Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationgalerie

Cézanne to Giacometti is a rich and challenging exhibition that in a direct manner sets out to make a touring exhibition of European “masterpieces” more relevant to an Australian audience.

Paul Klee, Landscapes in Blue, 1917, watercolour, pencil, pen, primed paper, cardboard, 18.3 x 24.5 cm. Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationgalerie—Stiftung Preuβischer Kulturbesitz

The Stülerbau West, the historical part of Museum Berggruen in Berlin, has been undergoing a substantial renovation since autumn 2022. A selection from the Berggruen collection has gone on international tour to Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Beijing, Venice, Paris and now Canberra. Later it will travel to Madrid. It is not unusual for an art collection to go on tour while its premises are refurbished and it’s a strategy frequently employed by a gallery to raise funds and generate publicity. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), at one time in its history, attracted such a plethora of these touring exhibitions that its director [Betty Churcher AO] became known as “Blockbuster Betty.”

A selection of paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, was simply exhibited at the NGA as a “masterpieces” exhibition in 2011, but by 2025 such a curatorial strategy appears no longer viable. In staging Cézanne to Giacometti: highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, the NGA has supplemented the eighty works from the Berggruen collection with about seventy-five works from its own holdings.

Again, it is not that unusual for an Australian gallery to slip in a few of its own works that supplement and complement works in the touring exhibition. In this case, pieces by Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Dora Maar, André Derain, Pierre Bonnard, Émile Bourdelle and Paul Cézanne have been added to the show. What is more adventurous is to integrate a parallel exhibition into the touring show. The Berggruen collection consists primarily of early European moderns—Cézanne, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Paul Klee. The NGA has juxtaposed these with the work by the Australian moderns who may have been responding to aspects of European modernism. It is a bold strategy that is, to some extent, successful. On occasion in the past, Australian galleries in Australia have run satellite exhibitions; for example, a touring loan exhibition of French impressionism, may be supplemented somewhere else in the gallery by a show of Australian impressionism. To merge two such shows within the one space is a high-risk strategy leading to comparisons in quality, chronology and the understanding of the European masters by the local artists. Unlike many other Australian galleries, the NGA declares that it is unapologetic about the local product and on most occasions sustains a convincing case.

Heinz Berggruen (1914–2007) was a German-born art dealer and collector, who fled Hitler’s Germany to America where he developed his interest in art. After the war, Berggruen set up a commercial art gallery in Paris and became friends with many of the avant-garde artists, including Picasso. By 1980, his focus turned to collecting art and he constantly refined his collection, selling some items and giving others away, including ninety Paul Klee works that he donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1988. In 2000, he sold his art collection of 165 works (including eighty-five Picassos) to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

The selection from the Berggruen collection that has come to Australia consists of eighty items, including major pieces such as Cézanne’s, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, c. 1885; Picasso’s Portrait of Jaime Sabartés, 1904; Seated Harlequin, 1905 and Dora Maar with Green fingernails, 1936; Matisse’s Portrait of Lorette, 1917 and Interior, Étretat, 1920; Giacometti’s Tall Nude Standing III, 1960 (cast posthumously in 1981), as well as a wonderful cross-section of Klee’s work. It is the thirty-six pieces by Klee that is the main highlight of this exhibition. Despite this artist’s prominence and significance in European art, he has been poorly represented in exhibitions in Australia, and this is possibly the largest display of his work in this country to date. Some of the other “imports” are less memorable, such as minor sketches by Cézanne that are not likely to be of much interest to anyone outside a small circle of experts, and a number of Picasso’s portraits that testify to the fact that even major artists can have bad days. Picasso possibly had more than most.

The attempted coupling of the European moderns with their possible Australian followers is the most challenging and interesting part of the exhibition. The painter John Brack recalled that, in the postwar period in Australian art, “to be ‘modern’ had come to be regarded not as an aberration, but as an obligation. . . . Of course, the general idea was right. For a painter to be other than absolutely modern is an abdication of his responsibility. The trouble is, and was, that there is no universal agreement about what ‘modern’ means, in particularly, as applied to painting.”

“Papa Cézanne,” whose influence was so pervasive for European modernists, arrived late and was poorly understood in Australia. John Passmore’s Landscape Llooking Down to a Small Town, c. 1945, marks not only the direct influence of Cézanne that he had acquired from the almost two decades he spent in Europe, but also an understanding of the master’s principles. Other Australian artists, including Roland Wakelin, Grace Cossington Smith, Lina Bryans and George Bell, in some instances, claimed an adherence to Cézanne, but were never followers who had a sound understanding of his ideas.

Cubism arrived late and was poorly digested in Australian art. Dorrit Black, Paul Haefliger, Eric Wilson and Anne Dangar all absorbed aspects of cubism, generally from second-generation cubists, especially André Lhote, rather than from Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. They then played with aspects of cubism that frequently had little resemblance to what was happening in Europe.

It is difficult to quantify the direct impact of Klee on Australian artists. In the NGA exhibition, there is a considerable display of the work of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and that is completely appropriate. However, one needs to keep in mind that Hirschfeld-Mack was a colleague of Klee’s at the Bauhaus where one can argue about who exactly influenced whom. He arrived in Australia as one of the “Dunera Boys” in 1940 and to what extent he can be considered as an Australian artist by 1941 can be debated. It is more difficult to argue for a link with Klee in the work of Inge King or Normana Wight.

Exhibition

Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie

31 May – 21 September 2025

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

This review was first published in Artist Profile Issue 72, 2025