisch’s minesweeper continued its task of clearing shipping routes in Scandinavia. When it hit a mine and sank, he was one of only four crew members to survive.

Things picked up for him in peacetime. The import business was thriving, and he and Helga had six children, built a modernist bungalow for themselves on the River Elbe, and befriended a host of figures who would influence the cultural and intellectual life of West Germany in the decades to come. (These included the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki; the founder of Der Spiegel news magazine, Rudolf Augstein; and the art theorist and Fluxus group member Bazon Brock.)

In his early years as a collector, Hegewisch called upon friends for advice, such as the graphic artist Horst Janssen. Over time, he came to rely increasingly on his own judgement, taste and eye, but always enjoyed the exchange of ideas and knowledge, especially with his friends Werner Hofmann, then director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and the theatre director and cultural critic Ivan Nagel at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus.

Highlight acquisitions included Rembrandt’s etching The Three Trees, depicting a Dutch landscape over which a summer storm is passing. In the fine tonal impression owned by Hegewisch, the effects of light and shade are captured in an atmospheric tour de force.

Among other purchases was a richly inked impression of Picasso’s famous print La Minotauromachie, an allegorical self-portrait inspired by the Greek mythological figure of the Minotaur; and Dürer’s engraving Saint Eustace, where the subject kneels before a stag, between the antlers of which he has seen a vision of the crucified Christ.

Hegewisch was interested in the dreams, fantasies and fears that drive and torment us — and his art collection reflected that. Its images teem with mythical creatures: from Goya’s winged demons and Odilon Redon’s chimera to Ensor’s vengeful skeletons and the strange homunculus in Munch’s lithograph Madonna.

According to his children, collecting art was a way in which Hegewisch dealt with the trauma of his — and his country’s — wartime past: through artists who explored the depths and far reaches of the human soul.

Like many Germans of his generation, the man himself rarely spoke of his wartime experiences. He did say, though, that the spellbinding aspect of his collection ‘only gradually became apparent’ (as opposed to having been planned). ‘In the course of engaging with individual artists, one… gains insight into the relationships that exist between them,’ he said.

Hegewisch’s business did well right through until his retirement in 1986. By then, he and Helga had divorced, and he was married to his second wife, Erika, an artist.

Like his personal life, Hegewisch’s art collection also underwent changes over the years. Initially, it had included a number of paintings — most notably Beckmann’s Carnival (today owned by the Tate), as well as The Poet Iwar von Lücken by Otto Dix (now in the Berlinische Galerie). From the 1980s onwards, however, Hegewisch, who had always felt drawn to the graphic arts, concentrated on works on paper and prints, with a few sculptures and West African works of art as exceptions to the rule.

At first, his interest lay in art of the early 20th century. This later expanded to the 19th century and, finally, the Old Masters. The end result was one of the world’s most distinguished private collections of prints and drawings.

In many instances, Hegewisch did not acquire works in isolation, but rather in view of their place within his broader collection.

On the walls of his home, he showed Le repas frugal beside a charcoal drawing of another emaciated man and woman, Le Couple. Picasso produced both works in the same year, 1904.

Elsewhere, a bronze sculpture by the Spaniard, Femme se coiffant, was displayed below La Coiffure (Femme se coiffant), a charcoal drawing by him of the same subject: a woman combing her hair.

Perhaps the most striking juxtaposition, however, was the hanging of Picasso’s Nez quart de Brie (a preparatory drawing for his landmark 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) above a Dan-Guerzé mask from the Ivory Coast. The former depicts a stylised face, which exemplified the artist’s recent proto-Cubist shift away from naturalistic representation — a shift inspired in part by African masks akin to the one owned by Hegewisch. Both Nez quart de Brie and La Coiffure (Femme se coiffant) were formerly in the collection of Gertrude Stein.

This was a collector who loved to show his collection, both in public and at home. On bright days, the curtains in his apartment were drawn shut to protect the many graphic works hanging on the walls from daylight. ‘Since I got together with my husband, my life has become much more shadowy,’ Erika quipped.

Works were also regularly lent to exhibitions worldwide, and in 1997 a dedicated space called the Hegewisch-Kabinett was established at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. For the following two decades, this housed rotating exhibitions drawn from the collector’s holdings.

No look at Hegewisch’s life is complete without a brief mention of his exploits as a sailor. He crossed the Atlantic on more than one occasion, most memorably in 1955 when skippering a German vessel in the first transatlantic yacht race after the war. He sailed boats, just as he collected art, into his old age.

Hegewisch passed away in 2014, age 94. He left behind an art collection that is frequently enchanting, occasionally disquieting, and all but guaranteed to leave a viewer spellbound.

Spellbound: The Hegewisch Collection, Part I will be on view at Christie’s in London from 8 to 16 October 2025, prior to the sale on 16 October. Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions