This portrait of Jaime Sabartés was completed in Barcelona in April 1904. Shortly afterwards, the two friends would part, not to see one another for the next 30 years. It was not until 1935 that Sabartés returned from South America to coordinate the visits and business at Picasso’s large studio on Rue des Grands-Augustin. Since they last saw one another, Picasso had become world-famous. From many descriptions, including that of Picasso’s lifelong companion Françoise Gilot, we can piece together a picture of the later Sabartés, who was completely devoted to Picasso.

Picasso and Sabartés got to know one another in 1898 in the artists café Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. At the time, the 17- and 18-year-old Picasso was in the process of finding a new basis for his painting, which took its orientation from the Art Nouveau movement. Sabartés, following several unsuccessful attempts to be a sculptor, hoped to embark upon a new career as a poet and novelist. Two Picasso drawings from 1900 painted in watercolors, one of which somewhat ironically shows Sabartés as a “decadent poet” in a cemetery, as well as three oil paintings from the Blue Period testify to this friendship. Sabartés himself defined a relationship between portraits of him and both the beginning and the end of the Blue Period. It starts with the well-known painting Le Bock, which shows Sabartés lonely and melancholic in front of a beer mug, and ends with this portrait, in which the pink, added to the lips at the end, seems to announce the Rose Period.

Picasso started this portrait one evening in his studio in Calle del Comercio, after they had spent an unedifying evening in a café with a few “idiots.” The painting was more-or-less completed that night and finished over the next few days, perhaps from a photograph. By that time, Picasso’s bad mood had blown over and, as art historian Marilyn McCully suggests, had partially flowed into the portrait.

In this half-length portrait, which was fully executed in blue and barely reveals his hanging shoulders, Sabartés looks tired and melancholic, introverted and much older than he does in a contemporaneous photograph. Partly due to his white collar, his pale oval face stands out against the blue of the painting. Beneath the finely drawn eyebrows, his dark, lusterless eyes—which more or less end in the spectacles—seem to bore into the canvas like holes. Picasso exploited Sabartés’ extreme short-sightedness (as he could only see a few meters) to describe the almost lifeless state of an introverted person. At the same time, however, the eyes, which are linked to the spectacles, penetrate space like two tubes, preparing the way forward for the formal independence of the object, typical of his Cubism that would follow.

Angela Schneider

The Seated Harlequin made its way into the Berggruen Collection from the estate of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. Dated 1905, it is a part of the great series of pictures of harlequins and acrobats from that year, finishing with the monumental painting Les Saltimbanques, which inspired poet Rainer Maria Rilke to write his “Fifth Duinese Elegy.” Harlequins and circus people repeatedly appear in Picasso’s work in various periods.

The Seated Harlequin was probably painted in the beginning of the year, with the commencement of the so-called Rose Period. We can conclude this from an exhibition list at the Galerie Serrurier and the review of this exhibition by Guillaume Apollinaire in the magazine La Plume, which also contained a reproduction of The Seated Harlequin. In contrast to Family of Acrobats with a Monkey, the first painting acquired by Leo Stein, as well as a number of other works, this gouache shows the youthful harlequin completely alone, wearing a faded tricot and a hat. With a mistrustful look in his eyes and his childlike body adopting a withdrawn posture, he still bears a strong affinity to the hostile figures of the Blue Period. Seemingly deprived of both surroundings and ground beneath his feet, he sits with his legs dangling from a bench that is more implied than real. The burning red, “a red resembling diseased blood” that goes far beyond the pink of the Rose Period, proclaims, according to the writer Palau i Fabre, an impending drama now taking place behind the almost white body, which seems to have been covered in makeup.

There were probably a number of reasons behind Picasso’s choice of the harlequin and travelers as his subject in 1905. Picasso himself mentioned a very specific event involving a group of acrobats he had encountered on the Esplanade des Invalides. At the time, he was living at the Bateau Lavoir at Montmartre and, together with his poet friends, he would visit the Cirque Médrano three or four times a week. Although harlequins were not actually present at the circus, Max Jacob and, above all, Apollinaire drew Picasso’s attention to the rich literary tradition associated with this figure. According to biographer John Richardson, Apollinaire encouraged Picasso to imagine himself in the various roles of the traveling entertainer and the harlequin. Role play is, as we know from Picasso’s later works, a form of constantly changing, new definitions of artistic existence.

Angela Schneider

The first important sculpture by the painter Henri Matisse, The Slave, apparently dates to late 1903. It was followed by a number of small standing and seated figures before Matisse turned his attention to the reclining female form, which had already become a theme in his painting. Matisse looked back to the form of the reclining Venus, part of the artistic canon since the Renaissance but with its formal origins in classical sculpture. The reclining female nude had also been popular in nineteenth-century French painting, as seen in Ingres’ odalisques or the salon painter Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus.

Matisse’s small statuette is similar in its posture to the painted figure in his famous Le Bonheur de Vivre. Unlike the figure in the painting, whose clear outlines show off the beauty of the body, the shimmering contours of this sculpture obscure the body’s outline, partially dissolving it into a play of light and shadows—elements traditionally belonging to the genre of painting. The chemise makes the upper body seem like a moving mass from which the head, the raised arm, and the legs emerge. These seem to be almost independent in relation to the body and are held as if caught in motion. The collector Sarah Stein quoted Matisse as saying, “It is necessary to determine the characteristic form of the different parts of the body and likewise the direction of the contours which give this form its expression.” The explicit emphasis on individual body parts, joints, and limbs may be the reason why Matisse’s female figures have been criticized as too masculine.

The sculptural presence of this little figure gives a marked impression of compactness rather than abandon, which we might expect from a reclining figure such as a Venus or an odalisque. This effect may also be due to the fact that a second iconographic theme is present in this work, that of the reclining sepulchral figure, familiar to us from Roman and Etruscan art, as well as from Michelangelo’s Medici tombs.

Angela Schneider

This study for the painting Nude with Drapery from the summer of 1907 came originally from one of Picasso’s sketchbooks. They were disassembled shortly after this gouache was created so that the studies, which today are found in different collections, could be presented separately. Leo and Gertrude Stein acquired this study directly from the artist in the autumn of 1907, together with a number of other preliminary studies and the completed painting, which hangs in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg today.

Like his previous pioneering work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting and the studies created for it reveal the influence of African or Oceanic tribal art, first seen by Picasso in March 1907 in the collections at the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. The figures’ mask-like faces, the narrow heads that converge toward a point, and the sharply cut, elongated noses are particularly evocative of the Trocadéro artworks (even though Picasso subsequently denied that they had ever influenced his artworks). The blank gaze, with its large, hollow eyes lacking irises or pupils, remains a feature apparent in the finished painting and reminds us of chiseled wooden masks. Influenced by pre-Christian Iberian sculptures shown in an exhibition at the Louvre in late 1905, Picasso had already begun to simplify and stylize his shapes and figures. His encounters with non-European art contributed to this tendency. These encounters also found expression in his handling of shapes, which was often sculpturally positive.

Head of a Woman, for instance, a watercolor in the possession of the Berggruen family that postdates Study of Head for “Nude with Drapery” by almost six months, appears to represent a chiseled wood sculpture rather than flesh and blood.

