Musée de l’Orangerie

From October 2nd, 2024 to January 27th, 2025

It would be wrong to describe the life of Heinz Berggruen as destiny. He was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, and sought refuge in California at the dawn of the Second World War. After studying in France, his first contacts with the art world were in San Francisco. When the war was over, Berggruen preferred to return to Europe, first to his native country as a journalist, and then to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He became weary and little by little made his way into the art market: first he had a gallery on Place Dauphine, and then moved permanently to Rue de l’Université where he specialized in graphic arts of modern artists.

He was passionate about his work and quickly made contacts in the Paris world of culture, and met not just artists to exhibit but also poets, art dealers, historians, critics and collectors of the time. Berggruen made a name for himself in the capital and due to his great success became “his best client”. Guided by his own tastes and affinities, he built up a solid collection of 20th century works from his favorite masters: Picasso and Klee.

From October 2nd, 2024 to January 27th, 2025

From the early 2010s, the vocabulary of Amélie Bertrand has been made up of motifs - almost signs - that everyone can easily understand: brick walls, fences, chains, swimming pool tiles, taken from answers given online to questions in the form of keywords. She then combined them into “credible spaces” forming strange landscapes, which provoked in the viewer a feeling of mirage often leading to discomfort, exploring the possibilities and contradictions of these artificial images. At the center of this universe, nymphs become shapes, or perhaps the contrary, and the geometric form becomes a water lily, a symbol of proven effectiveness, definitively checked and almost exhausted by the vast series by Claude Monet and the immersive decor of Musée de l’Orangerie.

Offered to the French State by the painter Claude Monet on the day that followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol for peace, the Water Lilies are installed according to plan at the Orangerie Museum in 1927, a few months after his death. This unique set, a true « Sixtine Chapel of Impressionism » in the words of André Masson in 1952, testifies to Monet’s later work. It was designed as a real environment and crowns the Water Lilies cycle begun nearly thirty years before. The set is one of the largest monumental achievements of early twentieth-century painting.

The Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collection is one of the most wonderful European collections of paintings, bringing together 148 works from the 1860s to the 1930s.

The Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collection was mainly put together by Paul Guillaume, a young passionate French art dealer. From 1914 to his death in 1934, he built up a rich collection of several hundred paintings, from impressionism to modern art, as well as African and Oceanian artworks. He became wealthy and well known, from Europe to the US, and died at the peak of his fame when he was considering opening a museum.