Image: Joyce Varvatos, New York
Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco is presenting “Defining the Century: Modern Visionaries from Picasso to Calder”, a focused group exhibition of work by ten leading figures of 20th-century modernism. The show opened on 10 September and runs until 22 October 2026.
The exhibiting artists are Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Juan Gris, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Yves Tanguy. The gallery describes the selection as an intimate look at the bodies of work of some of the century’s most influential artists.
The exhibition frames these artists against the academic conventions that dominated European art in the early 1900s, when many turned instead to emotion, symbolism and nature as sources. The gallery points to the moment in Paris in 1907 when Picasso and Braque broke up the picture plane to show several viewpoints at once. It also highlights Klee’s rhythmic handling of color and line, Miró’s combination of the everyday and the dreamlike, Kandinsky’s conviction that pure color and form could carry spiritual meaning, Calder’s experiments with space and Picasso’s approach to portraiture.
Works listed on the gallery’s exhibition page range from 1918 to 1971. They include Gris’s oil “Arlequin à la Guitare” (1918), Klee’s watercolor and ink on linen “Unerfülltes” (1930), Léger’s “Composition aux Trois Profils” (1937) and Kandinsky’s “Au Milieu (In der Mitte)” (1942). Later pieces include Tanguy’s “Les Sourciers” (1945), Miró’s “Femmes et Oiseau dans la Nuit” (1946) and “Femmes devant la Lune” (1971), Braque’s oil and sand painting “La Caisse Verte” (1952) and Picasso’s “Femme dans l’atelier” (1956).
Calder is represented by two works in sheet metal and wire: the standing “Petit mobile sur pied” (1953) and “Blue Among Yellow and Red” (1963), which measures 42 by 60 inches. The selected works on the page do not include a piece by Matisse, although he is named among the exhibiting artists.
The gallery has also released a video walkthrough of the installation with John Berggruen, alongside installation photographs by Shaun Roberts.
