Pablo Picasso works draw art world to Berlin
Reopened Berggruen Museum will feature many of artist's paintings, alongside pieces by Matisse, Klee and Giacometti
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Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger, bought by the Berggruen in 2011 for £11.4m. Photograph: Museo del Prado
Sweeping into the museum, Diana Widmaier-Picasso walks past a towering Giacometti figurine in the lobby, and into a room full of small sculptures. One is of a tiny bird, fashioned from wire and wood by Pablo Picasso.
"That shows you that while Picasso could produce the great masterpieces, he was also very moved by something so delicate as a little wooden bird," she says, pausing to take it in. "Now where is Les Femmes d'Alger?" and the artist's granddaughter is off again, clicking through rooms of masterpieces in the Berggruen Museum in Berlin in her kitten heels in search of the 1955 painting, which was bought for the museum in 2011 for £11.4m.
This weekend the Berggruen collection will reopen to an international audience from the art world who have descended on the city in between the art fairs in Venice and Basel to see the newly extended display of some of the best examples of modern art, from Picasso to Matisse and Giacometti to Klee.
The collection was sold to the city in 1996 at well below its market value by Heinz Berggruen, a Jew who was forced to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
He returned after six decades of exile and, in an act of reconciliation, enabled Berlin to buy the collection he had amassed.
The works' role, he said, was to fill the deep cultural void that had been left by decades of dictatorship and cold war division.
"The collection is like a dialogue between the artists that were witness to the drama of the 20th century, just as Heinz himself was," says Widmaier-Picasso, a New York-based art historian who in 2015 will herself curate a Picasso exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.
"And most of the artists here were also considered to be persona non grata, their art classified as 'degenerate' by the Nazis. Heinz's big gift to the city was to bring all those people back, and in so doing to signal a new era."
While it includes more than 60 works by Paul Klee, 20 Henri Matisses – including six of his trademark cut-outs – and sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, the collection's central figure is without doubt Picasso. One hundred of his works are on display here, making it one of the best collections of the artist's work in the world, barring that in Paris and those held privately by the artist's family.
Which is the reason why no fewer than five members of the Picasso clan, including Widmaier-Picasso, have descended on Berlin for the grand opening.
"All the phases of his oeuvre are represented here," she says. "You get an impression of every period of his creativity, every technique and medium.
"Berggruen is up there with the Picasso museums in Paris and Barcelona, but even Barcelona only focuses on the earlier works, whereas Berggruen gives you the whole sweep, because he embraced Picasso from the age of 15 to until the day he passed away and was interested in every aspect of his work from his sketches to sculpture to his great masterpieces."
Seeing so many of her grandfather's works in such an intimate space, she says, helps her to make something of an emotional connection to the man she never met.
Picasso, who died in 1973, the year of her birth, had a passionate, eight-year affair with her grandmother, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
A 1932 work of Marie-Thérèse by Picasso, Woman Sitting Near a Window, was sold at auction at Sotheby's in January for £28.5m.
"He has always been a towering figure in my life and has been all the more overwhelmingly for being not just an artist but an artistic genius," she says. "Being an observer of art history has enabled me to get to know him."
Sitting in the new garden complex with sculptures by Thomas Schütte and overlooking the elegant glass pergola that connects the old and new wings of the museum, Heinz Berggruen's sons Nicolas, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist, and Olivier, an art historian, are relieved to see the fulfilment of their father's reconciliation with his native city, whose leadership once drove him into exile.
The expansion of the Berggruen Museum, they say, has enabled many works to be taken out of storage and allowed the family to buy more art, which it has donated to the museum, continuing his legacy.
"He fell in love with Berlin again after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and placing his collection in Berlin was a way of keeping it intact and giving back to the city what it had lost," says Nicolas. "But his dream was always that the art should have more space to breathe." Berggruen, who died in 2007, retained the hope that would happen, "as a way of cementing his homecoming and that of the art".
He even started something of a trend among erstwhile exiled artists and dealers of donating their works to the city following the collapse of communism.
He later persuaded his friend, the photographer Helmut Newton, to give his collection to the city of his birth.
Udo Kittelmann, director of Berlin's Nationalgalerie, which is now responsible for the collection, has said the state-funded expansion, which firmly roots the collection in Berlin, is as much a cultural landmark for the city as for the Berggruen family.
"It marks a milestone in the struggle to restore Berlin's museum landscape, which was severely depleted by the barbaric iconoclasm of the National Socialists, to an international level of significance," he said.
Olivier Berggruen, the art historian, said his father always believed that the impact of his collection would be greater in Berlin than elsewhere, because of the city's history. "I think he's been proved right," he added.
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