About
Schweizer Premodern is an international art business specializing in confidential off-market sales of major works from premodern Africa, the Pacific and the Americas.
Over the course of his career, Heinrich Schweizer has sold over $400 million worth of premodern African and Pacific Art, more than any other expert in these categories. He has been instrumental in the creation of some of the finest private collections in the world, and has placed many important works in Europe’s and America’s leading art museums. His portfolio of transactions includes sales of individual masterpieces to preeminent public and private collections worldwide, such as The Friede Aripa to the National Gallery of Australia, and sales of entire collections such as the Masco Collection of Pacific Art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), at the time the highest-value transaction of Pacific Art in history.
Prior to founding Schweizer Premodern in 2015, Mr. Schweizer was Sotheby’s Head of African and Oceanic Art in New York from 2006–2015. During this time he had a tremendous impact on the market for premodern African and Pacific artworks: recognizing those artworks as Fine Art, he introduced new standards for art historical scholarship, provenance research and catalogue presentation, thus enabling the market to exploit a hitherto unrealized potential. Presenting the most important collections to come to market, including those of Henri Matisse, Pierre and Tana Matisse, Marsha and Saul Stanoff, Milton and Frieda Rosenthal, John Friede, Werner Muensterberger, Shelly and Norman Dinhofer, Renee and Chaim Gross, Robert Rubin, Allan Stone and Myron Kunin, he orchestrated the highest totaling auctions of an entire decade, and grew annual sales at Sotheby’s department more than twentyfold. At auction he set an unprecedented number of world record prices for virtually every collecting category, many of them still current today. On November 11, 2014, he set the still current overall world record for African Art at auction with the sale of the Kunin Senufo Female Statue for $12 million. By doing this, he established African Art as one of the highest-value categories of sculpture, at par with the highest prices for sculpture in the markets of ancient and modern European, American and Asian art. Through his work Mr. Schweizer has made premodern African and Pacific Art accessible to a vastly expanded audience and pioneered the transformation of a niche “antiques” market into a major fine art collecting category.
Mr. Schweizer studied law, art history and philosophy and holds a J.D. (Doctor of Law) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School (2004–2005), focusing on foundation and trust law, as well as a Research Fellow at the UNIDROIT International Institute for the Unification of Private Law in Rome (2002), focusing on cultural property protection laws. He is an alumnus of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Germany’s national merit foundation for academic excellence recognizing the top 0.5% of each academic year. He speaks English, German, French and Italian, and also holds degrees in Latin and ancient Greek.
The son of a sculptor and a painter, Mr. Schweizer began collecting premodern African and Pacific Art when he was ten. He has published numerous articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading newspaper, as well as in law journals such as the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts. His most recent book is Visions of Grace, a general introduction to premodern African Art based on the private collection of Drs. Daniel and Marian Malcolm, published in 2014.
About
Schweizer Premodern is an international art business specializing in confidential off-market sales of major works from premodern Africa, the Pacific and the Americas.
Over the course of his career, Heinrich Schweizer has sold over $400 million worth of premodern African and Pacific Art, more than any other expert in these categories. He has been instrumental in the creation of some of the finest private collections in the world, and has placed many important works in Europe’s and America’s leading art museums. His portfolio of transactions includes sales of individual masterpieces to preeminent public and private collections worldwide, such as The Friede Aripa to the National Gallery of Australia, and sales of entire collections such as the Masco Collection of Pacific Art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), at the time the highest-value transaction of Pacific Art in history.
Prior to founding Schweizer Premodern in 2015, Mr. Schweizer was Sotheby’s Head of African and Oceanic Art in New York from 2006–2015. During this time he had a tremendous impact on the market for premodern African and Pacific artworks: recognizing those artworks as Fine Art, he introduced new standards for art historical scholarship, provenance research and catalogue presentation, thus enabling the market to exploit a hitherto unrealized potential. Presenting the most important collections to come to market, including those of Henri Matisse, Pierre and Tana Matisse, Marsha and Saul Stanoff, Milton and Frieda Rosenthal, John Friede, Werner Muensterberger, Shelly and Norman Dinhofer, Renee and Chaim Gross, Robert Rubin, Allan Stone and Myron Kunin, he orchestrated the highest totaling auctions of an entire decade, and grew annual sales at Sotheby’s department more than twentyfold. At auction he set an unprecedented number of world record prices for virtually every collecting category, many of them still current today. On November 11, 2014, he set the still current overall world record for African Art at auction with the sale of the Kunin Senufo Female Statue for $12 million. By doing this, he established African Art as one of the highest-value categories of sculpture, at par with the highest prices for sculpture in the markets of ancient and modern European, American and Asian art. Through his work Mr. Schweizer has made premodern African and Pacific Art accessible to a vastly expanded audience and pioneered the transformation of a niche “antiques” market into a major fine art collecting category.
Mr. Schweizer studied law, art history and philosophy and holds a J.D. (Doctor of Law) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School (2004–2005), focusing on foundation and trust law, as well as a Research Fellow at the UNIDROIT International Institute for the Unification of Private Law in Rome (2002), focusing on cultural property protection laws. He is an alumnus of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Germany’s national merit foundation for academic excellence recognizing the top 0.5% of each academic year. He speaks English, German, French and Italian, and also holds degrees in Latin and ancient Greek.
The son of a sculptor and a painter, Mr. Schweizer began collecting premodern African and Pacific Art when he was ten. He has published numerous articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading newspaper, as well as in law journals such as the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts. His most recent book is Visions of Grace, a general introduction to premodern African Art based on the private collection of Drs. Daniel and Marian Malcolm, published in 2014.