Picasso’s break with academic art reached its first climax in the paintings Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Nude with Drapery. By the turn of the century, he had already made some progress in this direction, which ultimately became vividly apparent in the Cubist forms he developed along with Georges Braque. The heightened fragmentation of forms into surfaces with dark outlines in Nude with Drapery, with its reduction to geometrical forms and representations of objects from multiple perspectives, speaks to this new style even more strongly than Demoiselles.

Anke Daemgen

This “head” of Fernande Olivier (1881–1966), Picasso’s partner and frequent model during this period, is one of the most important examples of Cubist portrait sculpture. The downward tilt of the gaze reveals how the artist stretched the back of the head out of proportion, thus achieving the same anatomical distortion that he was developing in his two-dimensional portraits. This warping of the skull and the abandonment of an assumed single perspective are what make this head Cubist. The furrows of the surface had been an established stylistic element in Modernist sculpture since Auguste Rodin at the latest. Picasso’s innovation was to refrain from making the face particularly prominent; instead, he modeled it similarly to the hair and other traditionally less important parts of a portrait head. The solid bronze coloration makes this effect even more successful than in his and Braque’s two-dimensional portraits of the same period, which feature different shades for skin and hair. The sculpture, originally cast in 1909 for the Paris art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, was recast when Heinz Berggruen received permission from Picasso to make nine new casts in 1959. This one bears the number 6/9 next to Picasso’s signature.

Gabriel Montua

The division of form into different facets, which continued throughout 1910–11, more or less resulted in the complete dissolution of the subject within the overall structure of the picture. Referring to Picasso’s portraits, the writer Pierre Daix speaks of the “loss of the portrait.” But Picasso, in contrast to Braque, who did not paint any portraits, ultimately always proceeded from the morphology of the subject being depicted, no matter whether it was a still life, a landscape, or a portrait. He was thus able to render even the most abstract paintings recognizable. We can also see this in the grandiose portraits of his art dealers Wilhelm Uhde and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whom he identifies by means of tiny distinguishing features in their physiognomy, for example, Uhde’s lips or Kahnweiler’s quiff. His talent for and delight in a caricature were of great assistance to him here.

This painting, which dates from the winter of 1909–10, still distinguishes between the figure and the ground. One key connecting element is the almost monochrome brown tone which extends across the entire painting. He only employs Cézanne’s principle of the passage, which breaks up contours and thus abandons the autonomy of the subject, as a secondary means and in the painting’s less significant parts. The subject matter is concentrated, as in all of Picasso’s Cubist paintings, in the middle. The oval face, which has been given a phallic elevation in the equally oval bowler hat, has been faceted to create a geometric pattern whose different color values lend it a relief-like character, hence making it easier to identify the face. A more organic diversity of forms, similar in density, evolves at the bottom of the painting. Not always completely explicit, the objects can be identified as a pipe, a beer-glass, and a hand. The ambiguity of form, a hallmark of Picasso’s work until his very last paintings, permits a number of divergent interpretations, as the face in this picture shows. It was initially viewed as a sensitive portrait of Braque executed in an intelligent caricatural style. “When he was talking to Pierre Daix”, writes William Rubin, “Picasso claimed that the man with the bowler hat was not Braque and that the painting had been executed without a model. It was only later, said Picasso, that Braque and I stated that it was a portrait of him. He was wearing a similar hat.”

Angela Schneider

Braque probably created the painting Still Life with Pipe (Le Quotidien du Midi) in the spring of 1914. When he was called up for military service in August of the same year, it put an end both to his fruitful collaboration with Pablo Picasso and to the Cubist period in the strictest sense of the term. In this painting, Braque continued what he and Picasso had been experimenting with since around 1912, so-called Synthetic Cubism. Synthetic Cubism saw the artists fill the image space with layered elements. Here we find rectangular planes lying on top of each other, large letters in the center of the image that could be continued to form the newspaper title Le Quotidien du Midi, and the only clearly depicted representational object, a pipe. The words “eau de vie,” meaning schnapps, float above like a puff of smoke in a seal-like circle. The still life evokes the physical pleasures of reading a newspaper in a cafe. Another feature of this later phase of Cubism is the use of collage. These elements can be either glued on, like the card with the title of Max Jacob’s new book in Picasso’s Still Life with Glass and Deck of Cards, or painted, like the masterful trompe l’oeil imitations of wood seen here.

Hans Jürgen Papies and Gabriel Montua

Klee’s army service, from 1916 to 1918, was among the most productive periods of his career. He was exempt from serving at the front, and his daily tasks left him with plenty of time for art. In 1916 and 1917, Herwarth Walden exhibited Klee’s pictures in his gallery Der Sturm, bringing him his first taste of artistic and financial success. During this period, Klee’s enthusiasm, willingness to experiment, and artistic ambition caused his art to become more abstract. He increasingly disassociated himself from representational subjects, focusing purely on structure, color, and form.

Klee’s visit to Tunis in April 1914 marked a watershed in his perception of color. His diary records that during his visit to Tunisia, Klee and his artist friends August Macke and Louis Moilliet discovered “a new coloristic realm.” These vivid scenes evoked the experience of a fairy tale and an altogether novel sense of unity with the landscape. The light and color phenomena that he witnessed during this journey resolved the compositional dilemma of color and line that had preoccupied him for years. In Tunisia, he left a phase of his career dominated by drawing and sketching behind him and found his own path to the qualities that distinguish a painter: “Color possesses me […] Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

Over the following years, under the lasting influence of his journey to Tunis, Klee worked on a series of pictorial projects whose apparent purpose was to investigate, radicalize, and master the potential of color. Klee’s countless voyages of discovery into the worlds of individual colors and tonal spectrums—in this case, into the world of blue tones—were central to this endeavor. In Landscape in Blue, a sleeping village viewed at night rises towards the horizon, with a small tree to the left and a church tower to the right and with the moon as a dark circle in the sky. Within this delicate, classically Romantic motif, there appears to be no place for the omnipresent war. Only cold colors and the absence of human figures from this night scene could be perceived as a remote commentary on the political situation. Rendered on specially primed paper, the blue of the night overlays the brightly-colored façades of the houses like a streaky, semi-transparent layer of varnish, depriving them of brilliance. Only two isolated façade areas have been left blank and are brilliantly white in the moonlight. The picture has the appearance of a dialogue of colors. It marks an experiment in color: a material study or analysis of the interaction between cold and warm tones, and an investigation of the relationship between vividness and levels of light. The poetic treatment of the landscape, which is structured like an architectural ensemble, could be described as incidental.

Christina Thomson

This harlequin differs in one fundamental respect from those from Picasso’s Rose Period. These figures, exemplified by works such as Seated Harlequin from 1905, were sad, mentally absent, or suffering in one way or another. This harlequin, however, almost seems a little naive due to the sheer contentment he exudes while holding his guitar. In the spring of 1917, Picasso made costumes and a sixteen-meter-wide stage curtain (now kept at the Centre Pompidou, Paris) for Parade, a ballet produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. This curtain features a harlequin in his suit of diamonds among a troupe of costumed artists. The group occupies a space in front of several theater curtains that open onto a scenic landscape of ruins and mountains. Picasso drew inspiration for the landscape, harlequins, and joyous atmosphere from his travels through Italy with the Ballets Russes. In this small painting in oil on wood, the harlequin is portrayed alone and looks like a miniature of the figure in the Parade stage curtain.

