Jan Shrem

Jan Isaac Shrem (1930 – September 2024) was an American book distributor and publisher, winery owner, art collector and philanthropist.

Early life and education Shrem's given name is pronounced "Yawn". Born in Colombia to Jewish-Lebanese parents, Shrem spent his childhood in Jerusalem, then the administrative capital of Mandatory Palestine, and his early adolescence in Colombia. He began by selling English-language books door to door, By the time he sold the business, it had 50 offices and 2,000 salespeople. The winery took its name and label image from Odilon Redon's Pégase, a work in Shrem's art collection.

In cooperation with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he conducted an architectural design competition for a winery building. Out of 96 entries, the winner was Michael Graves, who would design the postmodern Clos Pegase Winery building, which opened in 1987.

In 2007, it was described by architecture critic Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny as "an interpretation of Classicism in ochre and burnt sienna, with a spare desert feeling."

The estate eventually covered 450 acres and included an underground theater and concert hall, with some 350 works from Shrem's art collection displayed in rotation. The winery was subsequently acquired by Jay Adair. The sale was led by Pablo Picasso's Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat (1964), which realised $21.2 million with fees; 15 works sold from the collection brought a total of $26.6 million.

Personal life Shrem met Mitsuko Shrem in 1960; they married and had two sons, Marc and David. They were married until her death from pancreatic cancer in 2010.

In 2012, Shrem married Maria Manetti Shrem. His death was not announced publicly until late October, and neither the exact date nor the cause was disclosed. The gift to KQED was the largest individual gift that public radio and TV station had ever received. In 2019, the Shrems donated $18 million to the University of California, San Francisco to build the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Neurology Clinic, a unique clinic specializing in difficult-to-diagnose neurology cases, located within the Weill Institute for Neurosciences.