Masterworks by Picasso, Klee and Matisse make U.S. debut at MFAH

The German art dealer, collector, and gallerist Heinz Berggruen kept a private apartment at the top of the museum that bears his name, Museum Berggruen, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He would pop down and chat with unsuspecting visitors — including one Museum of Fine Arts, Houston curator, who recently told Museum Berggruen curator Natalie Zimmer that they spoke with Berggruen for more than an hour without realizing who he was.

Stepping into “Picasso-Klee-Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen” feels a bit like that. The show makes its U.S. debut at MFAH from May 20 through Sept. 13.

The exhibition, a collection of 89 masterworks by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Albert Giacometti and other familiar figures from post-war Europe, has been traveling since fall 2022. North America becomes its fourth continent. Zimmer says the road show has attracted 1 million-plus viewers.

“Somehow, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston feels the most intimate,” she adds.

The MFAH curatorial team has fashioned the Audrey Jones Beck Building galleries into a mid-century French interior aesthetic, painting the walls in large blocks of primary colors.

“So many of the works are smaller in scale. He lived with the works, this brings the height of the walls down,” explains Gary Tinterow, MFAH director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair.

The effect is decidedly residential.

“He was a nice, German-Jewish boy who wanted to be a journalist,” Tinterow says.

Berggruen fled to the U.S. in 1936 and studied German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle before joining the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He served in the U.S. Army and returned to Europe. He married twice and fathered four children, all of whom became artists, curators, gallerists and collectors themselves.

Two of his sons, Nicolaus and John Berggruen, will participate in MFAH’s “Conversation with the Director” on May 20, hosted by Tinterow on campus in Brown Auditorium.

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Tinterow and Berggruen met in 1979, when the latter owned a small shop in Paris on Île Saint-Louis, selling lithographs to well-heeled tourists. Berggruen also introduced Tinterow to the British art historian Douglas Cooper, who would become his mentor.

“Picasso-Klee-Matisse” functions as a conduit in that way, too. Visitors get better acquainted with Berggruen’s favorite artists and themes, familial relationships, and story arcs as the exhibition’s central character.

He left his native Berlin in exile with 10 Deutsche Marks and returned six decades later, in 1996, with 165 artworks, which he used to establish Museum Berggruen.

“The collection was very well-received and a sign of reconciliation,” Zimmer says. “Because he didn’t leave the collection in London or some other city. He wanted it to be back in his home.”

“Picasso-Klee-Matisse” examines how different artists tackled the most pressing questions of their artistic lives. The show is augmented by three dozen works from MFAH’s permanent collection.

In the first gallery, viewers are introduced to the three protagonists. Berggruen had the closest relationship with Picasso of any living artist; he knew Matisse intimately and, despite never having met Klee in person, was, without question, the most drawn to him.

“The first work Heinz ever collected was by Klee,” Zimmer says. “He carried it around with him even during the army.”

French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne also plays a significant role. Considered the father of modern art, his influence is evident throughout, beginning with “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” (1885) and informing Klee’s “Sealed Lady” (1930).

“As they’re moving into the 20th century, they’re looking at the world with fresh eyes and in a new way,” offers Dena Woodall, MFAH curator of prints and drawings. 

Nearby, Picasso’s “Still Life Before a Window, Saint-Raphaël” (1919), which he painted while on honeymoon with his then-Russian, ballerina wife on the French Riviera, depicts what MFAH consulting curator of European art Ann Dumas describes as very classic and realistic and Cubist in the way he’s arranged the table just so.

Tinterow suggests more is brewing beneath the serene surface. Picasso and Matisse were competitive, often embedding commentary about each other’s work in their own.

“This is next-level sophistication,” Tinterow says. “Picasso is playing with definitions. He’s saying, ‘I cannot be reduced to one style.’”

Dumas concurs. Picasso’s range is on full, unapologetic display through Berggruen’s eye.

