Guy Weill, who died August 17 at 92, was a Swiss-born importer of trendy menswear whose Madison Avenue store served as a gallery for his collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings.

Weill, who began his career as an art collector while still a teenager in Zurich by buying and selling sketches by Picasso and Kirchner, was proprietor of British American House, which specialized in importing the suavest rainwear from Burberry, Daks, and Aquascutum. In the 1960s, he was among the leading purveyors of Nehru jackets.

A passionate collector, Weill befriended many well-known Abstract Expressionist painters, including Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, his daughter, Claudia, said. Artists hung came in and out of the store, sometimes swapping a sketch for a raincoat.

In the 1960s with the rise of Pop Art, Weill and his wife abruptly switched their focus to Oriental art and began amassing a substantial collection. In 2002, some of their holdings were featured in a 2002 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Cultivated Landscapes: Reflections of Nature in Chinese Painting With Selections From the Collection of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill.” The dozen works featured were donated or promised to the museum.

Weill grew up in Zurich, where his family had dealt in menswear for generations. The composer Kurt Weill was his cousin. In 1938, he came to America, where he was drafted into the Army. Fluent in several languages, he was attached to military intelligence and worked as an interrogator of enemy prisoners during World War II. In the run-up to the Nuremburg Trials, he also interrogated Nazis, including Hermann Goering, whom he quizzed about his preferences in art, Weill’s family said.

Weill returned to New York after the war and married Marie-Hélène Bigar; their mothers had been schoolgirls together in Alsace before World War I and met again in New York when their children were married.

The Weills liked to vacation on Cape Cod, where Motherwell and Ms. Frankenthaler would join them at their home in Wellfleet, Mass., Mrs. Weill recalled.

The Weills collected art together but became disillusioned as Pop Art’s commercialism became predominant. It was while visiting their college-age daughter in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that the couple happened upon a show of Oriental art that converted them. They donated and sold off much of their Abstract Expressionism and began collecting Oriental works, especially Chinese paintings. Mrs. Weill became a gallery lecturer at the China Institute and later for the Oriental collections at the Met.

Beginning in 1979, the Weills journeyed each year to China and other parts of the Far East, where they traveled parts of the old Silk Road. Weill exhibited his photos of their travels at the Asia Society.

Weill was an ardent fan of the opera and liked to bring along a little book to performances at the Met, where he sat in the second row and sketched droll cartoons of the singers, with notes about how they should be painted back home.

Guy Weill

Born May 13, 1914, in Zurich, Switzerland; died August 17 at his home in New York City; survived by his wife, Marie-Hélène; three daughters, Claudia, Kathryn, and Patricia; four grandchildren, and a sister, Marianne Lester.