BELLAS ARTES

Berggruen’s collection with more than one hundred masterpieces is a spectacular tribute to the foresight of this major player in the Paris art market during the second half of the twentieth century. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1914, he went into exile in California on the eve of World War II. He became art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and assistant to the director of the San Francisco MoMA. After the war, Berggruen returned to Europe, first to Munich as a journalist, then to Paris where he worked at the UNESCO headquarters before becoming an art dealer specialized in the graphic arts of modern artists. He quickly established contacts within the Parisian cultural scene, meeting both the artists he would represent and the poets, dealers, historians, critics, and collectors of the day. Guided by his personal tastes, he built a solid collection of twentieth-century works now housed at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin spanning the careers of Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee and including Henri Matisse’s collages and Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures. The vast ensemble was exhibited at the Orangerie in 2024 and is housed in the Berggruen Museum/Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin.

Over her thirty-year career, celebrated designer Jo Thompson has become recognised for her timeless planting, well-proportioned, English-style gardens rendered modern by a staunch commitment to biodiversity to the eye this translates as a looser formality than English gardens of the past, though every bit as romantic.

Ottavi enjoyed a rare degree of open and candid access to Lagerfeld in his later years, and this biography offers an unparalleled look into the iconic designer’s complex personality and wide-ranging creativity. Lagerfeld himself wanted this to be a frank, honest, serious account that would be an invaluable resource for fashion lovers and admirers of his incomparable legacy. Unlike other recent books, this intimate portrait deftly reveals his true inner nature in his own words.

Schestowitz is a strong believer that a home should create a sense of belonging and togetherness. Growing up, she developed an appreciation for harmonizing diverse styles, placing a modern stainless steel island by an old dining area, an African dresser next to an Eames chair. Schestowitz is not a follower of design guidelines; she believes in an intuitive harmony of space, color, and light. The spaces she creates are infused with travel collectibles, art acquisitions, family pieces, and historical patterns. The rich palettes and bold patterns create spaces that feel naturally inviting and intimate, a result of her long-standing exploration of Mediterranean style.

The impressionists were forever inspired by the sea, which Claude Monet considered “a wonderful teacher for landscape artists.” The movement’s penchant for plein air painting and its characteristic style, with delicate brushstrokes and incomparable color palettes, was perfectly suited to portrayals of the sea and its perpetual movement, from gently rippling waves to raging storms.

An encounter with Gerhard Richter, the German artist who widened horizons in the relationship between painting and reality. From early photographic paintings, along with his famous RAF cycle, to late abstract paintings, experiencing Richter’s work always offers us the unexpected and unseen. Where he once set out to liberate the medium from ideological ballast, today, faced with the overwhelming presence of digital images, he shows us the unsurpassed impact and intensity of painting. A definitive introduction to one of the greatest artists of our time spanning not only his entire career, but also 50 years of cultural, economic, and political events.