Gabriel Montua

Inspired by his summer vacation on the Côte d’Azur with his new wife Olga Khokhlova, Picasso painted a large number of still lifes, which, as their titles suggest, are set in front of a window in Saint-Raphaël. What is particularly evident here is his desire to advance Cubism while also returning to a more representational style. The elements of still life, in which a guitar, a blank music book, and an abstracted fruit bowl with half a pear are clearly recognizable, represent the first ambition, while the window view and interior serve the second. Against the contrast of this classical background, the Cubist still life achieves an even greater impact than it ever could in a fully Cubist composition. On closer inspection, however, the representational approach has its drawbacks. The plausible reproduction of reality is disrupted and transformed into something fantastical, as if some kind of radiation is being emitted from the tabletop with the still life at the center of the image: the perspectives of the door and the window surround and contradict each other; the right-hand table legs are predominantly missing; the balcony actually has two sets of railings, one above and one below the table, both offset from each other; and the lower railings also cast a circular shadow that is physically impossible. Only further outside, away from the still life, does nature regain its familiarity: the sea ends at the horizon, while hazy, fluffy clouds drift in the sky above.

Gabriel Montua

A so-called carte de visite, or a small-format photograph of a young woman in traditional dress mounted on cardboard, inspired Picasso to create this Neoclassical pencil drawing of a woman with a jug. Picasso’s visit to Italy in 1917 with the Ballets Russes, for whom he created set designs, and his direct encounters with Classical and Renaissance art triggered his Neoclassical phase, which lasted until 1925. Following the First World War, the so-called “return to order” of more traditional forms became widespread in France. Having a sense of provisionally exhausting the possibilities of Cubism, Picasso became interested in reinterpreting in the classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Nicolas Poussin, as well as his increased interest in photography. However, the onset of Picasso’s Neoclassical phase did not mean that he had put Cubism behind him for good. He continued to return to this language of shapes throughout his life, and often worked simultaneously in different styles, sometimes using more than one style in the execution of a single work.

Formal innovations seen in Picasso’s work from 1917 onwards went hand-in-hand with new subjects, such as the motif of the Italian country woman or the theme of spring, both of which appear in this drawing. Picasso created several large paintings that featured these subjects, including The Spring and Three Women at the Spring from 1921 and two pictures titled The Italian Woman from 1917 and 1919—one Cubist, one Neoclassical. Picasso used the drawing Italian Woman with a Jar and the carte de visite it was based on for several artworks, with the original version often undergoing further changes over the course of different preliminary studies. He used them for the Neoclassical representation of The Italian Woman and for Three Women at the Spring: two pictures which were also influenced by other artworks, including those of Raphael and Jean-Baptiste Corot.

Anke Daemgen

In 1920, Paul Klee’s work received due public recognition for the first time. The Munich art dealer Hans Goltz staged his first comprehensive retrospective with 371 works from 1903 to 1920. Hans Goltz, who represented the gallery on a minimal monthly salary, had been marketing Klee’s works since 1912. In the special edition of the periodical Ararat accompanying the exhibition, Paul Klee wrote: “In this world I cannot be grasped at all. Since I reside as easily with the dead, as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. And still not nearly close enough.” At the same time, the first Klee monographs were published by Wilhelm Hausenstein, Hermann von Wedderkop, and Leopold Zahn, who wrote in his book “… alongside works of purest abstraction, we find here works that concretize new beings from abstract elements by virtue of an imagination filled artistic phantasy. Whereas phantasy strives to attain a pictorial vividness in the latter cases, it tends towards literary expression in others. Here Klee’s works assume the character of recordings.”

This “imagination of artistic phantasy”, which Leopold Zahn discerned in Black Magician, was by no means accidental, since Klee had seen himself as a “magician” and his studio as a magician’s workshop from a very early stage. In doing so, he came to identify himself with the enchanted and artistic world of the fair and the circus magician, that twilight world of showmen and -women where extraordinary things happen. Here we see the performance of the marionette-like magician with his female assistant at the front of the stage, bordered with dabs of green, his eye displaced in the manner of Picasso, his head a funnel. At his side, the doll Olympia from the opera The Tales of Hoffman appears, with breasts below and a floating head at the top. They are separated from the body and pointed at by an arrow. This magical evocation of an incomplete woman depicts her with her mouth wide open, issuing a never-ending scream. Suddenly the light goes on and everything returns to normal.

In Germany, the influence of metaphysical painting by artists such as Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico grew after 1919, propagated in Munich by Hans Goltz. Max Ernst, with his lithograph Let There Be Fashion, Down With Art, and Paul Klee, with his Black Magician, made the marionette-like alienation of the figure the theme of their art.

Roland März

Matisse spent part of the summer of 1920 in Etretat, a fishing village on the coast of Normandy where his predecessors Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet had also painted. Here, Matisse completed a number of small paintings depicting the jagged, rocky coast, the beach with its fishing boats, and isolated people walking about. His pictures also show interiors with views of the beach and the sea, as seen through open windows or balcony doors. In these works, Matisse succeeds in creating an atmosphere different from that expressed by the bright colors of the pictures completed in Nice. The sky, frequently overcast with storm clouds, compelled him to work with a more subdued palette, which contributed to the peaceful atmosphere in these works. Both his technical execution and allusions are indicative of his growing interest in nineteenth-century art, revealed by the works executed during this time.

The interior appears as if it was covered by a veil of mild sea air. The transparent light, which seems to emanate from the objects themselves, is reflected in the coolness of the painting’s lighter areas. The white canvas of the ground shimmers through occasionally, creating additional light values. Instead of establishing a dividing line between the two different worlds, the walls and windows of the interior form a transition to the beach and sea outside the room. The different layers of the painting seem to flow into one another.

In this respect, the picture distinguishes itself radically from Picasso’s Still Life in front of a Window, Saint Raphaël painted in 1919. Although these works are similar in their choice of color and motif, Matisse’s picture displays a marked contrast to Picasso’s work, whose formal language recalls his Cubist phase as embodied in the still life on the table. At the same time, the composition is distinguished by harsh demarcations between different levels of pictorial composition. Though the clear, cold light evokes the impression of harmonious unity, it creates a cool distance. Yet for all the differences between Matisse and Picasso following their initial encounter in 1906, their works frequently reveal signs of an artistic exchange expressed in the Cubist motifs.

Anke Pötzscher

Picasso’s Classical Period, as the era following World War I is called, brought with it representational depictions of figures that had not been found in his work since the end of the Rose Period in the first decade of the 1900s. Even the use of oil pastel, after his experiments with pasted newspaper, sand, and other everyday materials, feels like a renewed commitment to tradition. This is also true of the drapery on which the woman sits, isolated, in front of a timeless sea, and of her pose: she takes her foot in her hand to dry it, alluding to the ancient sculptural archetype of the spinario, a boy usually seated on a stone, pulling a thorn from his foot. This figure inspired Picasso on a trip to Italy in 1917, as had the same pose in Auguste Renoir’s Eurydice from 1895–1900, one of seven works by the Impressionist that Picasso had acquired a few months earlier from his art dealer Paul Rosenberg. At first glance this pastel seems more visually appealing than Picasso’s large-scale Three Women at the Spring from the same year. The suggestion that that the artist might have become unreservedly academic in style is deceptive: the horizon line behind the woman makes an inexplicable leap, her limbs are enormous, and her hands in particular already foreshadow the crude, mismatched hands of the woman in The Yellow Sweater.

