Cézanne to Giacometti: Adam Lindsay and the Living Lineage of Modernism
Image credit: Pablo Picasso, Woman in a multicoloured hat (Tête de femme au chapeau), 1939, installation view, Cézanne to Giacometti: highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, National Gallery of Australia Kamberri/Canberra, 2025
The National Gallery of Australia’s major winter exhibition, Cézanne to Giacometti: highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, brings together some of the most significant names in modern art in a once-in-a-lifetime presentation. On view until September 27, the exhibition showcases more than 80 works from Berlin’s renowned Museum Berggruen alongside over 75 works from the NGA’s collection. It is the first time the Berggruen collection, one of Europe’s most important holdings of 20th-century art, has travelled to Australia.
At its heart, the exhibition is about influence. It begins with Paul Cézanne, often described as the “father of modern art,” whose revolutionary approach to form, perspective, and colour transformed painting at the end of the 19th century. His innovations directly shaped the work of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Klee, and Giacometti, all of whom are represented in this exhibition. Their works, in turn, reverberated far beyond Europe, finding echoes in the practices of Australian artists who adapted modernist ideas to the local landscape and cultural conditions. This dialogue between Europe and Australia is one of the exhibition’s most compelling aspects, offering visitors a way to trace not only the evolution of modernism but also how those ideas travelled, transformed, and embedded themselves in Australian art, tracing a path from Cézanne’s late-19th-century explorations to Giacometti’s existential 20th-century vision.
The exhibition places these canonical works in conversation with Australian modernists such as Grace Cossington Smith, Dorrit Black, Russell Drysdale, and John Passmore. Their paintings and drawings reveal how international movements like Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism were reinterpreted through Australian eyes. In the hands of émigré artists like Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, who brought Bauhaus principles to Australia after fleeing Nazi Germany, modernism took on new urgency, reshaping the trajectory of Australian art.
As the exhibition comes to the end of its season, VAULT Editor in Chief Alison Kubler caught up with Adam Lindsay, Deputy Director, National Gallery of Australia to talk about the legacy of Heinz Berggruen, the German-Jewish collector who built the Berlin collection after fleeing Nazi Germany, whose commitment to preserving and celebrating the art denounced by fascism was itself an act of cultural defiance, and later, of reconciliation, whose legacy underscores the resilience of art and the importance of cultural exchange across borders and histories.
Image credit: Adam Lindsay, Deputy Director, with Cézanne to Giacometti: highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, installation view, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, 2025
Adam, what makes this collection of work so special?
Well, apart from the works themselves, they're extraordinary and very personal to Heinz Berggruen (1914–2007). They were collected by him, but from his earliest days, he was really guided by three things. One of his notable abilities was spotting interesting and emerging artistic talent and trends. He was one of the first people to acquire a work by Paul Klee. He was the first person to exhibit Henri Matisse's cutouts. They could have quite easily been dismissed. You've got an artist who's much more physically feeble than he was in his earlier career. He's essentially cutting and pasting. Now he's doing it with a plum and skill, but it's Heinz Berggruen who says, I think I can market these. I think I can sell these. He was exceptionally skilled at spotting emerging talent and artistic trends.
The second was that he was a great businessman. He had a keen eye for what he could buy and sell for a higher profit. He was extraordinary at that. And throughout the course of his career, he bought some works multiple times, three and four times, because he knew the movement of the art market. And then the third element was altruism. I mean, the overarching story of this collection and how it ends up back in the state is one of going back to your homeland and accepting that. And in fact, the first work he ever bought was a Paul Klee piece from a Jewish person in America who had fled and needed the money. Again, that trend, that artistic eye, that commercialism. But he could have bought any work at that point, but he bought it from a Jew who needed the money.
At a pivotal moment.
A pivotal moment
Image credit: Cézanne to Giacometti: highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, installation view, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, 2025
Let's go back a bit, then, and talk about who he was. Who was he? How did he make his money?
He grew up in Berlin and fled because of the rise of Hitler's Nazi party. Like many, that part of his story isn't unusual. He goes to America and has an incredible variety of jobs. He's a keen intellect, which is why he writes for newspapers. He serves as the assistant to the director of the LACMA in Los Angeles. He has a rumoured affair with Frida Kahlo. And so, he's in the art world from the very beginning. He's in an adopted home, like many; I don't think that part is unusual. Guided by those three things—the keen eye, the commercialism, and the altruism—he begins buying art.
Essentially, he is the secondary market before large-scale auctions are everywhere. He's really trading these things. He's an old-school gallerist insofar as he develops personal relationships; he doesn’t just like their work. Take Picasso, who he's probably closest to among the artists he represents. Picasso shares that same feeling of being separated from Spain. Initially self-imposed, then after Franco comes to power, Dora Maar radicalises and politicises him, and he paints Guernica (1937), and he's never allowed back again. So, these two - Berggruen had a different story, he did go back home, and Picasso didn't - but they bonded and were close because of this shared displacement from their homeland.
And I mean an example of the very personal nature of the collection, one of the portraits, the blue period portrait in the show by Picasso, is actually a painting of one of Picasso's studio managers, who was the first person to answer the door the first time Heinz Berggruen ever met Picasso. He buys these works because they are familiar to him. When you walk into the gallery, you see the Portrait of Jaime Sabartes (1904), a piece from the blue period. Jaime worked for Picasso and when Heinz first goes to meet Picasso to say, how about I represent you, it's Jaime who meets him and ushers him into Picasso's room. Picasso is already a famous artist by this point. And so, to buy that work and have that face staring back at him, he had personal connections with these works.
Image credit: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Jaime Sabartés (Portrait de Jaime Sabartés) 1904 oil on canvas, Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie—Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz NG MB 3/2000. Photo: ©bpk/ Nationalgalerie, SMB, Museum Berggruen/Jens Ziehe © Succession Picasso/Copyright Agency, 2025.
We are all familiar now with mega collections, but so seldom have people had these sort of meaningful connections and relationships with the artists that they are collecting arguably.
Exactly. And through truly pivotal periods. Picasso was close to Heinz Berggruen, but Heinz Berggruen also remained close to Dora Maar, even after Picasso and Dora Maar’s separation. She withdrew from society at that point and didn't do many commercial shows. In fact, the only person to exhibit her work after Picasso was Heinz Berggruen. So he stayed close to her until the end. Dora's journey, however, was very different. She transitioned from being an extremely left-wing radical protest and street artist to an early pioneer of surrealism, and I believe we can credit her with sparking a political consciousness in Picasso. He would have been a much more commercial artist if he hadn't listened to her activism and treatise on war. I also believe she's an unspoken part of Guernica and the development of his social conscience. But after that, and the painful separation from Picasso, she grew increasingly right-wing, and by the time she died, she was extremely right-wing. Berggruen remained friends with her and continued to be her commercial representative right to the end. In fact, he bought Dora Maar with green fingernails, 1936, from her estate shortly after she passed away, because she kept that work.
Careers can take unexpected turns. You can imagine, after seeing the brilliance of Matisse's painting, people might have said, “Hang on, you're cutting out paper?” We hadn't really seen paper feature much in the Western art canon, a little in synthetic cubism, but it then disappears and later reappears with Matisse’s cutouts. It reflects the talents of Berggruen, his ability to recognise artistic talent and trends, along with his commercial instincts. He successfully placed his cutouts in print magazines. But there might also be some altruism involved. The first work he bought was from Paul Klee, an immigrant, and then he supported Matisse through that period. These are two great examples of those three talents shining through.
You've been closely involved in bringing this exhibition to Australia. Can you tell us a bit about how it all first came about?
Nicholas Berggruen came to visit with David Walsh, actually, and was really impressed by the collection and the building and said, Well, you should contact the Museum Berggruen, they're closing for some upgrades to their building and they're working with a few museums across the world to stage a show.
But we were firm from the start that we wouldn't just do an exhibition of Heinz Berggruen's collection. It had to engage in dialogue with our collection. The National Gallery increasingly showcases its collection, especially through temporary exhibitions. I believe that's both right and responsible. It reduces freight costs and prevents the collection from sitting in storage, but it also means there's no need to choose between importing works from Europe or displaying them locally. They can sit alongside works from our collection, which the Australian public cherish. The museum grew, and we were genuinely excited about this prospect. We set up a Curatorium with three curators from our side, two from theirs, and me. We debated every aspect of this exhibition thoroughly.
This exhibition is just a small part of the Museum Berggruen, which resides at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. They gifted it to the nation, yes?
Yes, they sold it for about a third of the price. He still wanted his children to have some of the hard-earned money he had accumulated during his career. The remaining two-thirds of the value were gifted as a homecoming. He was genuinely delighted to return to his home country and his hometown of Berlin. However, that relationship didn't end with the sale. They opened the museum, and he continued to give. I mean, Tall Standing Nude III (1960) the very large Alberto Giacometti sculpture, was the last gift he gave them just before he died, only a few months prior.
And from your perspective, what do you think are the highlights of the exhibition? I mean, they're all fantastic, but I believe that the collection of Paul Klee works is extraordinary. I can't imagine any other setting where we'd see that many works by Paul Klee in one room.
