Ludwig Museum

This guide to the Ludwig Museum in Budapest follows Peter Ludwig, a German chocolate manufacturer turned obsessive art collector who wrote his doctoral thesis on Picasso's face and then spent decades buying up his work. You'll hear how, unlike most Cold War collectors, Ludwig bought freely from East Germany, the Soviet Union, China and Hungary, and how a 1983 exhibition of his collection brought forty thousand Hungarians their first look at Western pop art without a passport. It traces the negotiations that led to his 1989 donation, signed months before the Iron Curtain fell, and the museum he never lived to see.