BERGGRUEN MUSEUM, Museum Berggruen

The Berggruen Museum is one of Germany’s most important modern art museums.

It was created in 1996, when the art collector and dealer Heinz Berggruen left his collection to the city of Berlin. When he died in 2007, his heirs pledged to maintain and enrich the splendid collection.

As you can see, there is nothing modern about the building itself. It was built between 1851 and 1859 by Friedrich August Stüler as barracks for officers of the Royal Guard. The building next to it houses another interesting museum, the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, which has a collection of Surrealist art featuring works by, amongst others, Dalì, Magritte, Ernst and Dubuffet.

The most important part of the collections in the Berggruen Museum features over 100 works by the great painter Pablo Picasso, who died aged 91, covering the various stages of his lengthy artistic career. You’ll find works from his earliest periods, featuring canvases dominated first by shades of blue and then by shades of pink, up until his more audacious Cubist creations.

These works by Picasso are joined by more than 60 striking, creative canvases by Paul Klee, the great Swiss Abstract painter, and twenty by Henri Matisse, leader of the French avant-garde movement of les fauves, the “wild beasts”, a group of painters active in the early 20th century who believed in the use of strong colors over realistic or representational values. Also present in the collection are some of Matisse’s famous and rare cutouts.

The collection also features the tall, slender sculptures of the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, many works by Paul Cézanne, who had a profound, although unintentional, influence on Cubism, as well as a number of works by the ever-fascinating Van Gogh.

Let me leave you with an interesting fact: Heinz Berggruen, whose collection formed the basis of this museum, spent sixty years away from Germany before returning after reunification. He claimed he was “neither French nor German, but European”, adding “I would like to believe in the existence of a European nationality, but I fear this is a dream”.