David Nahmad: The Man with 4,500 Paintings

At age 78, the patriarch of the famous dynasty of dealers still has a remarkable memory for numbers. He looks back at the early beginnings of his modern art collection, now considered one of the most important in the world.

At Giverny, you present 57 works from a corpus estimated at around 4,500—including 400 by Monet and Matisse, and 300 by Picasso—valued at several billion dollars. What do these figures evoke for you?

To be honest, I don’t know how many works I own. What do these figures mean? One Picasso can be worth 20! What matters to me is the historical quality of the pieces. My collection, of which a large part is stored in Geneva’s free port, has been built up over the decades with my brothers around decisive paintings: milestones in modern art, like the ones on show today.

How did this adventure with art begin for your family?
With my older brother Joseph, known as Joe. In 1951, he gave our mother some small paintings not worth very much, which he bought in Paris for $400. I was four at the time. My father, a banker of Syrian Jewish origin living in Lebanon, didn’t get his love of art at all. Later, when a Gauguin was stolen from us in Milan, he said we had been robbed twice: once on the day we bought it, and once with the theft!

What role has Joe played in your career?
A crucial one. Without him, I might have become an engineer. In the 1960s, strikes paralyzed the Polytechnic University of Milan, where I was studying. Joe then asked me to work with him. At the time, Italy was leading the way in terms of art criticism, contemporary art and institutions like the Venice Biennale. There were also some prominent collectors, like the designer Adriano Pallini and the couturier Valentino. Thanks to him, I met several artists: Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Giorgio De Chirico, Roberto Matta and Arnaldo Pomodoro—to whom my brother paid a monthly salary of around $800—as well as the critics Franco Russoli, Enrico Crispolti and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco.

What did you learn from your contact with the top art dealers in Paris in the 1960s?
Aimé Maeght, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Sami Tarica in Paris, and Pierre Matisse in New York, all played a vital role in my career. Tarica told me a lot of anecdotes about the artists and their work. Meanwhile, I met Kahnweiler in 1965. My brother Ezra and I had just bought several Juan Gris paintings from his gallery, and hoped to buy more. In his office, I noticed Picasso’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), which he refused to sell during his lifetime. I finally bought it in 1992 for FF12 M, and I have had it with me all the time ever since. Nine years ago, it was exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay, alongside the Manet that inspired it (“Picasso/Manet: Le déjeuner sur l’herbe“, October 2008-February 2009). I wonder if Picasso would have become what he did without Kahnweiler.

Your collection focuses on 19^th century painting and the avant-garde. Why have you avoided post-war art and sculpture?
We want our collection to provide a “scientific” overview of the history of modern and contemporary art. In around 1967-1968, I was the first person in Italy to buy a Rothko: at the time, it was worth between $40,000 and $50,000, and a Cy Twombly more like $30,000. After Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, I found that art became harder to understand…On the sculpture front, we have many work by Calder and Giacometti. I’m a “mathematician” who buys what he knows: my unit of measurement is a work’s date. For instance, Nymphéas avec reflets de hautes herbes (Water Lilies, Reflections of Tall Grass) by Claude Monet, currently on show at Giverny, is thought to be one of his first paintings of water lilies according to Marianne Mathieu, head of collections at the Musée Marmottan Monet. That’s important.

Where do the pieces in your collection come from?
In the 1960s and 1970s, my brothers and I bought most of the works from above all galleries, for reasons of security and provenance. But I also went to auctions, particularly at Drouot, where there were few bidders, no journalists and no phones. Auctions give a form of legitimacy to purchases. Now that the big historic galleries have disappeared, I buy mainly at auction: it’s more reassuring from a legal point of view. I have some wonderful memories of auctions: Monet’s Chrysanthemums bought in 1987 for FF13.8 M, a record at Drouot that year, or his Meules (Haystacks) bought at Bayeux in 1990 for FF 28.1 M, which were sold for $85 M in 2015. In 60 years, my brothers and I have sold 6,000 paintings, not so much to make money as to be able to keep buying.

You’re well-known for your sharp eye and sense of timing…
True, but in the 1960s and 1970s, no one could have guessed that the art market would take off as it did. On 3 April 1974, I bought a Twombly at Sotheby’s in London for about $39,000. My brother Joe was angry, as he thought it was too much. On October 6, 2020, I bought it back at Christie’s New York for a thousand times more… In 1975, a New York apartment could be sold for very little, while a Gauguin was already worth $900,000. Even when the stock market and property markets are faltering, the art market remains solid.

What role did your work as a gallery owner play in your collection?
My brothers and I were keen salesmen: to keep buying, we had to sell. For a market to work, it has to fluctuate, with ups and downs. Take Jean-Michel Basquiat: to be able to sell a piece for several million dollars, paintings must previously have sold for $5,000, $50,000, $100,000 and then $200,000. I staged a René Magritte exhibition 50 years ago: the entire show sold for $800,000, with some paintings going for $10,000 or $15,000. Today, one of those works has topped $100 M! I often buy back my own paintings, as I did recently with a Picasso I had sold 40 years earlier. I really don’t mind paying more for it. As Nietzsche said: “The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what we get out of it but in what we pay for it, in what it costs us.” My real wealth lies in having protected and enriched my collectors.

What works would you find it impossible to part with?
Pieces I am sentimentally attached to. The aforementioned Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (The Women of Algiers) versions H and J, as well as various Matisse and Miró works, a sculpture and two paintings given to me by Salvador Dalí.

Are there any collections comparable to yours?
Our collection is unique and reflects the history of our family. There is the Estée Lauder Collection, but it focuses on expressionism, which doesn’t interest me. In my opinion, the Rockefeller Collection only included five great masterpieces, including a very fine Matisse and a few Picassos. Viktor Ganz’s collection, which included Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger, was important, as was Eva Maier’s.

In 60 years, you have loaned works to over 500 museums around the world. Have you considered setting up a foundation?
I believe a collection should circulate and be seen by the public. From the age of 22, I loaned works to the Palazzo Reale in Milan, then to the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York. Foundations tend to fix works in a single place. Some, like the Barnes Foundation and the Menil Collection, do not lend their pieces. But who knows, maybe one day I’ll set one up in Monaco, where I live.

Worth seeing
“The Nahmad collection. From Monet to Picasso”
Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny (Eure)
Until June 29, 2025
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