A Show Worth The Trip To Paris

Under the title ‘Heinz Berggruen, a Dealer and His Collection, Picasso-Klee-Matisse-Giacometti’, the Musée de l’Orangerie in the French capital has just opened an exhibition that includes some 100 central works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti and Paul Cézanne and that promises to be one of the blockbusters of the season.

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The masterpieces by a group of the most important painters and sculptors of the 20th century shown in the exhibition were collected by the German/U.S. gallery owner and art dealer Heinz Berggruen and belong to Berlin’s Berggruen Museum, currently closed until 2025 for renovation.

A Collector And His Favorites

The exhibition explores the relationship of this unusual gallery owner with the artists, in particular Picasso and Klee, whose paintings make up the bulk of the show (more than 40 Picassos and 20 Klees), and with the art market network of post-war Paris.

It’s presented in chronological order of artists: Cézanne, Matisse, Klee, Picasso, Braque and Giacometti, their famous paintings alternating with other, lesser-known works — all of which celebrate the vision of a great connoisseur.

A Dealer’s Journey

Born in 1914 to a Jewish family in Berlin, Berggruen studied literature and journalism there and then in France. He was forced to flee, finding refuge in California at the dawn of the Second World War with a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. He later worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he made his first contacts with the art world.

Berggruen returned to Europe when the war ended, first to his native country as a journalist and then to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He slowly made his way into the art market, opening a gallery in 1947 where he specialized in graphic works of modern artists. There, he met not just artists to exhibit but also poets, art dealers, historians, critics and collectors of the time.

In 1980, he decided to dedicate his efforts to collect works from a few selected masters.

His Best Customer

“My collection began quite modestly, as modestly as my gallery, before becoming over the years a passion,” Berggruen wrote in 1997. “Later, I came to feel that my gallery was only a pretext to enlarge my collection. Little by little, I became my “best customer.”

Paris represented the most important professional stage in the life of Berggruen, now considered one of the most significant German gallery owners and art collectors of the 20th century.

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In the early 1980s, Berggruen retired from art dealership but continued to enrich his personal collection. He donated many works by Klee to the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris (1972), as well as to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1984).

In 1996, Berggruen moved back to Berlin and resumed German nationality. There, he focused his collection on 20th-century art and parted with masterpieces by Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.

The exhibition, which very much highlights the entire careers of Picasso and Klee, and incudes Matisse’s remarkable cut-outs and Giacommeti’s skinny sculptures, was donated to the German state in 2000, a few years before the collector’s death.

The collection has been on tour since the renovation began in 2022 at the Berggruen Museum. This is its first time in Paris at such scale.

The exhibition in Paris will close on January 27, 2025.

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