The next gallery, A World of Things, functions as a still-life laboratory from a time when the artists were drawing and painting everyday objects that were readily available to them. “Study of an Apple”(1885) by Cézanne lays the foundation.

Matisse explores further, more radical reductions of form with “Mimosa” (1949), a limited-edition rug commissioned by Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Company, and “Vegetal Elements” (1947), a gouache cut-out laid and woven on paper, mounted on canvas. At the end of his life, an assistant helped with placement; some pinhole marks are visible on the paper.

Berggruen was one of the first to embrace paper cut-outs as works of art. “Matisse said they were the purest expression of form and of life,” Tinterow says.

The following gallery dives into musicality. “Still Life on a Piano” (1911/1912) by Picasso is a strong example. Woodall said she revisited the oil and charcoal on canvas several times and always found something different.

“Enigma is part of the aim,” she shares. “There’s something poetic, and something enigmatic and a musical rhythm to it. The whole room is really about music.”

Picasso’s love of wallpaper and antique frames wink from several works in the space as well.

Though in Multiple Faces, he flexes range again with “Portrait of Jaume Sabartés” (1904) from his melancholic Blue Period and “Head of a Young Man” (1906). Zimmer draws attention to Picasso’s astounding ability to switch up his style.

Caroline Wiess Law, who bequeathed 54 works and a $25 million endowment to MFAH upon her death, was said to have purchased Picasso’s first Cubist sculpture, “Head of a Woman (Fernande)” (1909/1910), from Berggruen.

Another Cubist distortion shows two perspectives of his lover and muse at once in “Dora Maar with Green Fingernails” (1936). Here she appears strong-minded and radical, poised on one elbow, with a Basque-region updo of the times; Zimmer acknowledges the frame, drawing attention to how committed Berggruen was to finding the appropriate home for each work. In “The Yellow Sweater” (1939) Maar appears regal and majestic.

A nearby gallery, The Human Figure, contains the first Picasso that Berggruen acquired, “The Sleeper” (1942). The seller, Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, threw in a watercolor by Klee, too, to clinch the sale.

“Sleeping Nude” (1942) by Picasso of Maar, stretched out in a gloomy scene of greenish-gray hues reminiscent of the German uniform, reminds viewers of the Second World War. “Seated Woman” (1938) similarly reflects the artist’s experience of the Spanish Civil War and of being called a degenerate by the Germans.

In the penultimate space, Maar, who became a recluse following her split with Picasso, gets her due. A wall of her photography and paintings from her post-breakup move to the South of France showcases her own talents.

“The lovers of Picasso were all poets and painters and artists,” Woodall notes.

Four bronze sculptures by Giacometti share the floor. Three towering, elongated female forms send mixed messages.

“They’re very powerful and commanding figures, though they’re emaciated. So there’s vulnerability and an existential conflict: Is there no god? No life?” poses Dumas. “They also point to Giacometti’s own isolation and loneliness.”

Zimmer adds that Berggruen visited the Swiss sculptor’s studio, where he often appeared covered in white plaster, rarely uttering a single word while onlookers observed his practice.

“Tall Nude Standing III” (1960) is regarded as Berggruen’s farewell and the final gift to his eponymous museum; he died two months later in 2007.

“Picasso-Klee-Matisse” says goodbye with an unexpected, though fitting, conclusion: an homage to The Magic of Paul Klee.

“Heinz saw his life as entangled with Klee even though they never met,” Zimmer says. “He collected work from all stages of Klee’s life.”

The room is a joyful shade of blue. Colorful paintings, an extension of Klee’s time spent in Tunisia and his love of children’s drawings, create a sense of optimism. 

“One of his famous sayings was, ‘You take a dot for a walk and it becomes a line,’” Woodall shares, noting several examples of Klee’s striped paintings. “At first glance, they seem strictly geometrical, but he freehanded it. Whenever Heinz felt homesick for Germany while he was living in the U.S., he always turned to Klee.”