At home with Picassos: gallerist Almine Rech on living with the legacy of the most celebrated artist of the 20th century
When you look at a painting, I think you can see precisely if an artist is copying a contemporary or going back and transforming history,’ says the French gallerist and collector Almine Rech. She is standing in the drawing room ofthe large art-deco villa in Brussels, built in the early 1930s by the city’s great architect of the era, Adrien Blomme, that she shares with her teenage sons and her husband Bernard Ruiz-Picasso–grandson of Picasso and son of Paulo, Pablo’s only legitimate male heir. Around her is an array of Picasso drawings, oil paintings, sculpture and ceramics – the many fruits of Bernard’s inheritance.
Rech’s attention is focused on an artwork that does not bear the Picasso name: a triptych of nudes reproduced by Richard Prince from Willem de Kooning’s notorious 1950's Woman series, which Prince has illustrated with sketches of male and female genitalia and a bare milky bottom cut and pasted from a porn magazine.
Since their marriage in 2000, Rech and her husband have been buying art: in a public capacity for their joint foundation, Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA); and privately – they own one of the most important contemporary collections in the world. It is housed not only here in Brussels but in their apartments in New York and Paris; in Boisgeloup, the 17th century Normandy estate that was once Picasso’s rural escape; and in storage warehouses besides.
Rech’s career as an art dealer began in 1989 in the Marais, when she used her first show to exhibit a single piece of art: a large red monochrome created out of light by James Turrell. ‘Everyone thought I had lost my mind,’ she recalls, in quiet clipped consonants redolent of her native Paris.
A slight woman, she stands like a ballet dancer, with feet parallel. ‘Because Turrell’s pieces cost so much to produce, his work had only ever gone into a couple of museums, never galleries. But I thought it was just so amazing to see an artist push everything away; to become so radical as to show only colour and light.’ The show was a success. And here, in the monochrome splendour of her grand hallway, shines another master stroke of projecting light, made by Turrell in 2008.
Rech continues to represent the artist (although now she has four eponymous galleries, in London,Brussels, New York and Paris, and she has added to her roster such contemporary giants as John McCracken and Jeff Koons). Only a couple of feet from the Turrell stands a 2014 plaster statue of a woman balancing a gazing ball on her shoulder by Koons, who is also Rech’s great friend. The daughter of Georges Rech, who founded in his own name one of Paris’ first ready-to-wear labels, she spent her childhood weekends visiting museums.
As a teenager, she harboured an ambition to become an artist herself, which culminated in a year at art school. ‘But I have quite a high idea of what it is to be an artist and what art is,’ she admits. ‘I knew I would have to be alone in the studio all the time, and I wanted a family. I love children.’ So she changed tack, studying art history, literature and the cinema of the surreal, before joining the Louvre as a modern-art specialist.
It was not until 1997, after two marriages and two sons, one with financier Xavier de Froment, and another with Cyrille Putman, son of the interior and product designer Andrée Putman, that she met Ruiz-Picasso. They were seated next to each other at a dinner during Paris’s International Contemporary Art Fair; the couple married the following year. Almine describes her husband as discreet and private, but then for most of his adult life he has lived with the international fascination surrounding the many inheritance claims to the art world’s richest dynasty.
When Picasso died in 1973 he left a personal estate containing 45,000 works, $4.5 million in cash and $1.3 million in gold – and there was no will, the repercussions of which Ruiz-Picasso became embroiled in when his own father died just two years later.
He was 16. Since 2002, helming FABA has been his full-time job, fielding up to 400 loan requests a year from museums. And the man who has devoted his professional life to his grandfather’s work was close to him personally too, asaframed chalk drawing of a cheerful seagull, dedicated to him in neat staccato handwriting, testifies.
Before the four year-old Bernard went off to nursery for the first time he showed off to his grandfather his new, clean blackboard, which Picasso immediately drew on. ‘He cried a lot at the time,’ says Rech, who also describes how the blackboard was quickly sprayed to preserve the image Rech and Ruiz-Picasso moved to Brussels in 2006, converting a former truck garage into Rech’s new gallery space, and restoring this house, where art is at the forefront of their lives.
When their twins, Olga and Georges, now 16, were young, Rech removed some of the early sculpture they found frightening – strange primordial faces were out, as were sharp edges–but nothing went merely because it was valuable.
Rech walks on, past an oil painting by Gerhard Richter, whose record price at auction is ￡30 million–‘It looks like the trails of rain on a train’s window, don’t you think?’; past an iron mask by Julio González, who taught his friend Picasso how to weld; and into a wood-panelled room where Bernard works at a desk adorned with models of bulls. On the facing wall hangs a portrait of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s last wife – the work of Martin Kippenberger, who made a series of images in 1996 he called Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore.
Like the Prince in the drawing room, it asks questions about what is creating and what is rewriting, questions that seem to captivate Ruiz-Picasso and Rech. Bernard hardly knew Picasso’s first wife, his grandmother, Olga Khokhlova, a dancer in the Ballets Russes and one of Picasso’s early muses. Their marriage was not a happy one after the birth of Bernard’s father in 1921 and Picasso’s chance encounter with a 17-year-old French girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter, in 1927.
Khokhlova leftPicasso in 1935, when she learnt of the affair and Walter’s pregnancy.Yet when she died in 1955 – Bernard was only two – she was still married to him, despite having filed for divorce.The painter refused to grant her one: he did not want to divide his estate, as French law insisted. ‘When my husband and I first started to buy art together,’ Rech recalls, ‘our tastes were different.
His was more on the figurative side and I was minimal and abstract. Now the way we see things has converged. Had I not met Bernard, maybe Kippenberger would not have been in my collection…’ Later, when Rech has finished her tour, she sits very straight on a silk sofa and thinks of what makes a great collector.
‘It is like classic music informs even rock music if you know about it. If you know of the Renaissance, you are informed about modern art, and modern art tells you about contemporary art.’ She pauses. ‘The best collectors are those that teach you when you see their collection. They become like scholars.’
The exhibition A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981-2018, is at the Almine Rech Gallery in London, 2 October-17 November (alminerech.com)
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