Established | 1996 |
---|---|
Type | Art museum |
Visitors | 80,000 (2020) [1] |
Director | Gabriel Mantua |
The Berggruen Museum (also known as the Berggruen Collection) is a collection of modern art classics in Berlin, which the collector and dealer Heinz Berggruen, in a "gesture of reconciliation", gave to his native city. The most notable artists on display include Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque, Paul Klee and Henri Matisse. The Berggruen Collection is part of the National Gallery of Berlin.
The collection arrived in Berlin in 1996, with Berggruen's return to his native city after six decades in exile. In 1988 he had given about 90 Klees to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [2] and in 1990, he had agreed to make a five-year loan (renewable by mutual agreement) to the National Gallery in London of 72 paintings and drawings by Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Joan Miró. [3] [4] Also in 1990, negotiations with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for the Berggruen collection to be shown in Madrid fell through. [3]
Berggruen initially lent the collection, which he had assembled over 30 years, to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK). [5] He finally sold it to the SPK in December 2000, for the "symbolic" [6] price of 253 million marks, well below its then estimated value of 1.5 billion marks. [7] Today it is exhibited under the title "Berggruen Collection – Picasso and His Time" as part of the National Gallery of Berlin, in the West Stüler Building on Schloßstraße, opposite Charlottenburg Palace.
Berggruen continued to purchase works after the museum's opening in 1996, including Picasso's important 1909 painting Houses on the Hill (Horta de Ebro) [8] from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. A total of 165 works were transferred from Berggruen to the SPK in the 2000 sale.
In 2005, the Berggruen family acquired Picasso's Nu Jaune (1907) for $13.7 million at Sotheby's in New York. [9] This gouache is one of the first studies for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , a milestone in 20th-century art.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the museum, and his permanent retirement from public life at the age of 92, Berggruen donated a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman III, to the collection in December 2006. It had in fact already been on loan at the museum until then, standing in the Stüler Building's rotunda. To keep the two-metre high bronze statue within the collection – his life's work – Berggruen quickly purchased it and donated it to the SPK. [7] Several weeks later, on 23 February 2007, he died in Paris.
The museum received 1.5 million visitors during its first decade from 1996 to 2006. [7] Besides the permanent exhibition "Picasso and His Time", the museum hosts numerous special exhibitions on themes of classic modern art.
In July 2007 the heirs to Berggruen's estate announced that they would present a further 50 classic modern works to the museum, in order to continue in their father's tradition of reconciliation with Germany. [10] Since the transfer at Christmas 2000 Berggruen had continued to purchase paintings, including works by Picasso, Matisse, Klee and Cézanne, among others. To make an expansion possible, the state of Berlin announced that it would endow the SPK with a new building for its 50th anniversary: the Kommandantenhaus, adjacent to the West Stüler Building. [11] [12]
A society for friends of the Berggruen Museum (Förderkreis Museum Berggruen e. V.) was founded at the same time, with members including Berggruen's widow Bettina, his children Nicolas, Olivier, John and Helen, as well as Michael Blumenthal, Michael Naumann and Simon de Pury. [13] The SPK agreed to take on the running costs of the society.
Plans were announced in 2008 to connect the two buildings, to be paid for by the government and installed by the state of Berlin. [14] [15] Chosen from an architectural competition, architects Kuehn Malvezzi designed a glass pergola which was completed in 2013. [16]
In May 2008 a further 70 paintings were added to the collection. [14] In 2011, the seminal Picasso painting Les Femmes d'Alger ("Version L," 1955) was acquired for the museum at auction for $21.4 million. [17] [18] [19]
Since 2022, the museum has been undergoing extensive renovations. [20] While it is closed, parts of the collection are being exhibited at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (2022), the National Museum of Art in Osaka (2022), UCCA Edge in Shanghai (2023) and Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris (2024). [21]
The centrepiece of the collection is the work of Picasso, with over 100 exhibits, together with over 60 pictures by Paul Klee. Henri Matisse is represented by over 20 works, including more than half a dozen of his famous cutouts. Sculpture ensembles by Alberto Giacometti and examples of African sculpture round out the core of the collection.
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
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The Thannhauser Galleries were established by the Thannhauser family in early 20th century Europe. Their cutting-edge exhibitions helped forge the reputations of many of the most important Modernist artists.
Heinz Berggruen was a German and American art dealer and collector who sold 165 works of art to the German federal government to form the core of the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, Germany. He was the father of John, Olivier and Nicolas Berggruen.
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Janick "Jan" Krugier was a Polish born Swiss dealer in modern art most known for his relationship to the works of Pablo Picasso and a survivor of the Holocaust.
Les Femmes d'Alger is a series of 15 paintings and numerous drawings by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The series, created in 1954–1955, was inspired by Eugène Delacroix's 1834 painting The Women of Algiers in their Apartment. The series is one of several painted by Picasso in tribute to artists that he admired.
George David Thompson was an American investment banker, industrialist, and modern art collector, based in Pittsburgh. He started as a banker, but by 1945 was running four steel mills. In 1959, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art rejected his offer of over 600 artworks, unwilling to build a gallery bearing his name, and he gradually sold much of his collection, including 88 works by Paul Klee and 70 by Alberto Giacometti, although he left the Carnegie Museum over 100 artworks when he died in 1965.
Olivier Berggruen is a German-American art historian and curator, described by the Wall Street Journal as playing "a pivotal role in the art world."
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