The Scharf Collection Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Seated Clown, Miss Chao-U-Kao, from the series Elles – 1st plate, lithograph, black on vellum © The Scharf Collection, Photo: Peter Tijhuis

The Scharf Collection is one of the most significant private art collections in Germany. This exhibition is the first to showcase the collection which primarily consists of French art from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as international contemporary artworks. It presents a selection of some 150 items, including prominent artworks by the likes of Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, and takes visitors on a journey through the collection: from Goya and French Realism to the French Impressionists and Cubists to contemporary art. One special highlight is a selection of prints by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which have been fully preserved in the collection.

The Scharf Collection is a direct continuation of what was once Otto Gerstenberg’s extensive private Berlin-based art collection, which encompassed the dawn of modernism with artworks by Goya to the pioneers of the French avant-garde with works by Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas. Gerstenberg’s daughter Margarethe Scharf was able to preserve the majority of the collection despite considerable war losses suffered during the Second World War. His grandsons Walther and Dieter Scharf each went on to establish their own collections based on the artworks that had been bequeathed to them, with Dieter Scharf focussing on surrealism. His collection has been on permanent loan to the Nationalgalerie in the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg since 2008.

Walther Scharf and his wife Eve – in collaboration with their son René – further consolidated the French focus of the collection, acquiring works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane have shifted their focus to contemporary art and harbour a particular interest in the ways in which the medium of painting has expanded over time and the relationship between representational and abstract imagery. Against this backdrop, René and Christiane Scharf continue to modernise the family tradition of art collecting by acquiring works by Sam Francis, Sean Scully, Daniel Richter and Katharina Grosse.