Frieder Burda, the collector who filled his private museum with Pollocks and Richters, died at age 83.

Frieder Burda, the German publishing magnate, philanthropist, and art collector who opened a private museum in Baden-Baden in 2004, has died at the age of 83. His foundation said he passed away on July 14th after a long illness.

Burda started building his collection in 1968, when he bought a slashed red Lucio Fontana at Documenta 4. Over more than five decades of collecting, his trove grew to some 1,000 works, including world-class holdings of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. He also acquired several late paintings by Pablo Picasso, as well as paintings by American Ab-Ex masters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Since the Museum Frieder Burda opened, there have been exhibitions of living artists such as Georg Baselitz, Katharina Grosse, James Turrell, and Jean-Michel Othoniel. Earlier this year, it became the first museum to put on display Love Is In The Bin (2018), the Banksy work that was created after the artist pranked Sotheby’s and had his work Girl With Balloon (2006) spontaneously shred after it was sold for $1.3 million.

In a statement given to The Art Newspaper, the German culture minister Monika Grütters said that the museum is a “stroke of luck for the many art lovers who visit it, for Germany’s cultural landscape, and for the artists to whom Burda gave space—in all senses of the word.”