A New San Francisco Gallery Woos Tech’s Elite

John and Gretchen Berggruen expand to reach the city's small but growing art market.

When John Berggruen told his father, Heinz, that he was going to open his own gallery in San Francisco, the celebrated German art dealer replied, “Son, you’re out of your mind.” John recalls, “What it really meant was…San Francisco was the end of the world in terms of a collector base.”

That was in 1969. Forty-seven years and a series of tech booms later, Mr. Berggruen and his wife, Gretchen, have expanded their gallery from a small walk-up space selling prints on Grant Avenue to a completely renovated three-story, 10,000-square-foot space in a historic building on Hawthorne Street, across from the renovated and expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The new gallery sits in the center of the city’s growing arts hub, which includes the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Around the time the Berggruens announced they were going to open their space, Larry Gagosian announced plans for a gallery next door, which has already opened. 

The Berggruen Gallery will open Jan. 13 with an exhibition called The Human Form, featuring works starting in the early 20th century. Henri Matisse, Lucian Freud and contemporary artists such as George Condo will be represented. The 50 works range from Pablo Picasso’s 1907 “Yellow Nude,” an angular, figurative watercolor, to James Crosby’s 2016 “Deconstructed Hoodie,” a conceptual piece consisting of a hood covered in cement. The show will end on March 4.

Three works come from the Berggruens’ private collection, two from institutions and the others from friends. The Human Form, as Mrs. Berggruen tells it, shows the range of possibilities in both representational and abstract depictions of the figure, as well as how artists capture personality. Even though the exhibit is structured chronologically across the gallery’s three floors, the goal, the Berggruens say, is to provide unexpected comparisons between artists of different eras.