Gabriel Montua

This work depicts a strange scene and is set against a dark background, like a photographic vignette. Various objects are oriented toward a darker plane. They are mostly cubic forms, but some seem devoid of volume, like wires and antennas. What initially seems like the blueprint for a large machine or the model for a Modernist city is explained by the title, written by Klee himself at the bottom of the cardboard. Klee describes it as an interior space with a perspectival structure. The function of these objects is thus to illustrate perspective, similar to Italian Renaissance vedute, the idealized cityscapes of the late quattrocento in which the painted architecture serves to lead towards a unified vanishing point. Although Klee’s lines appear to have been drawn with a ruler, they are not aimed at a single vanishing point; instead, the creased and fissured lines are directed toward the surface of the door, which swallows them up like a black hole. Klee liked to contrast seemingly rigid lines with irregularities. His work Phantom Perspective, a watercolor from 1920, shows a similar assemblage of furniture and objects aligned toward a wall with an opening. That work was Heinz Berggruen’s first art purchase, and it accompanied him like a talisman for more than forty years. Now Phantom Perspective is in New York, with this watercolor in the Museum Berggruen a worthy replacement.

Gabriel Montua

Without using a ruler, Paul Klee drew irregular, slightly oscillating lines in thin pencil, which are still almost visible in places and whose horizontal and vertical parallels form the basic framework for an imprecisely overlapping quadrature. The “imprecision” of his strokes, the structure, and the transparent tonal nuances in the painting’s primary colors of red, yellow, and blue counteract the coldness and sterility of a purely geometrical order. Sublime, overlapping colors appear in gradations, proceeding from light to dark, within a breathing geometrical structure: ultramarine blue to light azure, burgundy red to pink and violet, light yellow to ochre. A colorful triad in red, yellow and, blue is complemented by a gradated green. However, the most conspicuous light in this pictorial polyphony is not in the middle of the painting but below, where a field of sunny yellow rises from the green lowlands. Architecture of the Plain comprises delicate geometrical bands of color, filled with light from within and colorful veils that call to mind the later works of the color-field painters like Morris Louis and Mark Rothko. Barnett Newman was the most radical in taking Klee’s color triads to the ultimate degree of philosophical purity. In this picture, polychromatic abstraction aims at the sublime interfusion of interior and external space.

Roland März

Picasso’s return to Classicism did not preclude the artist from continuing his Cubist experiments. His works in Museum Berggruen’s collection demonstrate this, a majority of which were created between 1918 and 1925. On the contrary, Picasso did not abandon his research into the compositional structure of Cubism, and he drew on it repeatedly. In 1924, he repeatedly used the motif of the still life with a guitar and fruit bowl, a contrast with his contemporaneous depictions of human figures inspired by Classicism and antiquity. This large-format canvas is dominated by color fields and playful formal resonances. The round shapes of the guitar hole and fruit, for example, actually represent opposite volumes: one a void, the other a sphere. Picasso also attached great importance to the outlines he carved into the paint. Corrections and overpainted areas are visible upon closer inspection. This work was confiscated from the Parisian collector Alphonse Kann in 1940; together with three other works now in Museum Berggruen, it was to be transported to the German Reich. However, the French Resistance was informed in time and stopped the train. Kann reclaimed his work in 1947.

Gabriel Montua

Paul Klee’s first five “square pictures” date from 1923. Year by year, he would continue this sequence with one or two variations until his death in 1940. Klee had already experimented with rhythmic musicality in his watercolor “gradations,” and he added another level in his quadratic structures from 1923 onwards. In these works, four-sided shapes of various sizes and lengths form the framework for Klee’s understanding of artistic “polyphony,” a chorus of many chromatic voices. In keeping with the color theory of artist Wassily Kandinsky, the vermilion accents sound a note of sharp, trumpet-like emphasis in the higher register of this color harmony.

In her dissertation on Klee’s square pictures, Eva-Maria Triska writes, “In a very colorful square-picture, a construction such as, for example, Pictorial Architecture Red, Yellow, Blue (Architecture of Graduated Cubes) from 1923 or Harmony of Squares with Red, Yellow, Blue, White and Black from the same year, these vermilion accents can also be clearly seen. Once again, moving from top right to bottom left, for Klee was left-handed, they help to emphasize the diagonal, but are also used in other parts of the picture. […] By means similar to the placing of accents in Abstract Color Harmony in Squares, Klee shows here with a simple graphic schema how from an undifferentiated group of fifty days and nights (‘major’) three hot days and three cold days (‘minor’) can be graphically accentuated by particular emphases. The structure of the abstract color harmony in squares with vermilion accents is, of course, far richer than this schematized example. But exact parallels can never be found in theory for Klee’s living creative structures.” In this balance of colors—vermilion and green, yellow and blue—Klee places a large, brown, toneless square on the border as a stabilizing factor. Against this semi-darkness of the squares (and rectangles), vermilion, yellow, and blue glow like rich jewels. It is a paradigm for Klee’s concept of a rhythmically composed unity of many things.

Roland März

Paul Klee always saw himself as the kind of artist who looks within and gives form to what is there. “There are some who will not acknowledge the truth of my mirror. They should bear in mind that I am not here to reflect the surface (a photographic plate can do that), but must look within. I reflect the innermost heart. I write the words on the forehead and round the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than real ones. If I were to paint a really truthful self-portrait, you would see an odd shell. Inside it, as everyone should be made to understand, would be myself, like the kernel in a nut. Such a work might also be called an allegory of crust formation.” Between the Buddha-like Absorption of 1919 and the brooding Scholar of 1933, Klee’s watercolor drawing Scanty Words of the Thrifty Man forms part of a series of “allegories of crust formation,” with elements of self-portrait.

Here too is an artistic figure with various possible interpretations. The image is reduced to basic lines composed on a narrow axis. Two button eyes sit beneath the horizontal of a ruled and categorically drawn T. The eyes are distant and watchful, the mysterious dot used to depict them recurring in the ornament around the neck. Beneath the line of the nose, a tiny triangle of a mouth is pinched, closed, and sealed. In the strokes of ochre, yellow, and brown, and in the figure’s body, Klee includes the “broken-down words” of the title in a triangular relationship: “Krg,” meaning Karge or Scanty; “Wrt,” meaning Worte or Words; and “Sp,” meaning Sparsamen or Thrifty Man. On top of the head are some remaining strands of hair, perhaps representing an undergrowth of thoughts not yet organized. It is an androgynous figure, alternating between light and shade. It could be seen as a girl in an off-the-shoulder dress or a neo-platonic youth in a toga. It appears as an ambiguous figure caught between cold calculation and priestly awareness of a vocation. The depiction also seems to embody the “praise of economy” that Klee prized so highly in his art, teaching, and life. He himself was seen by the teachers and students at the Bauhaus as extremely reticent in face-to-face conversation: “Paul Klee was economical with his words. Even at meetings of the teachers’ council he was no speaker. ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ were often sufficient for him. Later, at home or in his studio, he would seek and find valid words, which he may sometimes have written down out of a feeling of discomfort at having taken no stand and said nothing.” Klee’s speech remained economical and sparse, remaining succinct, concise, without chatter. The artist had formulated a life-long conviction back in 1908: “A noble man concentrates on the brevity not the number of his words.” Klee was a man who spoke and worked inwardly, and could also listen within. The goal is always the picture of what is within.

