Herbert Lust’s collection began with a conversation he never expected to have.
Herbert Lust, a collector whose taste and friendships helped link him to some of the most important artists of the 20th century, died on May 12 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was 99. His life in art started in Paris in 1949, when he was studying literature at the Sorbonne on a Fulbright scholarship and found himself seated beside Alberto Giacometti at a luncheon.
By Lust’s own account, he tried to survive the moment by inventing an elaborate story about his origins. The lie did not end the encounter; it led to an invitation to Giacometti’s studio, where Lust eventually confessed the truth. The two became friends, and Giacometti introduced him to artists including Picasso, Max Ernst, and Hans Bellmer. What began as an improvised social performance became the foundation for a collecting life shaped as much by personal connection as by connoisseurship.
Lust later taught English at the University of Chicago, where he had earned a master’s degree in mathematics and philosophy, before becoming an investment banker in 1957. From there, he began collecting seriously. Over time, he assembled more than 1,000 works, with substantial holdings by Robert Indiana, Giacometti, and Bellmer. He also wrote books and catalog essays on artists he collected, including Giacometti, Enrico Baj, Robert Indiana, Carlotta Capron, and Bellmer, extending his role beyond collector into interpreter and advocate.
His published work included the novel Violence and Defiance, Giacometti: The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings, and Enrico Baj: Dada Impressionist–A Catalogue Raisonne for the Paintings. That dual identity — collector and writer — gave his career a distinctive shape. Lust was not simply acquiring objects; he was building a record of the artists around him and the ideas that animated their work.
In recent years, he also gave dozens of photographs to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Forty-eight photographs by Capron, among those gifts, are scheduled to go on view later this year.
Born Herbert Confield Lust on October 31, 1926, in Chicago, he grew up primarily in Indiana after his family moved there. He served in the Navy during World War II, and he later described a required literature course during officer training as a turning point. Lust was married three times, most recently to Virginia Wertheimer, with whom he ran the Virginia Lust Gallery in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s. He is survived by his son, Herbert Lust II, and 10 grandchildren.
For a collector who often called his life an accident, Lust left behind a remarkably deliberate record of modern art’s social and intellectual world.
