Edmund de Unger, Islamic artworks collector; at 92
NEW YORK — Edmund de Unger, whose childhood fascination with Oriental rugs and “The Arabian Nights’’ led him to amass one of the largest, most important collections of Islamic art, died Jan. 25 at 92 in his home in Ham, Surrey, England.
Mr. de Unger, a Hungarian who made his fortune as a property developer in London in the 1960s, followed his instincts and enthusiasms in accumulating priceless objects from nearly every period of Islamic art and a geographical area extending from the Mediterranean to India.
“Collecting is in a way like hunting, in that not only does one derive aesthetic pleasure from the objects collected, but the actual pursuit of them is also pleasurable,’’ Mr. de Unger wrote in the catalog for an exhibition of works from his collection at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin in 2007. “Every piece I have acquired has a tale to tell, and each acquisition has been the result of either a sudden passion or a slowly growing affection.’’