R.M.

In the period when this painting was created, gingerbread was not a frequent motif for Klee; in fact, the three works that preceded it depict flowers. Klee also listed this painting as Festival of Plants in his inventory before crossing out the title and replacing it with Gingerbread Picture. His method here is different from that of its predecessors. For this work, Klee covered plaster-primed cardboard with wallpaper imprinted with a pattern. The result is reminiscent of the papiers collés of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris, in which the Cubists integrated patterned wallpaper into their works or used a tactile material to represent something edible, such as sawdust for grapes. While the surface of Klee’s painting is already uneven due to the textured wallpaper, the forms break up the pictorial space even further: plants of various sizes, predominantly round, and angular geometric shapes are separated by black lines drawn in pen and ink. Ultimately, it is the relief in brown paint that evokes gingerbread. One can see how the coloration could also connect to Klee’s original title, signifying earth from which plants burst forth.

Gabriel Montua

Townscapes at night recur in Paul Klee’s work. The stylistic contrast between the diminutive construction of one town and the romantic remembrance of the other, submerged in medieval mists, could hardly be greater. The built-up “part” of this anonymous little town of “G.” is well-proportioned within the setting: one-third sky, in deep midnight blue with the yellow moon above, and two-thirds the plain of the Terra di Siena. The town’s construction is reminiscent of Italy. A sleepy little marketplace contains a town hall and a free-standing tower, its clock showing midnight. On the palazzi and turrets, flags and pennants wave, but the spaces in the town and its surroundings have been swept clean, as if after a great festival. There are no passersby to be seen anywhere. Little trees dot the landscape—or are they extinguished lanterns? The streets, like something from a stage set, end somewhere; the arrow indicates that the midnight town is nothing but an illusion, removed from its everyday course and jumbled up in giddy chaos. It feels as if a child, playing with colored building blocks, suddenly knocked away the solid structure in a fit of excitement. But in the end, this is yet another construction from Paul Klee’s creative dreaming: the architecture of the town is the architecture of the image. In his invented image, Klee overturns what is static—an act of liberation from the rationalism of perspectival geometry.

Townscapes built of stereometric elements had occupied Klee since the early 1920s. In his lectures at the Bauhaus in Weimar, he considered the fundamental functions of lines for compositions of this kind, dividing them into three main types: “active,” “medial,” and “passive.” The “active,” open-ended line comprises curved hatches and arrows, which show a certain movement of architecture. The “medial” line surrounds the motifs with a three-dimensional, spatial presence, and the “passive” line keeps a firm grip on the bright red, yellow, and blue on the surface of the painting. In his genial wanderings, Klee seems to distance himself from Klee, arriving at a different self.

Roland März

Klee’s 1914 expedition, which has gone down in art history as a journey to Tunis, fueled his interest in North Africa and prompted a second major trip to the region during the winter vacation of 1928 to 1929. On the second trip, he was no longer at the beginning of his career, already an established artist and teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau. For eighteen days, he traveled through Egypt to study its architecture, monuments, landscape, colors, and blazing light. He hardly did any work while traveling; only after his return to his Dessau studio did these experiences find expression in artworks. The oil painting Necropolis is based on Klee’s visit to the three pyramids of Giza. The artist condensed the triangular shapes so that they overlap each other, some reaching upwards, some pointing downwards. At the same time, he stripped them of their three-dimensionality, translating them and their surrounding landscape into an abstract pattern of stripes, rectangles, and triangles. The green stripe at the bottom and the light blue stripe at the top seem to suggest earth and sky. Klee cleverly departed from a strictly linear approach by adding a single semicircle in the upper right, reminiscent of the moon. In this way, the artist brought the Egyptian landscape and the cultural history of the pyramids into harmony with the laws of geometry.

Anna Wegenschimmel

An artist’s studio is more than just a place where art is produced. It is also a form of self-portrait that provides information about the artist’s state of mind. Among Matisse’s many studio images, those dating from 1928-1929 seem particularly bright and friendly, suffused with the southern light of the Mediterranean, which bathes the room in a golden glow.

Matisse lived and worked in Place Charles-Félix in Nice between 1927 and 1938. Situated on the fourth floor of an old building, the studio had a certain air of modernity, primarily due to its floor-to-ceiling windows with their broad view of the Boulevard des Anglais down to the sea. In contrast to his previous studios, where the walls were lavishly decorated with exotic carpets or pictures, this one appears almost sober. The geometrical structure of the triple windows dominates the center of the picture. They are framed on either side by a wall covered in small squares, namely a tile wallpaper. This wallpaper fascinated Matisse and appears in many of his pictures. The curtain to the left and the door to the right indicate that this room rests on a thoroughfare. The studio is sparsely furnished. On the table and stool in the corner are sculptures, possibly one of the torsos that have just been completed. At the table by the window sits a figure, presumably the artist himself in patterned garments; on the floor stands a samovar and a model, hardly visible and stretched out on one chair, while the other chair is empty. Everything is painted hastily, more a sketch than a finished picture. Things are caught as if at a point of departure or transition.

The large canvas, too, seems mostly empty apart from an initial ground. This is divided into three floating sections, almost like a Mark Rothko painting. The topmost takes on the color of the sea, as if it were a mirror. The middle section is the color of the balcony wall, though it could also be interpreted as the color of the beach. The brown may be associated with darkness and earth. By leaving the picture on the easel in this unfinished state, Matisse plays with the idea of the first day of Creation, when God divided light from darkness.

Angela Schneider

After initially borrowing from the iconography of antiquity during his Classical Period after the First World War, Picasso developed an intense preoccupation with this style once more when producing prints for the Parisian publisher Ambroise Vollard. At the end of the 1920s, he provided illustrations for Honoré de Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece from 1831, and this effort was followed in the 1930s by the Vollard Suite. In both, robes and props establish the figures as ancient. This gouache looks like an antique frieze in which a group of people are depicted side by side. What is notable here is that the men are much more vividly rendered and have more realistic flesh tones, whereas the women and the boy appear much flatter and are the color of plaster. They are being dragged along in this entourage that appears to be returning from a fruitful fishing expedition. In the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the Berggruen Collection in London, Richard Kendall notes Picasso’s tense personal situation between his estranged wife Olga and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1933, as well as his preference for motifs related to antiquity, sexuality, and bullfighting: “There can be little doubt that the artist identified with many of the characters and dramas in his own imagery.”

Gabriel Montua

In 1884, the five-year-old Paul Klee drew a clock in which the numbers ran counterclockwise. Almost fifty years later, he dispensed with numbers altogether. The hands here are at an angle of about 100 degrees, an angle that has been psychologically identified as the most pleasing to the eye. This is why most wristwatches in advertisements are set at ten to two. But this image is not trying to be visually appealing: instead of being harmoniously round, the dial is rectangular. It is stuck onto three concentrically layered, rectangular pieces of gauze that offset one another, adding movement or a certain restlessness to the hands. Has time been thrown out of sync? Earlier interpreters of the painting, such as Roland März, often noted that 1933 was the year when Klee lost his professorship in Düsseldorf after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and the artist had to emigrate to Switzerland. However, these pieces of gauze layered on top of each other, their earthy tones resembling sedimentary strata as well as a mummy’s bandages, point much further back in time. It is no coincidence that the major 2019 exhibition “Prehistory” at the Centre Pompidou, which explored the influence of prehistory and early history on modern art, welcomed visitors with this image.

