Edmund de Unger, Islamic Art Collector, Is Dead at 92

New York Times: Edmund de Unger, Islamic Art Collector, Is Dead at 92.

Edmund de Unger, whose childhood fascination with Oriental rugs and “The Arabian Nights” led him to amass one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Islamic art, died on Jan. 25 at his home in Ham, Surrey, England. He was 92.

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Edmund de Unger in 1998.

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His death was confirmed by his son Richard.

Mr. de Unger, a Hungarian who made his fortune as a property developer in London in the 1960s, followed his instincts and enthusiasms in accumulating priceless objects from nearly every period of Islamic art and a geographical area extending from the Mediterranean to India.

The Keir Collection, named after the house he once occupied in Wimbledon, included painted miniatures, metalwork, ceramics, carpets and textiles. It was documented in four scholarly catalogs he commissioned in the 1970s and a fifth catalog, on Islamic painting and book art, published in 1988.

Mr. de Unger was resourceful and idiosyncratic. If an important work did not interest him, he passed it by. If his interest was aroused, he pounced.

One rainy day in Paris he stepped into a secondhand bookstore for shelter and, to his astonishment, saw a manuscript from the Mongol Jalayirid dynasty, which ruled western Iraq and Persia in the 14th century. He disguised the book by grouping it with four books of no particular value, haggled a bit with the dealer and walked out the door with a bargain masterpiece.

The Keir Collection included rarities like early Coptic and Arabic textile art of the 5th to 10th centuries, early Islamic to late Medieval Egyptian manuscript art, painted Fatimid ceramics from the 10th to 12th centuries and extremely rare Fatimid rock-crystal vessels.

“Collecting is in a way like hunting, in that not only does one derive aesthetic pleasure from the objects collected, but the actual pursuit of them is also pleasurable,” Mr. de Unger wrote in the catalog for an exhibition of works from his collection at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin in 2007. “Every piece I have acquired has a tale to tell, and each acquisition has been the result of either a sudden passion or a slowly growing affection.”

Odon Robert Antal de Unger was born on Aug. 6, 1918, in Budapest. He developed an interest in carpets at age 6 when his father, a keen collector, warned him not to step on a valuable Transylvanian rug. His curiosity aroused, he began visiting museums and sales rooms with his father.

At 14, on a Boy Scout cycling tour in Romania, he showed the sharp eye and predatory instinct that would serve him well in later life. While visiting a church he found himself attracted by a carpet despite its poor condition — the priest had recently torn off part of it to bandage the leg of a parishioner. He offered to buy a replacement in exchange for what he recognized as a 16th-century Turkish rug. He still owned it 60 years later, when its value was estimated at $50,000.

Mr. de Unger studied economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, law at the University of Budapest and history at Hertford College, Oxford. But as war threatened, he returned to Hungary.

He sheltered 22 Jews in his apartment during the battle of Budapest, one of whom, Eva Spicht, became his first wife. She died in 1959.

After the war he restored the Astoria, a once-grand Budapest hotel, which he ran until it was nationalized by the Communists. He was arrested several times before being allowed to emigrate in 1948.

After entering Britain in 1949 as a manservant, he studied for the English bar and took a post in the Colonial Service, which sent him as a Crown Counsel to Ghana, then known as the Gold Coast. On side trips to Egypt, he developed a fascination with Coptic and Islamic art.

In the early 1960s he returned to London, where he began developing property and collected carpets with such gusto that a crisis loomed. “The end came when I observed every carpet on the floor was covered by at least two other layers,” he wrote. “I realized that it could not go on.”

It was then that he began collecting Islamic art in earnest. He started with ceramics, devoting special attention to lusterware: pottery with an iridescent glaze produced in Mesopotamia beginning in the 9th century.

He soon gravitated to Islamic pottery from the so-called missing period of 1350 to 1550, a historic blank that he was determined to fill in to support his thesis that Islamic pottery developed continuously from its beginnings through the Safavid period of the 16th to the early 18th century.

He then concentrated on Persian miniatures and metalware and eventually extended his reach to non-Islamic art, notably French and Italian textiles from the 15th to 18th centuries. In the early 1970s, he acquired a superb collection of medieval European enamelware from the Swiss couple Ernst and Martha Kofler-Truniger.

In 1997 he put the enamelware up for auction. Sotheby’s New York, which conducted the sale, estimated that the last great collection of medieval art still in private hands would bring in $25 million but, in one of the great art-sale disasters of the decade, managed to ring up a mere $5.5 million.

In June 2009, Mr. de Unger signed an agreement to lend the works from his collection on a long-term basis to the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The catalog for the 2007 Berlin show was published by the University of Chicago Press as “A Collector’s Fortune: Islamic Art From the Collection of Edmund de Unger.”

In addition to his son Richard, of London, he is survived by his wife, Elizabeth; another son, Glen, also of London; and four grandchildren.