PARIS (AP) – Heinz Berggruen, an influential collector of Picasso’s artworks and longtime friend of the artist, has died in France, the Picasso Museum in Paris said Sunday. He was 93.

Berggruen died Friday at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just west of Paris, said Anne Baldassari, director of the Picasso Museum. The cause of his death was not revealed.

Berggruen, born in Berlin on Jan. 5, 1914, studied in Germany and France before leaving for the United States in 1936, where he became a U.S. citizen and worked as a free-lance art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, according to the Picasso Museum’s biography of him.

After World War II, he settled in Paris and dedicated himself to collecting art, especially Picasso’s.

“I was struck right away by his gaze,” Berggruen recalled of meeting Picasso in 1949, according to the biography.

Berggruen’s Picasso collection was one of the world’s biggest, with more than 130 works. The Picasso Museum in Paris staged an exhibit of some of the collection last fall.

“He was a great personal friend and great support for the Picasso Museum,” Baldassari said.

Berggruen’s collection included early pieces such as a 1907 study for the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and a portrait of Georges Braque of 1909-10. Later pieces included “Seated Nude with Lifted Arms,” painted in 1972 months before Picasso’s death.