Remembering Sylvio Perlstein, the Belgian art collector and jeweller, who died aged 94

"Sylvio Perlstein was born in Antwerp in 1931, and died there at the age of 94, but he lived a circuitous and peripatetic life which joined the co-ordinates for some of the most exciting transatlantic networks in modern art. Perlstein was one of the last of the great collectors of 20th-century avant-garde art who lived through many of its defining moments and was friends with some of its foremost stars."

"Not all of Perlstein's travels were made at liberty, though. He was from the third generation of a leading gem-cutting dynasty in the diamond capital of the world but, in 1939, with the Nazis on the march into the Low Countries, the infant Sylvain Perlstein fled with his Jewish family to Brazil, where he reinvented himself as "Sylvio". Later in life, he would think, and define ideas, in Portuguese."

Sylvio Perlstein was born in Antwerp in 1931 and died in Antwerp aged 94 after a peripatetic life that connected transatlantic modern-art networks. He belonged to a third-generation gem-cutting dynasty but fled Nazi-occupied Europe in 1939 with his Jewish family and reinvented himself in Brazil as Sylvio, later thinking and defining ideas in Portuguese. He collected 20th-century avant-garde works guided by a taste for the strange, asking whether objects were 'esquisito'. His first purchase was a painting bought from a florist on Copacabana. He often persuaded artists to sell directly and resisted the grandiose idea of a single coherent collection.

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