Gabriel Montua

In Picasso’s works on paper from the mid-1930s, the Minotaur appears so often and acts in such a variety of ways that the viewer is inclined to search for the artist’s own drives, desires, and fears in this part-man, part-bull hybrid. On a sexual level, Picasso’s Minotaur sometimes brutally forces himself upon women, sometimes tenderly caresses them with his mouth, or he might be found at the center of a bacchanal. A frequent theme is the wounded, dying, or blinded Minotaur, a colossus on clay feet who must be led by a little girl. This depiction, which was so dear to Picasso that he did not put any of the fifty-some prints on the market and only sold them personally, is the largest in format and one of the most enigmatic. A horse with a lifeless woman in a bullfighter’s robe on its back runs ahead of an aggressive Minotaur, who enters the picture from the right with a sword drawn. Standing in his way is a girl with a bouquet of flowers and a light on her outstretched arm, calmly holding her ground as if she could stop the monster. Behind her, a scantily clad man flees up a ladder, while two women with a dove perched near them watch the scene from a window with downcast eyes. Picasso’s dedication on the lower left is “to his friend Bergrruen”—as usual, he misspelled the name of his print dealer.

Gabriel Montua

This portrait dates from 1936. In January of that year, the 55-year-old Picasso encountered Dora Maar for the first time in the “Deux Magots” café in Paris. He was instantly fascinated by the black-haired, dark-eyed woman, and he felt that he must get to know her. Picasso’s poet friend Paul Éluard introduced them. Dora Maar was the daughter of a Yugoslavian architect and a French woman. She was born in Tours and grew up in Argentina. Picasso had heard about her from the Surrealist circles in Paris, where she had worked as a photographer.

The previous year, Picasso had separated from his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and he had an ongoing relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walther. Picasso and Dora Maar became intimate in August 1936, and it was then that he made his first drawings of her. More paintings followed in the autumn, above all in November. This portrait probably belongs in this sequence, for a portrait in a similar format dates from November 19, 1936. Both show the upper half of Maar’s body, seen from below. While the other portrait shows a somewhat pensive Maar, the emphasis here is on her outward appearance. Her dress, its stern darkness relieved by a scarf fastened with a flower-like brooch, functions as a plinth, above which the large oval of her face gravely rises. The chaplet of plaited hair was a popular, ordinary hairstyle at the time, reflecting Picasso’s sympathy for the Spanish people fighting the Fascists. Beneath the exaggerated arch of her forehead, a reference to Maar’s intellect or perhaps to the “headbirths” of the Surrealists, and her large eyebrows, the face, seen full on but turned slightly to one side, is characterized by her wide-open, almond-shaped eyes. The pupil of the right eye glows with a suggestive amber color, framed by the delicate violet shadows of the eyelid. This violet appears again in the lower lip, and, complemented by a delicate green, emphasizes the graceful pallor of her face. The right hand, which leans on the back of the chair, seems to supports the head, but her outspread fingers with their green-varnished nails also stress the elegance of this capricious woman.

“Picasso owed a lot to Dora Maar. She features as the critical, alert woman in his life,” wrote art historian Werner Spies. Under her influence, Picasso began to turn to political issues. It should not surprise us that her “classically beautiful” face is also found in the light-bearer figure in Guernica, painted in 1937. When Picasso left Maar in 1943, her world fell apart.

Hans Jürgen Papies

Museum Berggruen owns several portraits by Picasso from 1939 and 1940 in which a smaller part of the face with an eye and a nose has been added to the rest of the face like a collage, so that we can look at it as if from two different perspectives. In this work, the eye on the left side of the image looks straight at us. The bridge of the nose connects to the other half of the face, a profile turned slightly to the left. The reason that Museum Berggruen selected this portrait of Picasso’s then partner Dora Maar (1907–1997) as a motif for its posters is the sense of harmony that it evinces. Instead of appearing grotesque, the face looks like polished marble. The crude hands and the very short left arm are only noticeable at second glance and are secondary to the sublime calm of the figure’s enthroned position and the broad color fields. The provenance of the painting, on the other hand, is turbulent: created in France on October 31, 1939, shortly after the beginning of World War II, the Jewish Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg bought it and placed it in the safe of a bank after the invasion of the German Wehrmacht a few months later. The Germans cracked the safe and wanted to transport the painting to Germany along with other looted art, but French Resistance stopped the train and returned the work to its owner.

Gabriel Montua

At first sight, this appears to be a gay, light-hearted picture similar to the art of Joan Miró. However, this effect is deceptive. A shadow looms over Child’s Play. In the autumn of 1933, Klee began to suffer from the first symptoms of the skin disease called scleroderma. The mortal danger presented by the illness soon became alarmingly apparent. Faced with impending death, Klee reacted in 1939 with an unparalleled increase in creative activity: 1,253 drawings and color pictures, including numerous images featuring children. Following the constraints of his Bauhaus and Düsseldorf years, Klee discovered a certain “primitivism” and naivety during the final years of his life. Concentrating his efforts one last time, he conjured up the world of the child, adding his own recollections. In these works, he explores the nature of childhood: free from all constraints and practical demands, able to abandon oneself to the instinct of “play,” transforming the tangible objects of reality into fairytales and dreams.

Here, the girl floats over the farmyard. Fragmentary symbols in a pasty black merely intimate the outline of the figure, namely her hat, chin, arms, and the dots on the seam of her dress or skirt. At her side, a form resembling a ruler stands next to another that seems to be a cock with a red crest. Flowers shimmer impressionistically above the green grass. The yellow sun of a summer day turns into matte and dull tones in the girl’s dress and the ochre sand. On her face lies an empty brown eye, the other eye appearing as an inverted, questioning “S.” Next to the cheek we see a purple, heart-shaped mouth and an indefinable symbol. A red spiral whirls around next to her hat, but the vital agitation of the figure makes it easy to overlook the fact that she is firmly in the grasp of this dark, foreboding symbol. Klee suggests that life merely leaves its traces in the sand, like writing on the wall. No attempt has been made to harmonize figure and ground; life, with all its desires for love and freedom, is dispersed by the winds of childhood, youth, old-age, and death. Aware of the transience of all things, the older Paul Klee once again became a child. As the artist noted, “Art goes beyond the object, both real and imaginary. It plays an innocent game with its subjects. Just as a child at play imitates us, we also imitate at play the forces which created and create the world.”

Roland März

“This is a harsh painting—not one that’s easy to live with. But it is an incredibly exciting painting. And that is why it was so important to me to own this key work and be able to show it here.” Heinz Berggruen delivered these remarks when he presented Large Reclining Nude, painted by Picasso in 1942, to the Berlin public. He managed to acquire it at the spectacular auction of the outstanding Victor and Sally Ganz Collection at Christie’s in November 1997.

The painting was completed in Paris in 1942, during the German occupation. Asked in 1944 whether he had done any paintings of the war, Picasso’s initial response was in the negative, but then he added, “The war is [undoubtedly] in my pictures.” Indeed, during the war years, Picasso’s painting activities focused on a few subjects, primarily seated women, nudes, cityscapes of Paris, and still lifes. He explored “the domain of formal and physical deformation […] which operated on the distorted and, so to speak, painful thresholds of reality.”

