Mr. Ernst, how did you discover art for yourself? We need to look back to the 1970s. In 1971, I started working as an employee at the company that I later took over many years later. The company was an American-Japanese joint venture that aimed to establish manufacturing and sales of drives in Europe. Our task was to sell drives that we sourced from Japan and the USA, but the business in Germany was struggling. So, I traveled a lot abroad, usually two days a week. During these business trips by train – at that time the company had little money – I eventually started visiting museums on rainy weekends.

Did you grow up in an art-friendly environment at home? Were museum visits part of the family program? Not at all. And at the secondary school in Hofheim that I attended, there was one visit to the swimming pool and one to a museum scheduled each year. In fact, if I remember correctly, we only went to a museum once. It was a foreign world for me.

Which museum did you visit first on your own? It was the Musée Picasso in Paris at the end of 1985. The most important exhibits there were actually not abstract but figurative. Picasso was a master at giving faces a unique, distorted form, for example, those profile views where the eyes are aligned parallel to each other. These images, especially the colors, fascinated me even back then. Earlier, I think it was in 1982, I visited the Musée d'Orsay with our French representative. A beautiful old train station in Paris. I don't remember what was on display, but I can still recall the huge, impressive station clock. I later went back there for exhibitions of art, some of which were also abstract art.