Sir Edward George Warris and Lady Nika (née Princess Nika Youriévitch) Hulton

Aristocratic collectors of European modernism, Sir Edward and Lady Nika Hulton amassed one of the most important collections of modern art in England after the Second World War. During the 1950s and 1960s, audiences in Great Britain, the European mainland, and the United States learned about the Hultons’ efforts through numerous exhibitions showcasing their collection staged across these regions.

Born as Princess Nika Youriévitch, Lady Nika descended from Russian and Montenegrin nobility and was raised in Paris. Her father, Prince Serge Youriévitch, was a diplomat, scientist, and Chamberlain at the Czarist court, who together with his wife and two daughters lived in France as well as Russia. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the family lost all their property and remained in exile in France. Prince Serge, who had learned how to sculpt around 1903, became a celebrated artist late in his life. Indeed, it may have been his influence that sparked Lady Nika’s interest in the arts.

Lady Nika began to collect art after the Second World War and continued to do so until at least the late 1960s. One might speculate that her marriage to Sir Edward in 1946 was an impetus. Affluent, daring, and quick-thinking, Lady Nika became a coveted client of art dealers and galleries internationally—among them the Mayor Gallery in London, Galerie Berggruen et Cie in Paris, and Saidenberg Gallery in New York—but the exact dates of her acquisitions are often obscure. By the late 1950s, she was also a published author and had written a book on Paul Klee as well as another on art appreciation for children; she would also publish several novels and short stories in later years. The couple lived at their mansion, Hyde Park Gate, Cleve Lodge, in London, where they entertained guests such as the American art critic Clement Greenberg and his wife, the actress, writer, and editor Janice van Horne.

Sir Edward was born into an English publishing dynasty established in the 1870s by his grandfather, Edward Hulton, and continued the family tradition by becoming a publisher and editor himself. In 1937, he founded the Hulton Press, which published among other titles such iconic magazines as the illustrated weekly Picture Post. In 1957, when the magazine’s publication ceased, Hulton was knighted for his services to the field of journalism.

That year also saw the first presentation of forty-one paintings and sculptures from the Hulton collection in London. Entitled The Collections of Sir Edward and Lady Hulton, the exhibition at Tate Gallery suggested that the collection was indeed the work of two collectors with slightly different passions—one leaning more toward late nineteenth-century art and the other to that of the twentieth century. By 1964, when the Hulton collection was on view in Wuppertal, Germany in an exhibition that then toured European cities through 1968, this differentiation had become less obvious. At the time, the collection was presented as one entity and comprised an extensive collection of Klee’s work including nearly fifty paintings, drawings, watercolors, gouaches, and etchings aside from works that spanned the history of European art from the mid-nineteenth to the second half of the twentieth century. Among the other artists featured were Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean Dubuffet, Eugene Delacroix, Pericle Fazzini, Alberto Giacometti, Juan Gris, Alexej von Jawlensky, Vassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Giacomo Manzù, Marino Marini, Henri Matisse, Amadeo Modigliani, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat, Chaïm Soutine, Nicolas de Stäel, Takis, and Mark Tobey. In addition to their extensive holdings of Klee, the couple also amassed major representations of the work of Edgar Degas, Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Rouault.

In 1966, Sir Edward and Lady Nika ended their marriage but the couple continued to tour their collection across Europe with a final stop at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1967–68 and, indeed, lived together again during the last eight years of Sir Edward’s life. Little is known about the circumstances of how their collection dissolved, but sales records suggest that it was divided before Sir Edward’s death in 1988. On June 28, 1972, auctioneers Sotheby & Co. in London offered a group of ten nineteenth-century paintings and sculptures listed as coming from the collection of Sir Edward Hulton for sale. Almost a decade later, in March 1981, Lady Nika, for reasons that are still unknown, chose to sell her entire art collection to Marlborough Fine Art Ltd in London. The latter trove of modern art included two Cubist works—Braque’s Bottle, Glass, and Pipe (1914; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Picasso’s Pedestal Table, Glasses, Cups, Mandolin (1911; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection).