Paul Klee, Landscape in Blue, 1917, Museum Berggruen.

Pablo Picasso, Woman in a Multicoloured Hat (Tête de femme au chapeau), 1939, Museum Berggruen.

Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, c 1885, Museum Berggruen.

Pablo Picasso Dora Maar with green fingernails, 1936, Museum Berggruen.

Henri Matisse, Vegetal elements (Éléments végétaux), 1947, Museum Berggruen. Alberto Giacometti, Large nude standing III, 1960, Museum Berggruen.

Henri Matisse, In the Studio in Nice (Intérieur d’Atelier à Nice), 1929, Museum Berggruen.

Alberto Giacometti, Large nude standing III, 1960, Museum Berggruen.

The National Gallery is welcoming the winter with an exhibition of European masters that shows not so much their differences, but their almost familial connections, writes HELEN MUSA.

Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen will feature more than 170 works, 80 of which are coming from Berlin.

Based on the idea that the master of modern art, Paul Cezanne, powerfully influenced the giant art figures that followed him, not least Picasso and Matisse, the exhibition picks up, like so many before it, on the serendipity that a major European museum is closed for building renovations.

This is the first time works of art from the Museum Berggruen have come to Australia, and follows the recent sellout at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris of Heinz Berggruen: a Dealer and his Collection.

In another gallery tradition, by using works from the NGA’s own collection, a link will be drawn between the European giants and their Australian counterparts to show how Australian artists as varied as Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Russell Drysdale were influenced by what was happening on the other side of the globe.

When I catch up with the NGA’s curators David Greenhalgh and Deirdre Cannon, who’ve been working with Natalie Zimmer from the Museum Berggruen, I find that there was an extra level of serendipity to getting the show. 

Nicholas Berggruen, son of famed collector Heinz Berggruen, visited Canberra in 2023 and got talking to director Nick Mitzevich, who picked up on the fact that many of the Australian artists in our own collection had also been influenced by Paul Cezanne. The exhibition starts with Cézanne.

When he died in 1906, Braque, Picasso and Klee were all in their impressionable 20s but his influence can be traced back to Cézanne’s letters advising young artists to simplify subjects to their basic shapes, the cylinder, the sphere and the cone and to break up the picture plane, advice taken by Picasso in his proto-Cubist still lifes of apples and pears in a fruit bowl, while the older Matisse was obsessed with Cézanne’s short brushstrokes.

The artworks by Braque, Giacometti, Klee, Matisse and Picasso coming from the German collection tell one story.

But Greenhalgh says: “We are offering an expanded view, giving the sense that all these artists found inspiration in one another… it’s almost a family tree of influence and we expand the show out how to show not just how these European masters were interconnected but by bringing works in for our own national collection.”

Some of ours are Cubist works by Paul Haefliger, Roy de Maistre and Eric Wilson, but the NGA also holds Matisse’s Jazz series 

The Museum Berggruen collection, Greenhalgh says, features one of the strongest collections of Picasso worldwide, and originates from Jewish collector Heinz Berggruen who fled his native Berlin in 1936 and spent more than half a century living in Paris. 

When he returned to Germany as an 86-year-old, having left when he was 23, the collection was purchased by the German government, a kind of active reconciliation on his part and a full circle moment.

With such a massive exhibition, a curatorial division of labour makes sense, so Deidre Cannon has been looking after the Australian content of the show. 

Soon after Cezanne’s death, she notes, progressive art schools in Australia taught his techniques, meaning an immediate infiltration of ideas. 

Also, there was a huge Post Impressionist exhibition curated by Roger Fry in 1912 at the Grafton Galleries in London showcasing British artists influenced by modern French art, which Australian artists saw. 

Then there was John Russell, the so-called “Australian lost impressionist”. Uniquely, he’s an example of reverse influence, whereby Russell, who lived for years on Belle Île off the coast of Bretagne, enjoyed painting visits from both Matisse, whom he introduced to impressionist techniques and colour theory and Monet, who said he preferred some of Russell’s Belle Île seascapes to his own. 

“This part of the exhibition gives us a way of thinking about Australian art history, which is a bit European… There’s a diversity of approaches, but a shared understanding,” Cannon says. 

One of the big drawcards in the show for viewers will be a substantial segment of works by Pablo Picasso, from a 1904 work to 1940s portraits and several paintings by his muse, the artist Dora Maar.

And the Giacometti of the exhibition title? Greenhalgh says, there will be a bronze Giacometti cat and the entire exhibition will end with his 1960 nude sculpture, Grande Femme Debout III, 2.3 metres tall and a fitting way to end a Grande show.

Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, at the National Gallery of Australia, May 31-September 21.