The Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris will host from Wednesday masterpieces by Matisse, Picasso, Klee and Giacometti, emblematic figures of modern art, belonging to the collection of German art dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen (1914-2007).
Some 90 paintings, including almost half by Pablo Picasso, rare paper cutouts and a few paintings by Henri Matisse, numerous works on paper by Paul Klee, as well as sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, are on display until January 27 .
Almost all come from the Berggruen/Neue Nationalgalerie museum in Berlin, which houses the 300 works from this dealer’s collection, and loans from his family, and are brought together in Paris on the occasion of its closure for renovations. The collection, transferred to the German state in 2000, has been installed there since the end of the 1990s.
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Among the nuggets on display are a few pastels and a large cubist nude by Picasso and paper cutouts by Matisse, “among the most beautiful and rarest,” according to Claire Bernardi, director of the museum and general curator with Gabriel Montua, her counterpart at the museum. Berggruen.
“It’s the kind of gift you don’t refuse,” rejoices Ms. Bernardi. This “Parisian stop” can also be explained because Heinz Berggruen, a German Jew born in 1914 in Berlin and exiled in California during the Second World War, “opened a gallery on his return to Europe, a stone’s throw from the Musée de l’Orangerie “, she explains.
This German collection also echoes that of the French merchant Paul Guillaume, exhibited at the Orangerie and “created 30 years before, between the wars”, she underlines.
Heinz Berggruen “had magnificent 19th century works (Cézanne, Seurat, etc.) which he sold to gradually narrow his collection to the great figures of modern art such as Picasso, whom he met and with whom he worked, after purchasing a very first drawing by Paul Klee in 1940 in the United States, which he long considered a talisman.
He will then offer several Klee to the modern art museum at the Center Pompidou, as well as to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The exhibition itinerary is designed around large sections such as the world of things, the face, the human figure or abstract territories, approximately half of the works (45) being by Picasso, bought and resold from the 1950s but especially after the 80s.
A “Large Reclining Nude” by the Spanish master, dating from 1942, is the largest work in the collection. It echoes a statue, “large woman standing III” by Giacometti, probably the last work purchased by the dealer.
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