Jan Krugier was one of the world’s foremost art dealers and the creator of a superb collection of drawings and other art works by artists ranging from Raphael and Ingres to Picasso and Bacon. His achievements were the more remarkable for the harrowing circumstances of his childhood — as a boy he survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

Janick Jakov Krygier was born at Radom in Poland in 1928. His father, Alfred Adam Krygier, was a businessman — a poor one according to his son — and manufacturer, who spoke Hebrew at home but, as a Polish patriot, disdained Yiddish. He began to exercise his son’s artistic eye, more perhaps from books and reproductions than his own collection, which appears to have been patchy: “He had some very bad paintings . . . Some horrible Renoirs,” his son recalled. Krugier’s mother died in childbirth when he was about 6, and thereafter he had an indulged boyhood, tormenting his stepmother and a succession of “mesdemoiselles”. That idyll ended in 1939 when his father was killed while serving in the Polish Army against the German invaders.

Young Krugier was soon recruited as a courier for the Resistance. He saw his home being plundered, but was away when his stepmother and brother were taken to Treblinka, not to be heard of again. For a while he carried Irish papers, a pretence supported by his blue eyes, and at 13 he delivered his first bomb, in a rucksack, to a hotel, rashly asking directions of an SS officer on the way. He was twice captured, and twice escaped from trains to the camps, but eventually found himself in Auschwitz. He survived partly thanks to an acquaintance of his father who put him on the labour roster at the IG Farben chemical works. He also endured the “march of death” as prisoners were moved west before the advancing Red Army, and was finally liberated from Belsen by the British.

He was the only member of his immediate family to survive the war and Holocaust, and for the rest of his life he remained particularly close to people he had met in the camps, friends who, like him, carried a number tattooed on their left forearms. After liberation he was found by a Swiss friend of his father, Margaret Bleuler, who had been searching for the family. She adopted him and took him to Zurich where he went to school, but resented the discipline and was expelled for punching a teacher. A period with Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian and believer in dialogue, and art lessons from Johannes Itten, the Swiss painter and mystic who had been a founder of the Bauhaus design movement, proved much more valuable to him.

During the summers he went on painting tours. During one tour, in the Engadine mountains, he met and became friends with Alberto Giacometti. In 1948 Krugier went to Paris to study painting with André Lhote, and enjoyed the café life in Montparnasse, where he and Giacometti shared a mistress (“her husband was a horrible man”). He intended to paint and teach, but was discouraged by the aged Matisse, to whom he bravely showed some work, and later by Giacometti, who instead advised him to become a dealer and consultant.

Marriage to Eva Spierer, a tobacco heiress, took him to Geneva, where he worked as an adviser and in 1962 set up his first gallery. The opening show was of 112 works by Giacometti. He also held the first Morandi show outside Italy. However, the enterprise went into liquidation within two years, by which time, and despite two children, the marriage had also foundered. Undaunted he reopened not only in Geneva but also New York, where from 1966 to 1981 he ran a gallery with Albert Loeb. It was less common then, than now, for European dealers to establish themselves in Manhattan, but they acquired a formidable reputation as dealers in the greatest 19th and 20th-century paintings and drawings.

In 1964, at a fair in Los Angeles, Krugier met his second wife, Marie-Anne Poniatowska, a painter and a descendant of the last King of Poland. Despite their difference of faith and his divorce he was welcomed as a son-in-law, and the marriage developed into a close partnership in artistic matters.

Their drawings collection was built up together, from the first purchase in 1972: a Seurat homage to Poussin priced at a daunting $12,000. The Krugiers always bought the best, despising “collectors” who thought only of money. “Every rich man can buy art. Only a man with an eye can build a collection.” As a disciple of Buber he believed that the elements of a collection should converse with each other, as when in an exhibition he created a “dialogue” between a 4,000-year-old Egyptian sculpture of a walking man, and its 1950 Giacometti counterpart.

Krugier also believed in the primacy of drawing: “A drawing is the first cry of humanity,” he said. “A painting can be varnished, layered over, reworked, but an artist cannot cheat or lie in a drawing. It goes back to something deep and primitive.” Collecting, he said, was his way of reconciling himself to other human beings, and by buying art he could come to “live with the memories haunting me”.

Krugier first met Picasso at his Antibes studio in 1948, introduced by Spanish fellow survivors of the camps, and both then and on a subsequent visit in 1952 found himself thoroughly intimidated. This was no small thing, since Krugier himself could also be intimidating. As François Curiel, deputy-chairman of Christie’s, said of him, he would not be influenced by anyone, and to proffer one’s own opinion felt like time wasted, even if in fact it was not always unheard. It is a tribute that despite this, staff tended to stay with the gallery for many years.

In 1973, soon after Picasso’s funeral, Krugier was contacted by Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s former mistress, who wished to help the neglected family of his first wife by selling some of her collection on behalf of the grandchildren, Pablito and Marina. Pablito had just swallowed bleach, and died a few agonising weeks later, but through his brother-in-law, then the Minister of the Interior, Krugier had been able to expedite matters. In 1976 Marina Picasso became heiress to the largest collection of her grandfather’s work, and again called on Krugier. Once the French state had taken its share, she appointed Krugier and Marie-Anne sole agents to choose what should be sold and kept. Over the following decades they arranged touring exhibitions to fund Marina’s humanitarian foundation, building an orphanage and schools in Vietnam.

While the Geneva gallery continued, Krugier returned to Manhattan once again, first with an office in 1983, and then with a full gallery from 1987. He was also a regular exhibitor at fairs. In the gallery, at fairs or at sales, Krugier himself was an elegant figure, often carrying a cane and enjoying a cigar. He was also known for pungent comments to auctioneers.

At the same time, the collection in the Krugiers’s Geneva home continued to grow — a wall full of Ingres drawings might have a Raphael in the middle, both to show the artist’s debt to his classical predecessors, and to test unwary visitors. There were great works from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and of course there were the

Picassos. This meant that for much of the time many of the rooms had to be kept in darkness. In 1997 they paid a then record $7 million for a Bacon — a far cry from when Krugier had to sell a Degas self-portrait from the collection because he needed the money.

From 1999 selections from his collection were exhibited in museums around the world, beginning with the Staatliche in Berlin, in aid of the Holocaust Memorial. In 1996 Krugier was appointed Commandant des Arts et des Lettres by France.

Krugier is survived by his wife, Marie-Anne, and by the children of his first marriage.

Jan Krugier, art dealer, was born on May 12, 1928. He died on November 15, 2008, aged 80