Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Giacometti

Berggruen's collection--with more than one hundred masterpieces--is a spectacular tribute to the foresight of this major player in the Paris art market during the second half of the twentieth century. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1914, he went into exile in California on the eve of World War II. He became art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and assistant to the director of the San Francisco MoMA. After the war, Berggruen returned to Europe, first to Munich as a journalist, then to Paris where he worked at the UNESCO headquarters before becoming an art dealer specialized in the graphic arts of modern artists. He quickly established contacts within the Parisian cultural scene, meeting both the artists he would represent and the poets, dealers, historians, critics, and collectors of the day. Guided by his personal tastes, he built a solid collection of twentieth-century works--now housed at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin--spanning the careers of Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee and including Henri Matisse's collages and Alberto Giacometti's sculptures. The vast ensemble was exhibited at the Orangerie in 2024 and is housed in the Berggruen Museum/Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin.

About the Authors

Olivier Berggruen is an independent art historian.

Claire Bernardi is director of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

Blair Asbury Brooks is an art advisor and PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Juliette Degennes is a heritage curator.

Guillaume Fabius is conservation officer at the Musée de l'Orangerie.

Alice Marsal is head of archives and documentation at the Musée de l'Orangerie.

Gabriel Montua is head of Museum Berggruen.

Veronika Rudorfer is research curator at Museum Berggruen.