No, there really hasn't been that much of an in-depth examination of Paul Klee ever. There was one many years ago, but it contained fewer works. I think Tall Standing Nude III is a definite highlight. It's never left Europe before. And that was over a year of negotiations to get that.
Image credit: Alberto Giacometti, Tall nude standing III (Grande femme debout III), 1960 (cast 1981) and Slim woman without arms (Femme mince sans bras) 1959‒60, installation view, Cézanne to Giacometti: highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, 2025
I can imagine, because I mean, I didn't even know he worked on a scale as large as that until I saw it!
Well, these are the largest indoor works that he did. There are a couple of outdoor commissions that are very large, but these are the largest, and it took a long time to convince the Museum to lend it, to justify why this work must be included and the risk involved, because they're a lot more fragile than they look. The ability to bring that here and show that to audiences, I mean, it is the quite literal exclamation point at the very end of the exhibition!
That is a highlight. I do think Dora Maar with green fingernails(1936) is a highlight - I know everyone will say that, but it's such an interesting portrait, and it's so beautiful. And the tension created by that very beautiful portrait next to a sketch that he did of her in the studio, which in my mind shows that the relationship is a little bit more complicated than maybe history has relegated it to. He did see her as an artist, or he wouldn't have depicted her in her studio. And I love the juxtaposition of Dora Maar with green fingernails, just glancing in the direction of the portrait she painted of Picasso, which is far less flattering.
And I think we're well versed with Picasso in Australia, but there's been such an intense focus on Cubism. To see almost every major period represented from 1897 schoolboy sketches is pretty remarkable. I particularly enjoyed the suite of works that focuses on Madame Cezanne. She was just such an eternal muse to him. And even though he wasn't the nicest painter to his sitters, there is something so solid in that bond and he painted her more than anyone else. To see these unfinished sketches and paintings of her is another highlight.
I must say there were so many big moments in this exhibition, and there's some very small ones too, like quieter ones. I particularly enjoyed the room that had Clement Meadmore and Inge King. Tell me a little bit about that room and those sort of, quieter moments.
Well, I think that's a really lovely way to describe it because in all the different connections between Europe and Australia, that room and the Bauhaus probably offer the most direct link due to Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. He was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, found himself in England, then was declared an enemy alien there, and was eventually deported to Australia. In him, we have a man who came to Australia because of World War II, studied at the Bauhaus under Paul Klee, and later became Art Master at Geelong Grammar, teaching successive generations about the principles of the Bauhaus, which he learned directly from and then went on to teach alongside Paul Klee. And even in those smaller moments, quieter moments, the exhibition design is still quite stark. But if you take the time, underneath, there are really a whole lot of personal stories happening at a time when the world, I mean, we feel now that the world is in chaos, and for many people it is, but it's not yet, fingers crossed, a World War. Could you imagine the mass migration and panic? Just think about Hirschfeld-Mack in a concentration camp, finding the time to make art.
Adam, it's quite clear that you're very passionate about your art history. And I would imagine, as Deputy Director, you don't get a lot of time to fully engage with the things you probably love. Have you enjoyed that aspect of this exhibition?
I have loved that! I think it's actually really important. The longer you go without connecting with those elements the more disconnected you become. And even with those creative elements, there are still logistical and operational elements. If you want to display a work of art, you need to order it weeks in advance to get it shipped to the collection study room. It does keep you connected with the operations of the business and the professionals who work in those areas. It is really important.
But I've really loved this process and also working across the different perspectives of where they say they are, for example, in Germany in terms of representing social history, women, how they talk about their legacy of violence and dispossession and the Holocaust, and where we are with our discussions of First Nations, with our discussions about the representation of women. So, we spent a lot of time in these curatoriums talking about how we harmonise those two very different worldviews.
I enjoyed the opportunity, like you, to go back and revisit some art history and really think about people like Picasso again. So, finally, last thing. What is something you hope people will take away from this exhibition?
Oh, my goodness! That's such a great question. I hope people who work in the arts take away the idea that the time for just buying in show after show is over. That you can extend intellectual effort to curate something unique for Australia and Australians, and that collections we hold here are really, really important, and that you can put them alongside international works of art, which people love to see. Some people don't get to go to Europe and see them. That's important. And I think using our collections more is really, really important. I hope other arts professionals take that away. I hope people consider just how much happened in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Art history, though some people are averse to it, is actually our history. I hope people learn a little bit more about the world through what artists represent.
Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie is showing at the National Gallery of Australia until September 21, 2025.
FIND OUT MORE
