The story
Heinz Berggruen left Berlin as a young Jewish man in the 1930s, escaping the Nazis, and made his name in Paris as a dealer in modern art. Late in life he brought a large part of his own collection home, and in 1996 it opened as a museum in a classical pavilion facing Charlottenburg Palace, a homecoming the city treated as an act of reconciliation.
The holdings are narrow and deep. There are more than 120 works by Picasso, following him across his whole career, some 70 by Paul Klee, and rooms of Matisse and the thin bronze figures of Alberto Giacometti. Berggruen sold the collection to Germany for far less than it was worth, so the pictures he had chased for decades came to rest in the city he had once fled.
For now the pavilion is closed. The museum shut in 2022 for a full renovation of the building, and while the work goes on the collection travels, with a stop in Miami from October 2026. A date for its return to Berlin has not yet been fixed.