In Picasso’s painting Large Reclining Nude, depicting a traditional motif normally used to convey themes of harmony and eroticism, the physical presence of war is manifest. This has been the tenor of a number of interpretations of the work in the past, the most convincing advocate of this view being John Richardson, the English Picasso biographer. Dora Maar, Picasso’s companion during those years, is stretched out naked, as if in a daze, on a mattress in a room as barren and gloomy as a prison cell. Her face is petrified by fear. Her hands are clenched into fists. The agony of confinement reflects not only the torment experienced by Dora Maar and Picasso during the occupation, but that of all their fellow human beings. In his rendering of the fractured body, which calls to mind the formation of ice-flows, Picasso falls back on the vocabulary of Cubism, which he again employed with renewed vigor from the late thirties onwards. Now, however, he was also able to draw on the Surrealists’ treatment of space. The legs of his reclining nude are crossed over one another like the crossbones beneath a skull, evidently representing a secret symbol used during the German occupation. The oppressive character of the subject matter is conveyed, not least, by its almost monochromatic coloring, and “the greenish-grey color of the German uniform” is surely no coincidence here.

The painting was preceded by a long series of studies that Picasso began in May 1941, which reached their provisional climax in the large painting The Serenade, also of a reclining nude, accompanied by a woman playing the lute. Four months later, on September 30, 1942, he completed Large Reclining Nude, exhibited here. In John Richardson’s view, this painting expresses the horrors of war far more forcefully and intensely than Picasso’s famous The Charnel House.

Hans Jürgen Papies

This artwork was created for the culture and art magazine Verve, published by E. Tériade starting in 1937. Previously, in the early 1930s, Tériade had commissioned Matisse to create a number of book illustrations; further projects, such as the art book Jazz, and a number of cover designs for Verve, were to follow. Two similar cut-out designs for the cover of Issue 13 exist—the composition of white figures against a green background that was ultimately chosen for the cover, and the more complex Museum Berggruen version. In this version, black figures dance against the green background. They are surrounded by the letters of the magazine’s title in closed black squares, and by white bursts of light that are half-star, half-grenade. This motif was particularly resonant in the year 1943, during the war. The same explosion motif appears on the figures, around the heart. The yellow-red doubled accenting of these shapes transfers the formal rhythm of the explosions and the letter blocks into the inner space of the highly active, dancing, black silhouettes.

These cut-outs look like composites of previous representations of nudes by the artist. The right-hand figure reprises the figure-in-motion motif of the rear left dancer in the famous composition The Dance of 1909 and 1910, except that the head is flung upward and backward and instead bent forward and downward. The left-hand figure is similar in that it throws its arms and legs up in the air in a supine position. Within this composition, this curious, half-sliding, half-tumbling dynamic pose has a certain air of uplifted ecstasy. Contextual parallels make it plausible that this figure has a relationship with the seated figure motif of Cézanne’s extensive “Bathers” sequence. Matisse had acquired the picture Three Bathers (1882–1897) in 1899. A male or female figure with their legs drawn up appears in almost all the variations contained in the “Bathers” suite, and it is a central element of Cézanne’s pictorial theme of nudes in an Arcadian landscape. Matisse had completely internalized the formula of the seated figure, along with the striding figure and the standing figure. The theme of dance allows him to interpret this pose with the greatest possible freedom, with it exploring the diametrical opposition of rising and falling. In this respect, this picture is an archetypal example of how Matisse’s concept of form brings opposites together.

Eva Morawietz

The Blue Portfolio is one of a series of interiors set against a red background that Matisse painted between 1945 and 1948 at the Villa Le Rêve in the Provençal town of Vence. All refer back to the famous Red Studio of 1911, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which both the room and the various objects in it are inscribed on a large, red-brown surface. Here, however, the colored surface is given movement. Individual brushstrokes are visible, surrounding the furniture of the studio like a peaceful river washing past its islands. Pieces of furniture are arranged in a gentle curve from bottom left to top right. It starts with the chaise-longue with a female form lying as if poured onto it, the woman presumably being one of Matisse’s models. Then follows the marble table with curved iron legs, with melons lying on it and a sculpture that suggests the cut-paper works of the following year. Continuing on, there are the model’s stool with its plant, the chair with the portfolio, and finally the fireplace. They are all elements of the villa where Matisse lived, familiar to us from many photographs.

However, Matisse placed the objects in this picture in a new relationship, using color to unify them and change their textures. The flower-patterned chair and the marble table-top become pink and orange surfaces respectively, their color carefully approaching that of the red background, which spreads like a fire through this room, suffused with the glow of the sun. Individual objects emerge from this background by virtue of their difference in color. Thus, a visible connection is established between the portfolio and the chaise-longue with the young woman, whose relaxed posture is reminiscent of Matisse’s earlier odalisques.

Is she the object of desire whose picture now lies hidden and unseen in the portfolio? Is a subtle game between life and art unfolding, in which life is visible but art remains locked away? Or is this simply about a model sitting for an artist? The artist has finished his work and laid down the portfolio, and the model is resting.

Angela Schneider

Giacometti completed City Square II from 1948–1949 in Paris, after living in exile in ¬Geneva. The sculpture presents a female figure and four men, who walk past without encountering her. A seemingly happenstance situation, the scene can be observed every day. As Giacometti himself commented in retrospect to the journalist Raoul-Jean Moulin, “People constantly flock together, move apart, approach one another anew and meet again. In this way, they incessantly form and transform living compositions of incredible complexity.”

Giacometti had already produced an ingenious and successful Surrealistic body of work. But in the mid-thirties, having completed his studies, he devoted himself to nature, aiming to create “compositions with figures,” as he wrote in a famous letter to Pierre Matisse in 1945. Two weeks, he thought, would suffice to comprehend the construction of a head or an entire figure. Even before he expressed these thoughts about the proper representation of man in lived moments, Giacometti had designed Model for a Square in 1932, manifesting his first ideas on figural composition. This sculpture was originally designed for a public garden, but the project was never realized. Grouped around a stele, which stands in the center of a plastered slab, there is an open hemisphere on the right, a narrow ramp in the rear, a cone on the left, and a zigzagging strip in front. If we interpret the latter, as the literature suggests, as a snake, then the stele stands for the tree of knowledge; the head for the reflecting male, who is already estranged from nature; and the cone for the female.

Set against this background, City Square II can be seen as a continuation of this theme, as a description of the split between man and woman. Released from all symbolic representation, it depicts ordinary events, as Giacometti himself remarked in 1961: “…Rather like ants, each figure looks as if it is moving along on its own in a direction unknown to the others. They meet and go past each other, don’t they? Without looking at one another. Or they move about around a woman. A motionless woman, and four men who walk about more or less in relation to this woman. I had come to realize that all I could create was a motionless woman and a man walking.”

Angela Schneider

Cranes comprise a family of fourteen kinds of long-legged and long-necked birds, and they are found in almost every corner of the Earth, mainly in marshy areas and plains. They were kept in Ancient Egypt as pets and sacrificial animals, and they frequently appear in ancient depictions of erotic scenes. They were even considered to be the bearer of glad tidings in Japan and a symbol of longevity in China.
In the early fifties, Picasso created a crane of a very special type.

