Image: Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Berggruen Gallery will present ‘Defining the Century: Modern Visionaries from Picasso to Calder’, an exhibition bringing together works by ten influential artists of twentieth-century modernism. The presentation will be on view from September 10 through October 22, 2026, at the gallery’s 10 Hawthorne Street location in San Francisco. An opening reception is scheduled for September 10 from 5 to 7 p.m.
The exhibition includes Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Juan Gris, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Yves Tanguy. Berggruen Gallery describes the presentation as an “intimate glimpse” of the artists’ oeuvres, bringing together figures whose work challenged established approaches to composition, representation and artistic tradition.
According to the gallery’s press material, the exhibition is framed by the shift away from European academicism in the early 1900s, as artists increasingly turned toward emotion, symbolism and the natural world. Its account links Calder’s spatial experiments with Kandinsky’s investigations of colour and composition and Picasso’s approach to portraiture, presenting these practices as part of a broader transformation in modernist art.
Several works are identified on the exhibition page and in the gallery’s announcement. Calder’s ‘Blue Among Yellow and Red’ (1963) is made from sheet metal, wire and paint and measures 42 by 60 inches. The presentation also includes Miró’s ‘Femmes et Oiseau dans la Nuit’ (1946), an oil on canvas measuring 9 3/8 by 13 inches, and Kandinsky’s ‘Au Milieu (In der Mitte)’ (1942), an oil on board measuring 19 1/4 by 19 1/4 inches.
Picasso is represented by ‘Femme dans l’atelier’ (1956), an oil on canvas measuring 23 5/8 by 28 5/8 inches. The gallery’s announcement also highlights Fernand Léger’s ‘Composition aux Trois Profils’ (1937), an oil on canvas measuring 35 by 51 1/4 inches. The available exhibition materials do not provide a complete checklist of works for all ten artists.
The gallery’s accompanying text places Picasso and Braque’s early twentieth-century fragmentation of the canvas alongside Paul Klee’s distinctive use of colour and line, Miró’s combination of everyday and otherworldly imagery, and Kandinsky’s emphasis on the expressive potential of pure colour and form. It also cites Heinz Berggruen, the father of John Berggruen, describing the distinction between two artists in musical terms: “Picasso is a symphony; Klee chamber music.”
‘Defining the Century: Modern Visionaries from Picasso to Calder’ will be presented at Berggruen Gallery, 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, from September 10 to October 22, 2026.
