Riccardo Jucker

Riccardo Jucker was an Italian entrepreneur based in Milan. Beginning in the 1940s, he built an important collection of modern art focused on Cubism, Futurism, and Metaphysical painting. A significant part of his collection is displayed today in the Museo del Novecento, Milan.

Jucker was born to a family of German Swiss origin that immigrated to Italy to start a business in the textile industry. His father Carlo was a collector of eclectic taste, while his uncle Giacomo acquired nineteenth-century Italian art. After studying law, Jucker travelled around Europe and the United States. In the late 1920s, he moved to Rome to work at the Associazione delle Società per azioni. He began developing an interest in modern art after meeting the artists Benedetta Cappa and Mario Sironi, and soon began to purchase modern art; a drawing by Sironi was among his first purchases.

In 1938 Jucker and his family moved back to Milan, where he became the director of his father’s textile factory, Cotonificio Cantoni. His growing interest in modern art was influenced by Roberto Longhi’s writing on Futurism and, in fact, Jucker managed to acquire a seminal work discussed by Longhi from the collection of Cappa and F.T. Marinetti: Umberto Boccioni’s Elasticità (1912). He acquired other important Furturist works largely in the 1940s, including Boccioni’s Carica di Lancieri (1915), Carlo Carrà’s Notturno a Piazza Beccaria (1910), Giacomo Balla’s Espansione di Primavera (1918) and Spazzolridente (1918), and Gino Severini’s La Chahuteuse (1912).

Postwar Milan was a vibrant environment for the arts and the art market. Jucker bought from galleries with established reputations such as Galleria Barbaroux and Galleria Il Milione and expanded the scope of his collection beyond Futurism to include paintings by Giorgio Morandi, an artist he befriended, and Amedeo Modigliani. Jucker, like other collectors and contemporary artists in post-World War II Italy, shared a renewed enthusiasm for the historical avant-gardes, which were canonized in the Venice Biennales of 1948 and 1950 in retrospective exhibitions on Futurism, Cubism, and Fauvism. Jucker acquired some works through the sales office of the Venice Biennale. His interest in Cubism was evident in his purchase of a papier collé by Georges Braque, Still Life with Guitar (1913), and Pablo Picasso’s painting The Bottle of Bass (1913), around the same time.

The international breadth of Jucker’s collection resulted from his relationships with Swiss dealers in the 1950s and 1960s, namely Ernst Beyeler in Basel and Angela and Siegfried Rosengart in Lucerne. In 1960, Jucker bought Picasso’s Nude Woman (1907) from Beyeler and Paul Cézanne’s Jourdan’s Cottage (1906) from Rosengart. The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome purchased the latter work in 1986: the only Cézanne in a public Italian collection. Jucker also acquired Art informel, including the work of artists Nicolas de Stael, Hans Hartung, and Wols. The collection was in constant development and Jucker often traded and exchanged works: for example, in 1964 he acquired Braque’s Fauve landscape Port-miou (1907) in exchange for paintings by Maurice de Vlaminck, de Stael, Jean Dubuffet, and Mark Tobey.

From 1974, Jucker began to explore the possibility of gifting his collection to a public institution or to the city of Milan. Initially, he placed forty-two works on permanent loan to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, while the museum’s directors Franco Russoli and Carlo Bertelli pursued an expansion of the building to make a space for modern art. During the 1970s and 1980s, Jucker, already thinking about his legacy, agreed to lend more works and sold others to make his collection more focused. In 1987, after Jucker’s death, his heirs were unable to reach an agreement with the Italian state for the acquisition of the collection and the works left the Pinacoteca di Brera. The municipality of Milan eventually took charge of the collection, which is currently displayed in the Museo del Novecento.