The Musée Picasso inaugurates its series of exhibitions on "private collections" with homage to Heinz Berggruen.
Over 150 works, documents and objects by Picasso from the Berggruen Museum, Berlin, are on show for the first time in France along with a new set of works recently gathered together by that tireless collector Heinz Berggruen. It includes personal items: notebooks, works, drawings and pieces dedicated by the artist to his friend and art dealer, along with their correspondence (Picasso's Private Archives). At the same time, the Berlin museum is holding an exhibition of Picasso's drawings with works on loan from the Picasso museum in Paris.
Heinz Berggruen, the collector
Born in Berlin in 1914, immersed in German culture between the two wars before Nazi barbarity engulfed his country and drove him into exile, Heinz Berggruen, by then an American citizen, decided in 1947 to settle in France. He set himself up as an art dealer. "My enthusiasm and my eyes were all the capital I had," he told Pierre Daix. His love for art did not come from books and he was guided by his passionate curiosity from his first jobs as a columnist and art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and as the organiser of the Diego Rivera exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1939 to his encounter with the great masters of the 20th century in the late 1940s.
At the age of thirty three, he set up his first gallery in a tiny shop in the Place Dauphine, before shifting three years later to 70, rue de l'Université, Paris. There, for thirty years, he ran a flourishing trade as an art dealer in the field of modern art. He became the specialist on the work of Paul Klee, published the catalogue raisonné of the work of Juan Gris and between 1950 and 1980 organised many exhibitions on Klee, Matisse, Giacometti, Miró, Braque, Léger, Laurens, Kandinsky and, of course, Picasso, of whom he was one of the eminent representatives after the war.
For over fifty years, while working as an art dealer, Heinz Berggruen built up a collection of works by Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Matisse, Braque and Giacometti, Klee and Picasso, an outstanding collection to which he devoted all his time after 1980.
The works presented at the Musée Picasso come from gifts that Heinz Berggruen made to the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, in 1996 then in 2000: a set of some 200 works exhibited in the Stülerbau, a neo-classical pavilion which is now the "Berggruen Museum" opposite the Castle of Charlottenburg.
The collector made several generous donations to various institutions: 90 works by Klee to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, a chandelier by Alberto Giacometti which once graced the Berggruen Gallery and 13 works by Klee to the Musée national d'Art moderne de Paris in 1958 and 1972, and Cézanne's Study for the Cardplayers to the Musée d'Orsay.
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