Herbert Lust, a major collector of modern and contemporary art who befriended Alberto Giacometti, Robert Indiana, and other artists, died on May 12 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York Times reports. He was 99.
Lust often described his life in the art world as something of an “accident.” On multiple occasions, he recounted how in 1949, while on a Fulbright scholarship to study literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, he ended up at a luncheon sitting next to Giacometti. Intimidated by the crowd, the then-22-year-old invented what he called “a cock-and-bull story” of his origins: that he was a Romanian Jew who escaped the Russians by walking barefoot across the Carpathian Mountains.
Giacometti invited the upstart to his studio where Lust, who was Jewish but grew up on a farm in Indiana, confessed the lie. He and Giacometti struck up a friendship, and Lust, who was an aspiring novelist, used his Fullbright money to buy small prints from artists that the famed sculptor introduced him to, like Hans Bellmer. Giacometti also introduced him to Picasso, Max Ernst, and other artists prominent in the mid-century Paris scene.
“I think that all life is an accident, I just feel I’ve been lucky,” Lust told Sotheby’s for a profile in 2019. “And I don’t feel proud of anything I’ve done, maybe to a fault.”
After leaving Paris, Lust taught English at the University of Chicago, his alma mater where he received a master’s in mathematics and philosophy for several years before becoming an investment banker in 1957. He began to collect seriously from there, according to a 2020 Times profile, accumulating over 1,000 works, with substantial holdings by Indiana, Giacometti, and Bellmer, among other artists.
Lust was a colorful and eccentric character, continuing to befriend artists over the decades, and even writing extensively on artists he collected. His books include the novel Violence and Defiance, published in 1983 by Station Hill Press and Giacometti: The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings, first published in 1970 and revised in 1991, and Enrico Baj: Dada Impressionist–A Catalogue Raisonne for the Paintings, published in 1973. He also wrote catalog essays for Indiana, the photographer Carlotta Capron, and Bellmer.
In recent years, he has gifted dozens of photographs to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. 48 photographs by Capron, gifted by Lust, are set to go on view later this year at the museum.
Herbert Confield Lust was born on October 31, 1926, in Chicago to his father, who bore the same name, and Jennie Lust. Lust’s father was a lawyer at a publishing house, and his mother worked as his secretary. The family moved to a farm in Indiana, where Lust primarily grew up. “He didn’t want his children brought up in the city…so he moved us to central Indiana, where we had a famous dog farm,” Lust recalled to Sotheby’s. Lust said that his family were the only Jews in Fowler, Indiana, and that they only didn’t suffer from discrimination due to his father’s wealth. However, when he was 9 years old, his father died in a car accident, and his mother was left to support Herbert and his two younger sisters. They moved to a small apartment, and his mother became a saleswoman in a department store.
Lust served in the Navy during World War II and, during officer training, took a required literature course that he described as life-changing. “I read the poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and something just devastated me – ‘What? Beauty is important? … I couldn’t stop reading … and my whole life was changed. I never looked back,” Lust recounted in a profile in the London List.
Lust was married three times, first to Frances Hutchins, then to Jean Marianne McDonald, and finally, in 1963, to Virginia Wertheimer. Werthheimer and Lust ran the Virginia Lust Gallery in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s and ’90s. Virginia Lust died in 2014.
Lust is survived by his son, Herbert Lust II, and 10 grandchildren. His son Conrad Lust died in 2024.