The Collector: Esther Grether

The Collector10.08.2025

Until her death in August, Swiss businesswoman Esther Grether owned one of the world's most valuable and significant collections of 20th-century art. Consisting of over 600 pieces, the collection includes works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Bacon.

Alongside her husband, Hans, Esther was a regular visitor to Basel’s Galerie Beyeler. On Saturday afternoons in the 1960s and 1970s, the couple could be found examining newly acquired paintings, including numerous Picassos. “Often we went home with a selection under our arms,” she once recalled. In the late-60s, the Grethers, alongside Ernst Beyeler and others, helped finance the Alberto Giacometti Foundation.

Following the death of Hans in 1975, Grether took over the management of the family pharmaceutical and cosmetics business Doetsch Grether in 1975. She also had a stake in Swatch and was a longtime member of the company’s board of directors.

In 1991, Grether purchased Robert Delaunay's "Premier Disque" from the estate of Burton and Emily Tremaine for a record-setting $5.17 million. [1]

In 1997, she purchased Andy Warhol’s "Big Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot)” (1962) from François Pinault. The $3.5 million price tag had to do with the painting's past: per the New York Times, “it had been damaged in transit between Paris and New York and was later restored.” [2]

Parts of the Grether collection have been exhibited several times at Basel’s Kunstmuseum, including a 2019 showcase of Surrealist pieces like Salvador Dalí’s “Cygnes se reflétant en éléphants” (1937), Max Ernst’s “Epiphanie” (1940), and Yves Tanguy’s “Les derniers jours” (1944). [3]

Grether’s collection of works by Francis Bacon rivaled any museum. She owned four triptychs out of the 30 in existence, including “Triptych, May-June 1973,” which represents the final hours of Bacon’s lover George Dyer. Grether bought the masterpiece at auction in 1989 for what was then a record $6.3m. She loaned the rarely-seen painting to a major Bacon retrospective at the Tate in 2008. Among the Bacon pieces in her collection were “Three Studies of Figures on Beds” (1972) and “Four Studies for a Self-Portrait” (1967). [4]

SOURCES

1. Vogel, Carol. “Wary Bidding at Auctions Reflects a Weak Art Market.” The New York Times, November 7, 1991 https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/07/arts/wary-bidding-at-auctions-reflects-a-weak-art-market.html

2. Vogel, Carol. “M'm! M'm! Good! Another Serving of Warhol.” The New York Times, March 31, 2006 https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/arts/design/mm-mm-good-another-serving-of-warhol.html

3. “Works from the Esther Grether Family Collection.” 19 September, 2019-28 June, 2020. Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.
https://kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/exhibitions/2019/collection-familiale-esther-grether

4. Thornton, Sarah. “Francis Bacon Claims His Place At The Top Of The Market.” The Art Newspaper, August 31, 2008. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2008/09/01/francis-bacon-claims-his-place-at-the-top-of-the-market

Image: Alberto Giacometti, “Three Men Walking” (1948) and Mark Rothko, “Untitled [Blue, Dark Blue, Yellow]” (1950)

Francis Bacon, “Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer, Self Portrait, Portrait of Lucian Freud” (1973) and Robert Rauschenberg, “Drawing Room 4 (Japanese Recreational Clayworks)” (1983)
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Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Dos Cabezas” (1983) and “Stroll” (1982). Jean Tinguely, “Sculptural Group Acht Philosophen” (1989) is in the foreground and Claes Oldenburg, “Soft Typewriter” (1963) is lower right.
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Bacon, “Two Seated Figures” (1979)
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Rothko, “No.8” (1952) and Daniel Strubi, “Sigma 1” (2012)
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Bacon, "Triptych, May-June 1973" (1973)
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Richard Hamilton, “Five Tyres” (1971) and Bacon, “Study for the Human Body-Turning on the Light” (1973-74)
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