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Temporary Exhibition

Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection

Works from the Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

From 28 October 2025 to 1 February 2026

The Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza is presenting 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.

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It is true that Picasso and Klee could not be more unalike. They belonged to very different worlds and were the antithesis of each other in terms of personality: the first was Southern European, down-to-earth, excessive and sensuous; the second was Nordic, spiritual, introspective and intellectual. Yet there is no doubt that they shared certain repertoires of themes, the same spirit of experimentation, and an analogous strategy of paring down and deforming that led them to distort forms and bodies by means of both geometry and organic mutation, as well as a similar sarcasm in their use of art as a transgressive weapon. The two formulas – opposite but equally revolutionary – that led them to destroy reality through an enormously radical plastic language largely transformed modern viewers’ way of looking at and approaching the world forever. 

The exhibition is divided into four sections featuring the themes and genres that interested both artists and showing how their creations are intertwined in thought-provoking and unexpected ways: ‘Portraits and Masks’, ‘Sites’, ‘Things’, and, finally, ‘Harlequins and Nudes’. Each further includes a selection of works from the Thyssen collection, some of which were once owned by Berggruen, making it possible to survey the close relationship established between them. 

Curators: Paloma Alarcó, Chief Curator of Modern Painting, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and Gabriel Montua, Director, Museum Berggruen, Berlin.

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Time

Mondays: 12.00 - 16.00
From Tuesday to Sunday: 10.00 - 19.00

24 and 31 December: 10.00 - 15.00
25 December and 1 January: museum closed.

Place
Temporary exhibition rooms level 1
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Practical information

Mondays: free access
From Tuesday to Sunday: included in full-access ticket.

Accessibility in the visit.
Reduced and Free Tickets

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The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza would like to thanks for the collaboration of:

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