The "symphonic" Picasso and the "chamber music" Klee resonate at the Thyssen

"Pablo Picasso is a grand symphony and Paul Klee is chamber music." Olivier Berggruen, son of the legendary German collector and dealer Heinz Berggruen, uses this metaphor to describe his father's two favorite artists, who gathered in his collection works from "the two greatest geniuses of 20th-century painting."

Now, those distinct yet complementary visual chords resonate together at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which presents a brilliant exhibition where both giants "tune" again, after their last meeting in Bern in 2010.

The works, coming from the Berggruen Museum in Berlin – closed for renovations for four years – have traveled to Spain to be juxtaposed with those at the Thyssen. "We have two disparate geniuses, two 'Pablos', Picasso and Klee, two great collections and two museums facing each other in the mirror," celebrates Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Madrid museum, delighted to host "the second great duel of titans of the autumn" weeks after exploring the connection between Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol in another 'duet' of giants.

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"It's a great gift for the Thyssen," adds Paloma Alarcó, curator of modern painting and co-curator of 'Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection', alongside Gabriel Montua, director of the Berlin museum. The exhibition, open until February 1, gathers 60 exceptional pieces organized around four thematic axes: portrait, landscape, still life, and nude, genres that Picasso and Klee revolutionized. Giants of modernity, Picasso (1881–1973) and Klee (1879–1940) shook the foundations of 20th-century art by stirring surrealism, expressionism, and cubism. Masters of drawing, they distorted faces and bodies playing with masks and irony.

Alarcó highlights the "opposite personalities" of both creators. "Picasso is earthly, excessive, southern and sensual; Klee is introspective, northern, spiritual and intellectual," she lists. "A deep affinity united them despite their differences," she says.

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"They shared the same spirit of experimentation, thematic repertoires and similar creative processes," the curator maintains. "Their formulas, as antagonistic as they were revolutionary, destroyed reality through a radical plastic language. They forever changed the way we look at and understand the contemporary world," she points out.

The exhibition pays tribute to two great patrons: Heinz Berggruen (Berlin, 1914–Paris, 2007) and Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (The Hague,1921– Girona, 2002) by confronting their achievements. "Both Germans, expatriates, collectors and founders of two great museums," Solana recalls.

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Born into a middle-class Berlin family, Berggruen studied Literature in France and was a journalist before going into exile with the rise of Nazism. In San Francisco, he began his life as a dealer working with Diego Rivera. He would be an American soldier in Europe and a collaborator with UNESCO. In 1950 he opened his legendary modern art gallery in Paris, where for three decades he provided avant-garde works to select clients like Baron Thyssen himself.

Passion

His passion for collecting began with a watercolor by Klee purchased in 1940. From 1980, he dedicated himself to expanding an exquisite collection of modern art that the German government acquired in 2000. With the Berggruen Museum, now part of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, he fulfilled his dream: to keep his collection together and share it with the public, as Baron Thyssen did with his in 1993.

One of the pieces Berggruen sold to the Swiss collector was 'Arlequín con espejo' (1923), an iconic 'Picasso' now a symbol of the Thyssen collection that previously hung in the Parisian salon of the German dealer. "He collected a few artists – Cézanne, Matisse, Giacometti... – but in depth," his son Olivier highlights. He confesses that his father had "a complicated relationship" with the late Picasso, "although he ended up collecting him."

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"I was my best client," he wrote in his memoirs, the astute dealer and great philanthropist who donated 90 works by Klee to MoMA in New York and another 13 to the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

The exhibition also includes works by some old masters who inspired both artists. Pieces like 'Ninfa de la fuente' (c. 1530–1534), by Lucas Cranach the Elder, in the portrait section, or 'Vista de La Haya' (c. 1690), by Gerrit Berckheyde, in the landscape section.

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Encounters and Disagreements in a World on the Brink

Picasso and Klee coincided in a couple of group exhibitions in Paris in the 1920s, but they were not friends. They admired each other and met at least three times, the last in 1935 in Bern, when the Swiss artist was already very ill. The Malaga-born artist arrived accompanied by a friend, but lingered drinking. He arrived late and tipsy to the meeting, which discomforted the strict and formal Klee. Picasso picked up a drawing by the Swiss without knowing whether he was holding it right side up or upside down. "Look at it from any side, because now everything is upside down and it doesn't matter. The world is falling apart," Klee snapped at him. A phrase that for Alarcó is "a metaphor of the tumultuous historical moment they were living in."

"Critic Clement Greenberg wrote that there was an opposition between them similar to that which existed between the Siena School and the Florence School in the Renaissance," Solana recalled. "A relationship analogous to that between Sassetta and Masaccio: between the page and the wall, calligraphy and plasticity, the miniature and the monumental."