Nearly 100 modern art masterpieces by some of the world’s most celebrated artists are coming to Houston next month.
Picasso–Klee–Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen will be on view on Level 1 of the Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston May 20 through September 13, 2026. The exhibit is organized by the Museum Berggruen – Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
It marks the U.S. debut of a selection of masterworks by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and other figures of the postwar European avant-garde, assembled by the famed gallerist and collector Heinz Berggruen. The exhibit explores his relationship with the artists, literary community, and art-market network to which he was intimately connected in postwar Paris.
Berggruen was a celebrated gallery owner, the force behind Berggruen & Cie gallery on Paris’ Rue de l’Université. Between the 1940s and the 1990s, he assembled a singular collection of hundreds of modern masterworks, many of them directly from the artists, and his collection was guided by his particular tastes and affinities.
In Picasso–Klee–Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen, visitors will encounter more than 95 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures from Berggruen’s collection. The MFAH exhibition combines thematic areas of focus, including still life, portraits, the human figure, and landscapes, with in-depth presentations devoted to individual artists, highlighting the entire careers of Picasso and Klee and showcasing Matisse’s signature cutouts, Giacometti’s haunting, elongated sculptures and paintings, and drawings by Paul Cézanne and Georges Braque.
“I am honored to bring to the U.S. and to Houston these exceptional masterworks,” said Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH. “It is especially rewarding to introduce our audiences to the life and legacy of Heinz Berggruen — a pioneering art dealer, publisher, and collector whom I was privileged to know and work with for more than two decades.”
Visitors will also learn about Berggruen and his influence on the art community. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Germany, he studied literature at university and began writing about culture for German newspapers in the 1930s. He fled Nazi persecution in 1936, emigrating to the United States. By 1939, he was a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, following a stint as a freelance arts journalist.
He returned to Europe after World War II and founded his Paris gallery in 1947, representing many of the artists whose works he began to collect privately. Berggruen retired in 1980 and concentrated on expanding his collection, which he placed with the German state in 2000. Those works are now in the Museum Berggruen in Berlin-Charlottenburg as part of the Berlin State Museums/Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage. The Museum Berggruen is currently closed for renovation and its collection is touring internationally.
“This exhibition is a chance to discover some less-familiar works by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, reflecting the personal taste of a discerning collector,” said Ann Dumas, consulting curator of European art at the MFAH.
Tickets to the exhibit will be available for purchase on the MFAH website, and there will be a series of associated events, including drop in tours. More information is available online.
Image courtesy MFAH
Pablo Picasso, The Sailor, 1938, oil on canvas, Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie. © 2026 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
