German-American art collector and dealer Heinz Berggruen was his own best customer; he built an exceptional collection of art by the twentieth-century masters Picasso, Klee, Matisse, and Giacometti.

Berggruen’s collection—with more than one hundred masterpieces—is a spectacular tribute to the foresight of this major player in the Paris art market during the second half of the twentieth century. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1914, he went into exile in California on the eve of World War II. He became art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and assistant to the director of the San Francisco MoMA. After the war, Berggruen returned to Europe, first to Munich as a journalist, then to Paris where he worked at the UNESCO headquarters before becoming an art dealer specialized in the graphic arts of modern artists. He quickly established contacts within the Parisian cultural scene, meeting both the artists he would represent and the poets, dealers, historians, critics, and collectors of the day. Guided by his personal tastes, he built a solid collection of twentieth-century works—now housed at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin—spanning the careers of Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee and including Henri Matisse’s collages and Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures. The vast ensemble was exhibited at the Orangerie in 2024 and is housed in the Berggruen Museum/Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin.

About The Author

Claire Bernardi is director, Guillaume Fabius is assistant curator, and Alice Marsal is conservation, management, and documentation officer at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Dr. Gabriel Montua is director at the Berggruen Museum. Nicolas Berggruen is a financier and art collector. Olivier Berggruen is an art historian and curator.