British Art of the Berardo Collection

The Berardo Collection brings together a number of remarkable works highlighting key moments that have marked the history of 20th century art and which, through various movements and protagonists, allow a broad and judicious reading of the development of the visual arts up to the beginning of the 21st century.

The emergence of the first avant-gardes at the beginning of the last century brought countless, previously unimaginable, aesthetic possibilities with enormous repercussions for subsequent Western art. It was a period characterised by discontinuities and ruptures that were central to 20th century artistic culture; and the diversity of the Berardo Collection, showcases the enormous creativity, complexity and contradictions of the visual arts from this era.

The Berardo Collection brilliantly exemplifies the dialectic, conflict and ultimately, the relationship, between abstraction and figuration throughout the 20th century. Taken as a whole, this collection serves as a powerful psychological record of the modern state of mind in all its ambivalence.

In British Art – Convergence, two major collections come together: the Gulbenkian Collection and the Berardo Collection. Due to the enormous richness, diversity and complementary of the different works they possess, these collections allow a fascinating reading of 20th century British art, opening up multiple opportunities to understand the clashes between its different components and sensibilities.

For this project, we selected works by artists from the so-called historical avant-garde – Constructivists, Abstract-Creationists and Surrealists – who have shaped the history of art. Artists such as Ella Bergmann-Michel, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Laszlo Peri, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Ben Nicholson, Peter Josef, Keneth Martin, Paule Vézelay, Eileen Agar, Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and Roland Penrose, challenged the traditional canon – the illusion of representing the world through perspective – in favour of new experiments, such as the geometrisation of forms in non-figurative painting, collages and assemblages, which completely changed the concept of the work of art, its nature and its function. The aim was no longer to faithfully reproduce the reality of the world, but to give artists the chance to express themselves and to question the processes and purpose of art.

This presentation also includes works representing movements and artists emerging in the post-war period: the Return to Figuration, Abstraction, Kinetic Art, Pop Art and Conceptualism. Some of these artists worked on the tension between abstraction and figuration, developing their works from the research of the early avant-gardes. While in the immediate post-war period, and throughout the 1950s, abstraction was the dominant language of Western art, the economic recovery and the establishment of a consumer society and mass culture led to the emergence of artistic languages that offered a critical commentary on the new urban reality. Artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Francis Bacon, R.B. Kitaj, Jann Haworth and Peter Blake reflected this quality in their works, developing personal techniques of representation.

Reading all these intersections reveals the enormous plurality and richness of the visual arts in the UK, to which this exhibition is intended to bear witness.

Rita Lougares
Curator