Walter Bareiss

Walter Bareiss was an American businessman who, with his wife Molly, assembled expansive collections of more than nine thousand objects including modern and contemporary European and American art, modern illustrated books, African sculpture, Greek vases, Japanese prints and contemporary pottery, and Chinese ceramics. Among their diverse holdings of European art, modern art received significant representation, particularly through examples of Cubism, German Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism.

Born to a German mother and American father, Walter Bareiss was raised bilingual. His father, Conrad Bareiss, owned a successful textile business and collected Old Master paintings. In 1931, the family relocated from Munich to Zurich and, in 1932, at the age of thirteen, Bareiss acquired his first work of art from a Zurich gallery: Picasso’s La Suite des Saltimbanques L14 (Salomé) (or Dance of Salomé, 1905; Museu Abelló, Barcelona). He requested the etching as a birthday gift from his father after the two had visited the 1932 Picasso retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Bareiss’s collection would come to include over fifty paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints by Picasso.

While his family lived in Zurich, Bareiss attended a boarding school in Munich, graduating in 1937. Later that same year, he moved to the United States to study applied economic science at Yale University. While at Yale, Bareiss took art history courses and became close friends with one of his professors, George Heard Hamilton, a trustee of The Museum of Modern Art and author of The Pelican History of Art: Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940. With Hamilton, he began taking regular trips to New York to visit galleries and art museums.

After graduating from Yale in 1940, Bareiss married Molly Stimson. The couple moved to New York, where Bareiss ran his own textile company and began building an art collection. Bareiss often traveled between New York and Munich to visit his family, who had returned to Germany from Zurich after World War II, and utilized his trips to also acquire art. During the 1950s, he acquired a large number of German Expressionist prints from auctions and through the Munich gallery Wolfgang Ketterer; in New York, he made purchases through such dealers as Sydney Janis, Pierre Matisse, Paul Rosenberg, and Eugene V. Thaw. In the late-1950s, he expanded his collection to include works by American Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. In 1960, after the death of his father, Bareiss returned to Munich to run the family’s textile business and began collecting contemporary German and Austrian art; his acquisitions included works by such artists as Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Wolfram Erber, Franz Hitzler, and Anselm Kiefer. In the mid-1970s his interests turned to African art, and he built a collection of over two hundred objects including sculpture, masks, figurines, furniture, weapons, and ceramics. Throughout his life, Bareiss also collected modern illustrated books, among them sixty-one books by Picasso. Bareiss donated his modern book collection to the Toledo Museum of Art in 1984. Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the Bareisses donated and sold different parts of their collections to various museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.