Dynasty prepares to share its family secrets
In his first ever interview, the dealer and collector Helly Nahmad reveals details about the family collection, which goes on show in Zurich this month
By Martin Bailey | From issue 227, September 2011
Published online 18 Oct 11 (Market)
The Nahmad family is one of the most powerful art-dealing dynasties to have emerged in recent decades. Forbes now values the family’s wealth at $3 billion, although this may be an underestimate. Nevertheless, and despite their conspicuous front-row bidding at auctions worldwide, they have kept a low profile regarding the extent of their private collection.
Now the Monaco-based family, who have amassed more than 3,000 works ranging from impressionism to surrealism, are about to “come out”. Highlights of their collection will go on show in October at the Kunsthaus in Zürich—including masterpieces by Renoir, Monet, Seurat, Malevich, Kandinsky, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Miró, Ernst and Dalí. The works have never been seen together before. To mark the occasion, London gallery owner Helly Nahmad has given his first ever interview, to The Art Newspaper.
The roots of the Nahmad family are in Aleppo, Syria, where banker Hillel Nahmad lived until just after the second world war. Following anti-Jewish violence in 1947, he moved to Beirut, Lebanon, and when the situation there became difficult, he took his three sons, Joseph, Ezra and David, to Milan in the early 1960s. All three brothers ended up making a fortune from art.
