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Museum Berggruen: Exhibition Tour during the Renovation of the Stülerbau Building

19.12.2024
Museum Berggruen

The Museum Berggruen is going on tour: While the building undergoes major renovation from 5 September 2022, an exhibition tour will bring important masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Giacometti and Klee to Asia, Europe and Australia.

Museum Berggruen is going on the road with an exhibition tour: After a very successful start in Japan in 2022 with two stops in Tokyo and Osaka, followed by two further stops in Shanghai and Beijing in China, the works have returned to Europe in 2024. During the Venice Art Biennale, a selection from Museum Berggruen was on display in dialogue with the collection of the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, before the works were shown at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris from October. In 2025, the collection will be shown at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

The neighbouring Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg with its focus on Surrealist art will remain open. Together with the Museum Berggruen, it forms an external location of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Charlottenburg.

The exhibition tour of Museum Berggruen is a great opportunity to share the Berlin works with new audiences in a broader context and is a fitting example of Nationalgalerie’s mission to be visible as an important collection of international significance.

Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie

The Collection, a Cultural Ambassador for Berlin

The exhibition tour is intended to promote Berlin as a center of art and culture. With major works from Museum Berggruen, including The Yellow Sweater (1939) and Large Reclining Nude (1942) by Pablo Picasso, Portrait de Madame Cézanne (1885) by Paul Cézanne and Blue Nude Skipping (1952) by Henri Matisse, the public in the host countries will be given an exquisite taster, which should also arouse interest in the other treasures kept in the collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. At the same time, the tour offers the works from Museum Berggruen an international stage at locations outside Berlin, thus opening up different resonance spaces. Together with curators from the host institutions, Museum Berggruen’s team, Head Gabriel Montua and curators Veronika Rudorfer and Natalie Zimmer, have adapted the exact selection of works for each stop to the circumstances and expectations of the host country.

In Japan, interest in European modernism dates back to the first half of the 20th century. In Tokyo and Osaka, eleven works from public Japanese collections were added to the presentation, combined with the collection of Museum Berggruen the show represented the largest ever exhibition of Cubist works in Japan to that date.

In China, comparatively few original works of 20th century European modernism have been on display so far. In Shanghai and Beijing, the works in the collection were presented in chronological order from 1885 to 1972, following an idea by Klaus Biesenbach, thus emphasizing the historical dimension of the 20th century.

Then again in Venice, the works from Museum Berggruen were integrated into the permanent collection of Gallerie dell’Accademia, the most important collection of Venetian painting in the world, creating a dialogue with much older art.

Finally, Paris is the conceptual origin of a large number of the works in Museum Berggruen's collection. This exhibition focused on the collector and dealer Heinz Berggruen, who ran his gallery in the French capital for over 30 years before selling his collection to Berlin.

In Australia, the works once again will enter into a dialogue. This time, the works from Museum Berggruen will be presented alongside works by the same artists from the holdings of the National Gallery of Australia, enriched through works created by Australian artists who have received and further developed European modernism in Australia.

Starting in October 2025, the exhibition at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid will explore the connections between the works of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso in a visual and intellectual dialogue. It demonstrates how the creations of both artists are intertwined in surprising ways.

The Venues at a Glance

  • 8 October 2022 – 22 January 2023: The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
  • 4 February – 21 May 2023: The National Museum of Art, Osaka
  • 22 June – 8 October 2023: UCCA Edge Shanghai
  • 11 November 2023 – 25 February 2024: UCCA Beijing
  • 24 March – 23 June 2024: Gallerie dell’Accademia and Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice
  • 2 October 2024 – 27 January 2025: Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
  • 31 May – 21 September 2025: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
  • 28 October 2025 - 1 February 2026: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Renovation of the Stülerbau since Fall 2022

The listed ‘Stülerbau West’, the historical part of Museum Berggruen, has been undergoing a complete overhaul since autumn 2022. The roof and façades in particular urgently need to be renovated. Waterproofing measures are also being carried out on the basement walls. Visitor guidance will be improved as part of the project. The entrance area will be made more attractive, the lighting situation will be fundamentally improved and the circular tour of galleries on the upper floor will be completed. The building will be stripped back to its walls, so that the technical systems for museum operations can be completely modernized. One aim of the project is to make the building more energy-efficient, including the installation of a photovoltaic system on the roof. The refurbishment will also focus on accessibility, with a new lift cabin in the entrance area and the visitor lift being replaced, and a barrier-free guidance system being installed.