Art dealer Heinz Berggruen’s gripping Picasso mini retrospective comes to Paris

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes?” Picasso asked in 1945. “On the contrary, he’s a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, fiery, or happy events . . . Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.”

Picasso’s friend Heinz Berggruen thought art a weapon for peace. Among nearly 50 Picassos in the Musée de l’Orangerie’s new exhibition Heinz Berggruen: A Dealer and his Collection, the grandest is “Large Reclining Nude” (1942). A figure, face frozen in fear, fists clenched, legs nervously crossed, lies on a thin mattress in a bare bunker. The flesh — greenish grey like a Nazi uniform — is broken into icy blocks. The cell could be any basement where frightened citizens seek shelter. The painting’s violence and rare refusal of eroticism still shock. It is as if cubism just appropriated images from the Middle East or Ukraine filling today’s news screens.

Berggruen called “Large Reclining Nude” “harsh . . . but an incredibly exciting painting”. He bought it in 1997 specifically to ensure it would hang permanently in Germany. A Jewish refugee, Berggruen fled Berlin for California in 1936. After making his fortune as an art dealer in Paris, he returned to his native city in 1996, bringing his paintings. Before he sold them at a fraction of their value to the German state in 2000 in a gesture of “forgiveness and reconciliation”, Berggruen’s was Europe’s greatest private collection of classical modernism.

Entitled Picasso and his Time, it now lives in Berlin’s Museum Berggruen which, during recent renovations, sent highlights on tour to China, Japan, Venice and finally Paris. Their arrival in the city where many of them were painted is a joyous event. Paris museums have plenty of Picassos, but Berggruen’s are singular and gripping, reflecting his taste and experiences. The collection is fascinatingly strong in works from 1936-43, when the Spanish civil war and Nazi occupation of Paris infused Picasso’s art, and Berggruen himself was a struggling exile.

“Head of a Faun” (1937) in burning oranges and reds is satanic. “Sailor” (1938) looks jaunty until you realise he is walking wounded, his artificial steel grey arm jutting towards us. He has a haunted double face comparable to “Woman in a Multicoloured Hat” (1939), which depicts Picasso’s jilted lover Marie-Thérèse Walter with pale, ethereal features streaked with thick yellow tears.

Two “Seated Woman” compositions tortuously dismember the female form. A 1938 ink-splattered monochrome pulls the body into geometric fragments, then reassembles them to suggest a smashed Gothic cathedral. In a painted relief (1940), a figure, breast and belly as bright yellow spirals, is bound to an actual piece of wood and looks out with pleading eyes and sewn-up mouth — a trapped life force. These are devastating images of the human cost of conflict.

Berggruen spent 50 years buying Picassos. In 1948 he acquired from poet Paul Éluard the rapturous drawing of a nude and dozing faun in a dusky interior, “The Sleeper” (1942), both claustrophobic and escapist. From the 1998 auction of Dora Maar’s Picassos he won, among other treasures, the unusual, beautiful “Dora Maar with Green Fingernails” (1936), painted when Picasso was initially mesmerised by her boldness.

Huge watchful eyes glow amber, mauve eyelids and mouth, angular fingers — splayed out as when Picasso once watched her stabbing a penknife between them — and a jagged black jacket dominate. In this fluid, half-classical, half-Cubist profile, Maar is not the weeping woman as she was later rendered, but a spiky free spirit.

Berggruen wanted this to complement “Yellow Sweater” (1939), Maar rigid and constrained: a queenly portrait in a costume jangling like hard, gleaming chain metal, fractured face carved as if from polished marble, hands — now resembling paws — nervously gripping the chair. “Yellow Sweater” is the Berggruen Museum’s poster image, for its female presence and power, perhaps also its ironic provenance. Berggruen acquired it in 1959 from dealer Paul Rosenberg, who purchased it during the war and placed it in a bank safe. Nazi officials cracked the safe open. Members of the French resistance snatched the painting from the train transporting looted art to Germany. But it ended up an icon of a Berlin collection, thanks to a Jewish collector.

Berggruen’s Picasso collection is fascinatingly strong in works from 1936-43, when the Spanish civil war and Nazi occupation of Paris infused Picasso’s art

I met Berggruen in his nineties in Berlin. He embodied the intelligent charm of old Mitteleuropa, and was gratified and amused by Germany’s welcome, offer of a plush apartment above his museum, and honours — “with all these decorations I could look like Hermann Goering!”

He summed up 20th-century history as “the Germans are too emotional, that’s why they got caught out by Hitler. But the French are not emotional enough”. He believed “understanding and tolerance are traditional Jewish virtues” and felt comfortable in Berlin, writing “you can drive a man from his homeland, but you can’t take the homeland from the man”. Nevertheless, he told me, “the Jewish people are missing. I am one of the few who has come back”. He kept his flat in Paris, where he died in 2007. At his request, he is buried in Berlin.

It’s not hard to see his picture collection as an inner homeland. His very first purchase, in wartime America, was a Paul Klee watercolour; he said its “unique atmosphere reminded me of the strange and alienated world of Franz Kafka, it reflected something of my own state of mind”. Klee’s small, delicate toytown abstractions here — “Blue Landscape”, “Palace in Passing”, “Party from G” — evoke hallucinatory cities. Berggruen collected them life-long, explaining: “Picasso is a symphony; Klee chamber music.” There are also engrossing contrasts between some harmonious Matisses, led by the arabesque mid-air “Blue Nude — Skipping Rope”, and Picasso’s turbulent inventions.

These remained what he understood best. At the Orangerie, Picasso’s diverse riches form a mini retrospective, for Berggruen often chose pivotal, breakthrough pieces: the aggressively hatched oil nude “Study for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’” (1907), which used to glare out from his living room; “Portrait of Georges Braque” (1909), smoking, as a Cubist puzzle; the monumental antique “Seated Nude Drying Her Foot” (1921). A painting of Françoise Gilot, “Woman Reading” (1953), is flat as a strip of metal; next comes a sheer, iron-cut sculpture “Woman with Raised Arm” (1961). The final slapdash 1970s works rage against the dying light: “Matador and Nude”, “The Painter and His Model”.

The range almost spans Berggruen’s lifetime, the story of his century. When I asked him about conceptual art, he answered, “Oh, there’s been a total break. Hirst? Animals crawling around? Who needs it? It has nothing to do with the world I love.”

To January 27, musee-orangerie.fr

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