SHANGHAI.- Now on view until October 8, 2023,
UCCA is presenting “Modern Time: Masterpieces from the Collection of Museum Berggruen / Nationalgalerie Berlin” at UCCA Edge in Shanghai. Organized in collaboration with Museum Berggruen, Berlin, the exhibition features nearly 100 pieces by modern masters Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), and Georges Braque (1882-1963), each carefully selected from Museum Berggruen’s unparalleled collection.
Shown in China for the first time, these works by the six artists span painting, sculpture, paper cut-outs, and other media, allowing viewers to experience the development of modern art through styles such as Cubism, Surrealism, and various strands of abstraction. One of Europe’s leading museums of modern art, Museum Berggruen is a member of the Nationalgalerie and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums). “Modern Time” marks the third stop of Museum Berggruen’s international exhibition tour following its debut in Tokyo and subsequent installment in Osaka. At UCCA, the touring exhibition has been installed in a rigid chronology, allowing visitors to grasp an artistic dialogue that developed across the oeuvres of different artists, and to understand the exhibition as arising from the collection of a single individual: Museum Berggruen’s namesake, legendary art dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen (1914-2007). Following its display at UCCA Edge, the exhibition will travel to UCCA Beijing, where it will run from November 11, 2023, to February 25, 2024.
“Modern Time” invites viewers on a walk through the history of twentieth-century art, offering a close-up view of the creative processes and thinking of six major figures. The Chinese translation of the exhibition title aptly references the idea of a leisurely stroll, promising an excursion that reveals the diverse artistic approaches and radical transformations found under the umbrella of Modernism. The exhibition is organized in strict chronology according to the completion of each work, rather than in thematic or artist sections. It thus introduces in sequence the new developments that marked the flourishing of creativity in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Visitors are guided through the exhibition by wall texts contextualizing individual artists, artistic movements, and major historical events, the last being of particular significance considering the impact of the period’s upheavals on many of the featured artists, as well as Berggruen’s personal background as a German Jew who fled the Nazis.
“Modern Time” sets the scene with two artworks from a slightly earlier era, portraits that Cézanne, an acknowledged influence on Matisse, Picasso, and Giacometti, painted of his wife around 1885 and 1890. The next artist to appear is Picasso—with 40 of his pieces, the exhibition provides all-encompassing overview of 8 decades of his artistic career. A wealth of works from Picasso’s Cubist period are complimented by the inclusion of Braque’s Still Life with Pipe (Le Quotidien du Midi) (1914), which demonstrates the latter’s refined approach towards composition and texture while underscoring how the two artists closely collaborated to radically re-imagine perspective.
The exhibition also features ten pieces by Matisse, originator of Fauvism and Picasso’s friendly rival for the leadership of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. These works begin with sculptural and characoal studies of the human body, move into interior scenes boasting vivid Mediterranean colors, and conclude with his final innovation, the paper cut-outs, or papier découpé, which allowed him to unite form and color. More than 30 pieces by Klee, meanwhile, constitute the most comprehensive presentation of his art in China to date. His works in the exhibition range from elegantly abstracted landscapes, evoking Cubism and bearing the influence of his time teaching at the Bauhaus, to the whimsical figuration of Child’s Play (1939). Found on UCCA Edge’s fourth floor, the piece’s lightedheartedness seemingly offers a riposte to the political violence of the preceding decade and the darkness of incipient conflict. Other works from the same period, such as Picasso’s Large Reclining Nude (1942), speak to the claustrophobic, anxious atmosphere of the war years.
Moving forward chronologically, visitors will encounter two sculptures by Giacometti, their stark forms speaking to a sense of existential doubt and isolation felt by many European artists and intellectuals in the aftermath of World War II. Yet the exhibition concludes with a touch of brightness, underscoring the continued relevance of these modern masters through the joyful exuberance of Matisse’s paper cut-outs and the defiant energy and eroticism of late period Picasso pieces such as Matador and Nude (1970).
The works on display in the exhibition are from the collection of the Museum Berggruen, which takes its name and owes its origins to Heinz Berggruen. Berggruen was a close confidant of Picasso and other artists, and throughout his life built an unmatched collection of modern art. Today that collection forms the core of Museum Berggruen’s holdings. UCCA is honored to welcome art from this priceless collection to China as part of the ongoing international exhibition tour which began at The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, and The National Museum of Art, Osaka. Following the two stops at UCCA museums in China, in autumn 2024 the exhibition will travel to Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris for its final installment. UCCA and Museum Berggruen are excited to work closely together to share this veritable feast of modern art with audiences in China and foster further Sino-European cultural exchange.
“Modern Time” is among a number of recent major UCCA exhibitions focused on major modern artists, which seek to locate the roots of the contemporary in the modern. Artworks by Picasso in the exhibition expand the exploration of the artist’s career begun by the 2019 UCCA Beijing exhibition “Picasso ¬– Birth of a Genius,” while pieces by Matisse provide a broader perspective on the artist at the heart of “Matisse by Matisse,” another upcoming 2023 exhibition. Furthermore, “Modern Time” compliments artistic discussions sparked by other recent exhibitions in Shanghai, such as “Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery” at the Shanghai Museum. Audiences may move from Renaissance art and Impressionism to the experimental spirit of twentieth-century Modernism, experiencing half a millennia of European art history without leaving the city.
Gabriel Montua, Head of Museum Berggruen and exhibition co-curator, comments, “I am very excited to see how the works from Museum Berggruen’s collection, all on view in China for the very first time, will be appreciated by local audiences. This is a great honor and we at Museum Berggruen can learn a lot from the reaction of visitors who see these works with fresh eyes and with a different visual heritage in their minds. I am very grateful to UCCA and its director Philip Tinari for this unique and wonderful cooperation.”
UCCA Director and CEO Philip Tinari notes, “UCCA is extremely grateful and excited to be able to present this body of work to viewers in China. That this collection, some two decades after finding its place in a rich constellation of German state museums, can travel in its near entirety to the other side of the world is something worthy of celebration, particularly at a moment when such motion and the dialogue across eras and cultures that it sparks feel more urgent than ever.”
“Modern Time: Masterpieces from the Collection of Museum Berggruen / Nationalgalerie Berlin” is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of Neue Nationalgalerie, Gabriel Montua, Head of Museum Berggruen, and Veronika Rudorfer, Curator at Museum Berggruen, and is presented in collaboration with UCCA.
June 22, 2023 - October 8, 2023