Picasso liked having pets around, such as his various dogs and his goat Esmeralda. After the war, while he was living in the small town of Vallauris in southern France, he discovered pottery as a working material. He modeled a few birds, such as owls and pigeons, and painted some of them too. In the early fifties, he made a number of large-format plasters, such as Goat, Woman with Pram, and Baboon with Its Young. He made these plasters out of found objects using montage, which he had also experimented with decades before. The earliest example of this technique was Glass of Absinthe from 1914, made with a real absinthe spoon. Perhaps its most succinct expression is Bull’s Head from 1942, a montage composed of a saddle and the handlebars of a bicycle. By this time, he drew sculptural inspiration less from items found by chance, instead searching deliberately for specific “found objects” for his plaster works. He looked for distinctive formal qualities, like a wicker chair for the ribbed chest of Goat and a toy car for the head of Baboon.

It was in this context that The Crane was made in 1952. It was also made of diverse “found items.” The original, in the Musée Picasso, has an elegant, yet stilted pose. There is a pleasure in looking for the individual items that compose the crane: the gas tap as the bird’s head, a piece of a wicker basket for the neck, a discarded spade in the back and tail, and finally, two forks as the legs. Picasso had four bronze castings made from this original, one of which can be found in the Berggruen Collection. However, Picasso felt that he also gained something from this, and expressed his delight at the way in which bronze was able to combine the most diverse elements. Picasso painted each of these four bronzes differently, as he had done with earlier ceramics, linking them with a “string made of graphics.”

Hans Jürgen Papies

In his autobiography Hauptweg und Nebenwege (Highways and Byways), Heinz Berggruen describes how he sought out Henri Matisse in 1952, as he prepared an exhibition of etchings and lithographs by the 82-year-old artist. During a visit, he saw some cut-outs and was immediately enthralled. “Just imagine,” said Matisse, “my own son, who owns a major gallery in New York, rejected these works. […] He straight out refused to show them.” Berggruen seized the opportunity to offer his own gallery, and from February 27 to March 28, 1953, he held the first public exhibition of the “papiers découpés.” And he had great success: all the works sold.
To advertise the exhibition, originally planned for January, Matisse drafted a poster. Along the left-hand side, he affixed the slender form of a climbing plant in white against the black background. To the right, a smaller vegetal form in dark red separates the artist’s name and exhibition title from the gallery address and exhibition dates. A few of the colored paper snippets were not preserved, revealing placeholders for several letters traced in white.

The design was never produced, which is hardly a surprise on account of its lettering. The angular, cut-out letters looked like runes for the Nazi SS, and it is certainly no coincidence that all instances of the letter “s” are gone. There is evidence of improvements made on the upper half of the black cardboard wherever there should be an “s”; it is obvious that Matisse tried to respond to the gallerist’s critique.
“Matisse was old and ill and did not pay attention to politics. He did not know the significance of the letters,” explained Heinz Berggruen, who was likely quite disturbed by the use of such letters due to his own emigration history. A different motif was thus selected for the poster, red algae on a blue background, with a conventional typeface printed on horizontal white stripes.

The first design remained, quite literally, stuck: the letters were fastened with pins onto the cardboard, which was mounted on a wooden board. The maquette was forgotten and reappeared only after the artist’s death, in his estate. When it arrived in Berlin, the work looked like a bed of nails, shedding light on the artist’s workshop and process. Berggruen did not wish to show it as an object, but rather as a two-dimensional poster, as originally intended. Thus the nails and wooden board were removed.

Dieter Scholz

After his work on the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, which had occupied him since 1948, Matisse created a series of large-format “gouaches decoupées” of female nudes in 1952. This was one of the artist’s most prolific periods. Using a new language of symbolic equivalents, Matisse created an atmosphere of pure joy, which he felt emanated from things. He emphasized the continuity between this and his artistic interests from earlier years in 1951: “There is no break between my early pictures and my latest, except that with greater completeness and abstraction I have attained a form filtered to its essentials; and of the object that I used to present in the complexity of its space, I have kept only the sign that is sufficient to make the object exist in its own form and for the ensemble in which I conceived it.”

While this series of four blue nudes, in which complex bodies fill the space, is dominated by static elements and geometric forms, the shapes in Blue Nude Skipping from the same year return to the arabesque. The figure is captured hovering in mid-air, caught in extreme movement. Floating above ground, she is removed from the dimensions of both space and, most importantly, time. Matisse communicates movement through his extensive study of human anatomy and motor functions, though here the artist restructures this idea. The foreshortening is no longer due to perspective, but rather aims to reduce a gesture to its essence. Even the structure of the rope seems open to this principle: the wave-like movement of the line, its irregular stretching up and sweeping back, indicates its swinging in the air, but it can also be read as an allusion to the material substance of the ropes twined together. These curves are taken up by the shape of the figure’s body and by other forms, which emerge from pieces of overlapping paper. Together with changing colors, they give extra life to the composition. The scissor’s fluid movement through the paper seems to be echoed in the picture as well.

Anke Pötzscher

The matador was Picasso’s favorite figure from the broad arena of the corrida. In autumn 1970, he painted a series of these bullfighters. Matador and Nude was completed on October 20 in Mougins. Two figures fill the large white area of the canvas right up to the edge. The matador presents himself wearing a white montera, or bullfighter’s hat, and a blood-red capote cape, as if a signal proclaiming: “into battle!”. He holds a sword firmly in his hand. The proud matador stands in a commanding pose. The fight is over, and a seductive woman lures him. The blue-veiled beauty, shown in profile, offers herself to the matador, displaying the curves of her body, playing a little game with her breasts. Her hands, one child-like and one clumsy, are adorned with golden bangles. Picasso remarked to writer Hélène Parmelin, “Do you know, it’s just like at the greengrocer’s. Would you like a little breast, sir? Fine, there you are, sir, there’s your breast. The important thing is that the person looking at the painting has, in his hands, everything he needs to make a nude. If you really give him everything that he needs, and the very best, at that, he will then put everything in the right place with his eyes. Everyone can then make the nude he wants with the nude I have made.”

The maxim of the 89-year-old painter was paint, keep painting, and just don’t “finish” the painting. The paint is applied quickly and spontaneously, resulting in a colorful composition of pure red and blue, with strokes of fresh lawn green added at the bottom. Colorful areas set the tone, twisted and turned into ornaments, or used in hatching for graphic accentuation. Picasso made the red, blue, and green glow by discarding color completely for the head of the matador and the body of the odalisque, leaving the white priming of the canvas untouched. These late works were completed in a frenzy that threatened to get out of hand. The time of his highly refined paintings had passed; the quickly improvised, vital expression of life was now more important than any kind of “perfection” in panel painting. Picasso noted, “I don’t want to destroy the original freshness of this work […] If I could I would leave this picture as it is and start from scratch again on another canvas, painting on until I reach a new stage, and then I would continue as before […] There would be no such thing as a ‘finished’ picture, only the various ‘states’ of a picture which usually disappear during the course of the work […] ‘finishing off’ has a double meaning: conclude, complete—well, and it also means: kill, destroy […] I paint so much because I am searching for immediacy; and if I have halfway succeeded in doing something, I do not have the courage to add anything else.”

Roland März