Monet – Cézanne – Matisse

The Scharf Collection goes back to a branch of the renowned Berlin collection of Otto Gerstenberg (1848–1935). Around 1900, he began to collect art on a grand scale. He soon expanded his collection with 19th-century European painting by artists such as Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and Gustave Courbet, before turning to the art of his contemporaries. He amassed high-quality works by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Auguste Renoir, among others, which established the current Scharf Collection’s focus on French Impressionism.

The current Scharf Collection goes back to the family branch of Walther Scharf, who, together with his wife Eve and their son René, continued the French focus and added key works to the collection. These include Monet's Waterloo Bridge (1903), part of a series of some forty paintings showing the famous London bridge in constantly changing colors and light. Pierre Bonnard's intimate painting The Large Bathtub (1937/39), which shows his wife Marthe lying in a bathtub, was also added. With Matisse's artist's book Jazz (1947), an icon of modernism is represented, combining twenty of his characteristic paper cut-outs.

René Scharf expanded the core of the collection with works of classical modernism and Abstract Expressionism, such as those by Sam Francis. Today, René and his wife Christiane Scharf also focus on contemporary art, thus continuing the family's collecting tradition into the present. Recent acquisitions include international positions such as Robert Longo and Sean Scully, as well as artists from the emerging Berlin art scene. They illustrate the diversity of contemporary painting in its handling of color and form.

The interest in the possibilities of painting characterizes the acquisitions across all four generations of collectors. The Scharf Collection thus also shows how artists continually learn from each other, relate to each other, and develop artistic ideas. The chronological tour through the eleven exhibition rooms of the Scharf Collection thus becomes a journey of discovery through different artistic approaches – and the idea that renewal rarely arises from a break with the old, but rather builds upon it.

An exhibition by the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Curator: Kathrin DuBois, Head of Painting Collection up to 1900, Kunstpalast