He got around the restrictions on Jewish contributors by submitting his pieces through a colleague and signing them with his initials, H. B., rather than his full, Jewish-sounding surname.

Berggruen immigrated to the United States in 1936 and studied German literature at University of California, Berkeley.

He then moved to Paris, where he worked in the fine arts division of UNESCO, run by his former boss at the San Francisco museum, Grace Morley.

[23] In 1990, he lent a good part of his collection to the National Gallery in London, where he exhibited works—including Seurat's landmark painting Les Poseuses (1886)—until 2001.

[24][25][26][27] In 1995, the German government lent him an apartment in Berlin and gave him an art museum opposite the Charlottenburg Palace.

At the time, then German culture minister Ulrich Roloff-Momin described it as "the most meaningful art transfer in Berlin's post-war history.

He additionally received the Jewish Museum Berlin's Award for Understanding and Tolerance in 2005, and was bestowed an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Adelphi University in 1993.

[38] In 2016, Berggruen's Klee collection was exhibited in its entirety to inaugurate the Met Breuer, and traveled to the National Gallery of Canada in 2018.

[8] Berggruen, who until his death maintained homes in Paris, Gstaad, and Berlin (and in Geneva and New York before that),[40] was quoted as saying "I am neither French nor German, I am European.