A groundbreaking exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie offers unprecedented insights into the magnificent Surrealism collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, revealing both the artistic treasures and the dramatic wartime stories behind some of the most important surrealist works of the 20th century. The show, titled "Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism. Provenances of the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection," presents 26 carefully researched works that tell the extraordinary tales of artists and artworks scattered across the world during times of persecution and war.
Visitors who were once invited to the Pietzsch collector's house in Berlin's Grunewald district found themselves face-to-face with an otherworldly assembly of surrealist masters adorning the walls. The collection brought together the entire lexicon of 20th-century Surrealism, including works by Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, his final great love, alongside pieces by the exiled Leonora Carrington who fled the Nazis to Mexico. The comprehensive collection also features masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Leonor Fini, Wifredo Lam, Victor Brauner, Hans Bellmer, Balthus, Roberto Matta, Hans Arp, Richard Oelze, Óscar Domínguez, Pierre Roy, and even Pablo Picasso, complete with an antiquarian copy of André Breton's 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism.
As Breton wrote, "Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought." He envisioned this free style of fantasy, mysticism, magic, and alchemy as a revolutionary new art form. For Heiner Pietzsch, born in Dresden, and his wife Ulla from Köpenick, this became a lifelong passion that extended far beyond personal enjoyment. In 2010, the couple donated their entire collection to the National Gallery, thereby gifting it to the state of Berlin for the future Museum of the 20th Century.
The current special exhibition tells the meticulously researched provenance stories of the most important works from this private collection, which comprises 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs valued at more than 120 million euros. The collection's breadth and quality are virtually unparalleled, and significantly, this generous donation fills crucial gaps in the State Museums Berlin's modern art holdings that were created during the Nazi era. Lisa Hackmann and Sven Haase from the Central Archive for Provenance Research spent two years examining 100 artworks, piecing together information and discoveries like puzzle pieces.
Working alongside National Gallery curator Maike Steinkamp, the researchers translated the remarkable international networks of the Surrealists into comprehensive maps stretching from Paris through Vilnius to New York. The exhibition presents these findings in three chapters that tell the story of an art movement dedicated to the超real. On the reverse sides of canvases, visitors can see customs documents and stamps, while accompanying text panels reveal the often dramatic fates of both artists and their works, sometimes reading like art crime thrillers.
The exhibition reveals the intricate web of relationships within the Surrealist circle - a melting pot of complicated friendships, delicate love affairs, and business connections. When members and their gallery dealers fled occupied France in all directions, went underground, or were interned like the German Max Ernst, some managed to take their art with them to safety. Others were forced to leave their works behind, hopefully in the care of loyal friends who would preserve them. The stories range from heartbreaking losses to remarkable rescues, showing how this art of the extraordinary survived despite being despised and fanatically persecuted by the Nazis.
Among the most persecuted artists were Max Ernst and André Masson. Masson's painting "Massacre," a shrill and cruel battle scene depicting his wartime experience at Verdun, was taken to the United States by Jewish gallery owner Paul Rosenberg during his emigration. When Rosenberg opened his New York gallery in 1941, this anti-war painting served as a powerful outcry against Hitler's crimes. Masson himself fled to the US via Martinique the same year, and when he returned to France in 1945, the painting remained with Rosenberg in the US before returning to the Galerie Leiris in Paris in 1972.
One of the most fortunate survival stories involves Masson's abstract work "Hunter," painted with pigment and sand. The piece had been confiscated in Paris and marked by Hitler's art agents with registration number KA 108 and a cross, signifying "Destroy!" However, it was discovered after the war in the collection depot at the Jeu de Paume Museum and was returned in 1947 to the emigrated Jewish collector family Kann. The family later brought the work to the art market, where Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch acquired it years later.
The Pietzschs' passion for Surrealism began in the mid-1960s when the couple met Max Ernst - the spark that ignited their collecting journey. Today, their collection represents an incomparable panorama of the Surrealist movement from the 1920s through the postwar period. The Pietzschs, who built their fortune through a plastic tarpaulin company, passionately collected Ernst's magical dream landscapes and erotic visual puzzles, along with his enigmatic combinations of motifs, frottages, and collages. They gradually added Óscar Domínguez's flowing dreamscapes, five Magritte paintings, and the soft, biomorphic forms of Yves Tanguy, whose work is so rare in German museums.
The couple tracked down works by Ernst, Miró, and Dalí at auctions, acquired Victor Brauner's suggestive motif-travesties, and over the years added the excellently painted超realities of Leonor Fini and Max Ernst's two companions, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning. They also discovered André Masson's automatic visual language and the quiet dreams of Pierre Roy. As Ulla Pietzsch emphasizes, following her husband's death in 2021, the couple approached this metaphysical art movement with art historical knowledge, never simply checking names off a list.
What mattered most was the individual impact of each work, the diversity of materials and genres, and the relationships between pieces that made visible the unconscious, the uncanny, chance, the irrational, as well as the repressed, dreams, and the pleasure found in fear. These works rebelliously broke through conventions and clichés, creating new visual languages for expressing the human experience. The collection demonstrates how Surrealism served as both an artistic revolution and a form of psychological exploration.
This context makes Heiner Pietzsch's emotional words on the day of the collection's donation all the more meaningful: "The Surrealists belong in Berlin! Here, the Nazis banned, expelled, and destroyed modernism. With a Museum of the 20th Century, the postwar era would finally come to an end." Just days ago, the topping-out ceremony was celebrated at the construction site at the Kulturforum, marking a significant milestone toward realizing this vision.
The exhibition "Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism" continues at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin through March 1, 2026, offering visitors a unique opportunity to experience both the artistic brilliance of the Surrealist movement and the remarkable human stories of survival, loss, and cultural preservation during one of history's darkest periods.
