PARIS, FRANCE.- Musée Picasso
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.

Heinz Berggruen’s Picassos: Heinz Berggruen’s collection of Picassos is one of the largest ever made by a private collector. It numbers over 130 works by the artist, mostly paintings (32) and drawings (79) covering all the periods of his multifaceted career.

Heinz Berggruen met Picasso in 1949, through the intermediary of Tristan Tzara: “I was immediately struck by his eyes,” he reminisced. He developed a close relationship with Picasso from this period and began to collect his work, trying to bring together major pieces once owned by great collectors and early dealers in Picasso’s work: Eluard, Dora Maar, André Lefèvre, Frua di Angeli, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paul Rosenberg , Christian Zervos… These prestigious provenances are one of the hallmarks of the Heinz Berggruen collection.

“I am interested only in great music,” he says. “Sometimes I had to live with a work to realise that it was of such quality that it would have been a mistake to let it go. In the end, I think I was my own best customer.”

Heinz Berggruen’s collection of Picassos offers an exemplary journey through Picasso’s work from the Sheet of Studies, 1897, crammed with sketches he made when he was 16, to the large drawing Seated Nude with Raised Arms executed in 1972 with the expressive vehemence of his ultimate works, a few months before he died.

Breggruen collection includes some of Picasso’s masterpieces: Seated Harlequin , 1905, Female Nude, Study for the Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 – which heralds the change in his work after his discovery of African art at the Trocadero museum–, Head of Fernande, 1909, Portrait of Georges Braque, 1909-1910, Houses on the Hill, 1909, Still Life with a Piano, 1912, The Glass of Absinthe, 1914, Glass, Flowers, Guitar and Bottle, 1919, – an outstanding set of experimental pieces using mixed media: paper cut-outs, imitation wood paper, sand, print, newspapers –, Portrait of a Woman, 1923, Dora Maar with Green Nails, 1936, The Yellow Jersey, 1939, Large Reclining Nude, 1942, Nude and Matador, 1970. The Protocubist (1907), Cubist (1910-1919), and Surrealist (1925-1940) periods are particularly well represented, with drawings, paintings, sculptures and engravings that faithfully document Picasso’s artistic research. These radical works take us to the very core of the artist’s creation and thought.