Lucerne, in Switzerland, may be the only place in the world to have two museums with a substantial Picasso collection. One is, of course, the "official" Picasso museum and the other the Sammlung Rosengart, a museum now run by a trust and made up of the private collection of Angela Rosengart, former art dealer to masters such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Joan Miro and the intense Paul Klee.
Rosengart, who has been painted five times by Picasso, is the daughter of Seigfreid Rosengart, the original art dealer in the family.
"I inherited a lot of paintings like the early impressionists and Monets that you see, and the rest were bought as part of my business," she says.
When the collection got unwieldy, Rosengart, a famous resident of this small town, decided to donate her paintings to a trust, and bought over a building belonging to the Union Bank of Switzerland to house them.
With over 40 Picassos, and a basement full of Paul Klees, the Sammlung Rosengart is by far the closest you can get to an original masterpiece, and to be given a tour by Rosengart herself is the icing on the cake.
Not for her the dry descriptions of colour, texture and nuance "" Rosengart, instead, gives rare glimpses into the lives of the great pianters and their sometimes tortured private lives.
Thus, the world may have seen Picasso as the epitome of the Spanish macho male, as typified in his own painting The Minotaur where Picasso as the beast is busy devouring his then mistress, the hapless Marie-Therese, but tell Angela Rosengart about that and she quickly dispels such notions.
"I would say that Picasso was being playful, although he did end his relationship with Marie-Therese because she just could not stand up to him," she says.
She holds no truck with the famous biography of Picasso by his former mistress Francoise Gilot although she does admit, "Francoise was the only woman who had the guts to dump Picasso."
To avenge the meek Marie-Therese though, she says, she has put a portrait of her right opposite that of Dora Maar, her successor in Picasso's life.
"It is naughty, isn't it, but Picasso would have enjoyed the joke," she says.
Different phases of Picasso's life show through in his paintings. While his earlier paintings such as The Minotaur show him as an aggressor, age seems to be catching up with him in the later paintings of his life.
With his second wife Jaqueline Roque and their art deco house in Mougins in the late 1950s, he sees himself at the receiving end of slings and arrows.
Angela Rosengart says these are arrows of cupid, yet Picasso looks pained without a hint of pleasure. She insists that her love for Picasso was never romantic.
"However, his paintings are my children," she says with pride. She is also reluctant to disclose the value of her collection. "If it brings you pleasure, it is priceless," she says, neatly sidestepping the issue.
Rosengart has, among others, a significant portion of the School of Paris art, made up of painters such as Picasso and Chagall, who painted in Paris in the 1920s and 30s.
The jewel of her collection, though, is a collection of nearly 70 paintings by Paul Klee, whose life follwed an inverted trajectory to most artists.
"Klee's paintings are almost miniatures, and reflect his inward looking personality. He got fame and money relatively quicker than most artists, and was living a life of relative comfort when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Then Klee's work was denounced as subversive, since he was a Jew. He had to move to Lucerne, where he died in some obscurity," said Rosengart.
Klee's patrons were mostly Germans who could not buy his art anymore, says Rosengart, who adds that her father bought a lot of his later work and hence the size of her collection of Klees.
In fact, Klee's paintings are very small and intricate, and have been housed where the UBS vaults used to be, since it is cool enough not to damage the paintings.
For Rosengart, who never married, no one ever matched up to the artists she represented. "My father used to ask me to get married, but I think no relationship can compensate the fact that I was surrounded by these greats," she says.
