Stealing beauty

I’m standing alongside Angela Rosengart, in a room full of portraits Picasso drew of her, when something spooky happens. Out of the corner of my eye, the old woman beside me becomes the young woman on the wall. It’s over in an instant, but it’s still strange and rather wonderful. For a moment, Frau Rosengart is young again, just as Picasso saw her.

We’re in the Rosengart Museum in Lucerne, a grand neoclassical building (formerly a branch of the Swiss National Bank) that houses Rosengart’s extraordinary art collection — more than 100 works by Klee, plus dozens of other modern masters: Léger, Kandinsky, Modigliani…Yet it’s her Picassos (32 paintings, plus about 100 other artworks) that really arrest the eye, for this collection is also a record of a unique friendship that lasted more than 20 years.

Angela’s father Siegfried was an art dealer, with his own gallery in Lucerne. Angela was his only child.