Heinz Berggruen

As a collector and dealer, Heinz Berggruen played a major role in the post-World War II reception and dissemination of European modern art, and more specifically, of Pablo Picasso.

Berggruen was born in 1914 in Berlin, studied literature, and in the early 1930s began to write on cultural and intellectual matters for journals including the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he was forced to publish his articles under the name “H.B.” to conceal his Jewish heritage. Facing the rising tide of anti-Semitism as the Nazi regime took hold, Berggruen fled Germany in 1936 for the United States. He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied German literature, and later wrote art criticism for the San Francisco Chronicle and worked at the San Francisco Museum of Art. He became an American citizen, joined the U.S. Army in 1942 and, after the Second World War, returned to Germany to work for the Army in order to aid German democratic reconstruction. Taking up a UNESCO post in Paris as a cultural official, Berggruen deepened his ties with the avant-garde art world and continued to publish his criticism.

In 1947, Berggruen opened the first iteration of the Galerie Berggruen & Cie at Place Dauphine on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, and began to collect and deal in modern art, specializing at first in books and prints. Three years later the gallery moved to 70 rue de l’Université, where it remained for thirty years. Berggruen inaugurated his first space with an exhibition of prints by Paul Klee, which led indirectly to the acquisition of his first work by Picasso. The poet Paul Eluard had been impressed with the Klee exhibition, and the two began a conversation about the links between Klee and Picasso; desperate for money, Eluard offered to sell Berggruen a drawing by Picasso from 1942 that the artist had given him as a gift, asking 5000 francs. While Berggruen felt this was out of his budget, he could not refuse when Eluard threw in a work by Klee. Soon after, Berggruen sold the Klee work for 5000 francs to the Swiss dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, but kept the Picasso drawing in his family’s collection. Berggruen maintained a deep interest in Klee, and donated his collection of works by the artist to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984.

Berggruen met Picasso through the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in the early 1950s and soon became one of the foremost dealers of Picasso’s prints and drawings. In 1954, Berggruen staged an exhibition of Picasso drawings in memory of Gertrude Stein, which impressed Picasso personally, and established a relationship with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the famous dealer and historian of Cubism, whom Berggruen had asked to contribute a text to the catalogue. After decades as a dealer specializing in Picasso, Berggruen retired in 1980 and focused on his own art collection, which became one of the most important private collections of modern European art. In 2000, Berggruen sold his collection, which featured over 120 works by Picasso, to the German nation; it is now housed in the Museum Berggruen in Berlin-Charlottenburg as part of the Berlin State Museums / Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage. He intended the sale as a gesture of reconciliation with Germany, not only for his own family history, but also to reunite the nation with an artistic lineage that the Nazis had suppressed as “degenerate.”

The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection features four works of art that were previously sold by the Galerie Berggruen: Picasso’s Sugar Bowl and Fan, 1909; Composition with Violin, 1912; and Bearded Man Playing Guitar, 1914; and Braque’s Head of a Woman, 1912.