Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
28 October 2025 - 1 February 2026
The Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza presents a selection of fifty masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee that belonged to the German dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen and are now part of the holdings of the Museum Berggruen in Berlin.
In 1950 Heinz Berggruen (Berlin, 1914–Paris, 2007) opened a legendary art gallery in Paris that specialised in modern art and was frequented over the next three decades by a prestigious clientele, including his friend Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. From 1980 onwards Berggruen focused exclusively on expanding his own select holdings of twentieth-century works, assembling an outstanding collection that was later acquired by the German government in 2000. The establishment of the Museum Berggruen in the Charlottenburg district, as part of the Neue Nationalgalerie of Berlin, marked the fulfilment of the collector’s wish to not only preserve most of the collection intact for posterity but also be able to share it with the public. In a sense his case is similar to that of Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid the previous decade.
While the building is closed for renovation, the Museum Berggruen has organised several international exhibitions since 2022 in Japan and China and, more recently, Europe to show different aspects of the collection’s highlights. The discourse of the exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is a visual and intellectual dialogue between Heinz Berggruen’s two favourite artists: Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.
MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid
