HAUS of ERNST

In a sleepy German town, a major new museum has opened. For its master architect and his patron, the project is more than a shrine to Abstract Expressionism. It may be the defining work of a lifetime.

- BY CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN

A friend once joked that if you want to shut down a conversation with a chatty airplane seatmate, just tell them you’re an abstract painter. That vocation is presumably so incomprehensible and off-putting to the ordinary person it guarantees no follow-up questions. The 79-year-old German art collector Reinhard Ernst finds himself similarly lost for words when encountering an abstract painting, but the speechlessness stems from an entirely different source.

“It’s so hard for me to put into words how I feel about a painting, because it hits me on an emotional level,” he says. “I can tell within five seconds if I like it or not, and within 100 seconds if 1 would buy it or not.”

We are standing in the enormous basement storage room of Ernst’s newly minted museum dedicated to his passion for abstract art, the Museum Reinhard Ernst, in Wiesbaden, Germany. Giant sliding metal racks carry works by some of the most important American abstract painters of the 20th century—chief among them a trove of canvases by Ernst’s favorite, the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painter Helen Frankenthaler. At current count, Ernst owns 50 of her works, which makes him the biggest private collector of Frankenthaler in the world. If that sounds like a billionaire brag, I’m not giving the right first impression of my subject.