The funding for the collection was provided by his childhood friend and fellow art enthusiast Alexander Schmidheiny, who shared with him the goal of establishing a first-rate collection of contemporary art. Living up to his maxim "You shall not collect what you want to sell", Ammann strictly divided his dealing in early twentieth-century art from his collecting postwar and contemporary works. Following the untimely deaths of Alexander Schmidheiny in 1992 and Thomas Ammann in 1993, the collection was inherited by their siblings.
The funding for the collection was provided by his childhood friend and fellow art enthusiast Alexander Schmidheiny, who shared with him the goal of establishing a first-rate collection of contemporary art. Living up to his maxim "You shall not collect what you want to sell", Ammann strictly divided his dealing in early twentieth-century art from his collecting postwar and contemporary works. Following the untimely deaths of Alexander Schmidheiny in 1992 and Thomas Ammann in 1993, the collection was inherited by their siblings.