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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\u201cPicasso-Klee-Matisse” arrives in Miami after stops in Paris, Madrid, Shanghai, Tokyo, Venice and beyond.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\u201cPicasso-Klee-Matisse” arrives in Miami after stops in Paris, Madrid, Shanghai, Tokyo, Venice and beyond.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Provided by Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preu\u00dfischer Kulturbesitz. \u00a9 2026 Estate of Pablo Picasso \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Jens Ziehe.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaintings,\u201d the legendary late art collector Heinz Berggruen once said, \u201cwant people to look at them and enjoy them; they want to inspire meditation and enhance our life experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
None of which, of course, can happen if those works remain cloistered in dark, climate-controlled storage units or personal collections or even, to some degree, in the static gallery show of a single distant museum. Which is why it is so appropriate that almost 100 works of canonical European Modernism from Berlin\u2019s Museum Berggruen and Berggruen family collections will be on display at the P\u00e9rez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)<\/a> beginning Oct. 29. The exhibit, \u201cPicasso-Klee-Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen,\u201d<\/a> arrives in Miami after much-heralded stops \u2014 albeit in different, curator- and location-driven iterations \u2014 in Paris, Madrid, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Venice, among other major cities.<\/p>\n Miami-born, Europe-educated PAMM associate curator Maritza M. Lacayo studied art history at the American University of Paris and wrote her master\u2019s thesis at the University of Glasgow on the \u201cpo\u00e8me-objets\u201d assemblages of surrealist Andr\u00e9 Breton. For her, PAMM\u2019s forthcoming exhibition, which brings \u201cthe Museum Berggruen collection into conversation with works from PAMM\u2019s permanent collection,\u201d is not only \u201can institutional milestone and an opportunity to broaden access to some of the defining works of 20th-century art,\u201d but an avenue to find cross-cultural synergy between the two worlds within which her curatorial career has existed.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat makes the Berggruen collection so powerful and resonant is that every time it goes to a different city, each new curatorial team is given a huge amount of freedom to contextualize it for their individual audience,\u201d Lacayo, who co-curated the exhibit with Museum Berggruen curator Natalie Zimmer, tells New Times. \u201cSo, as it travels, the collection continues to live and breathe and evolve and gain new meaning\u2026We felt a tremendous responsibility to help our audiences connect with these works in a way that honors that vitality and versatility.\u201d<\/p>\n To better tease out the threads that reveal the verdant, sprawling art history tapestry large enough to encompass both the powerhouse marquee artists Berggruen delivers \u2014 Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Paul C\u00e9zanne, Alberto Giacometti \u2014 and the Latin American modernist masters in the PAMM permanent collection \u2014 Diego Rivera,\u00a0Joaqu\u00edn Torres-Garc\u00eda, Wifredo Lam \u2014 Lacayo and company chose to organize the exhibit \u201cthematically around still life, portraiture, interiors, landscape, and the emergence of Cubism\u201d rather than individual artists.<\/p>\n \u201cBy embedding artists our traditional PAMM audience will recognize into the Berggruen collection, I think we provide people an easier contextual entryway to appreciate these works and see how their creators influenced one another,\u201d Lacayo says, adding, \u201cWe don\u2019t want there to be sections that are too concentrated with one artist. We really want them to play with one another.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Another compelling perception-shifting twist within the exhibition is rooted in gender. The largely female curatorial team brings much-needed context to a male-dominated collection. \u201cThe way I write about Dora Maar, for example, is not focused on her role as Picasso\u2019s sad ex-lover, but on her brilliance as a photographer, artist, and individual,\u201d Lacayo says. \u201cThose seemingly little shifts can often make a tremendous difference. I hope that later, when someone else curates a show with the Museum Berggruen, our scholarship and research will have helped to pivot the conversation in a more interesting, progressive way.\u201d<\/p>\n Even by the lofty standards PAMM has set as one of the most forward-thinking, innovative, and cleverly curated art institutions in the nation \u2014 fight us \u2014 this is a particularly golden moment in the museum\u2019s history. \u201cPicasso-Klee-Matisse\u201d arrives at a time when PAMM is already doing gangbusters business hosting ten magnificent and imposing pieces from Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/a> (courtesy of the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection); 40 works of paintings, photography, video, and installation art from conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari<\/a> (from the Craig Robins collection); \u201cOne Becomes Many,\u201d an exhibition featuring 11 Black Brazilian artists; and \u201cThis is America,\u201d another Lacayo-led effort drawn from the PAMM collection offering \u201ca multiplicity of perspectives on American history and identity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The winding, self-guided journey through the PAMM galleries encourages viewers to balance revisiting what they already love with discovery, between deepening their existing relationship to an artist and being steeped in the context that helps them find their way to a new artist, a new form, a new medium.<\/p>\n Finally, the exhibit also features some of Heinz Berggruen\u2019s own catalog writing; an important inclusion not only because it represents his work as a publisher and a window into his thoughts on the pieces on display, but, more essentially, as a reminder that his life story is, at its essence, a tale of the power of art and what ultimately triumphs and perseveres.<\/p>\n As a young man, Berggruen, a Jew, emigrated to the United States in 1936 to escape from a Nazi Germany then at war with what it derided as \u201cdegenerate art.\u201d He worked as an art critic, served in the U.S. Army, served as a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, made famous friends in the art world, had an affair with Frida Kahlo (!), and collected art across the world. In 1996, he returned to Berlin to curate a museum bearing his name filled with transcendent art, much of which outlived the men and movements that tried to stamp it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n If that subtext doesn\u2019t \u201cinspire meditation and enhance our life experience\u201d in times like these, what will?<\/p>\n