Top 200 Collectors

Jutta and Siegfried Weishaupt have been collecting art for more than four decades. “I collect intuitively,” Siegfried once said. During that time they have expanded their focus from geometric abstraction by Josef Albers and Max Bill to American Abstract Expressionism and later to Pop and contemporary art. Their collection of works by artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring is housed at their museum, Kunsthalle Weishaupt, in Ulm, Germany. The museum’s Wolfram Wuhr–designed building, completed in 2007, is also home to the art holdings of Siegfried Weishaupt’s father, Max Weishaupt, an important early collector of Pop art.

In the early 1960s, Max commissioned celebrated product designers Hans Gugelot and Hans Sukopp to work for his business, later also commissioning work from the Swiss graphic designer Josef Müller-Brockmann. “Thus the Bauhaus and its clarity of design moved in with us,” Siegfried has said. The influence of the Bauhaus vision is evident in the Weishaupt’s collection: key pieces reflect a reverence for geometrical and “concrete” art, particularly in works by Hans Arp, Rupprecht Geiger, Camille Graeser, Auguste Herbin, Verena Loewensberg, Richard Paul Lohse, Bridget Riley, and Victor Vasarely, among others. The couple only later embraced Amercian Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, eventually welcoming pieces by Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Kenneth Noland into their collection. Their kunsthalle also pays special attention to accomplishments in sculpture. Since 2009, Keith Haring‘s painted steel Red Dog for Landois (1987) has stood in front of the Kunsthalle Weishaupt. The Weishaupts’ daughter, Kathrin Weishaupt-Theopold, is an art historian and serves as the director of Kunsthalle Weishaupt.