Monet – Cézanne – Matisse
The Scharf Collection
Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf
March 12 – August 9, 2026
River Landscape with Houses, circa 1904
Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm
© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign
Young woman with flowered hat, 1877-1879
Pastels on paper, 48 × 43 cm
© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign
The Scharf Collection – a German private collection of French art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and international contemporary art – is being presented for the first time.
It continues the fourth generation of a branch of the renowned Otto Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin, which encompasses everything from the beginnings of modernism, represented by Francisco de Goya, to the French avant-garde of the second half of the nineteenth century, represented by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Despite many wartime losses, Gerstenberg’s daughter Margarethe Scharf was able to save the majority of the collection and bequeath it to her two sons Walther and Dieter Scharf.
Following the division of the collection between the grandchildren, Walther Scharf, his wife Eve and son René developed the French focus further and added works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, among others.
Waterloo Bridge, 1903
Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm
© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign
Vase with flowers, 1933
Oil on canvas, 99.5 x 48.5 cm
© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign
Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane Scharf specialise in international contemporary artists, including works by Sam Francis, Daniel Richter and Katharina Grosse. With a particular interest in the boundaries of the medium of painting and the relationship between figurative and abstract pictorial worlds, they have brought the family tradition of collecting into the present day.
An exhibition by the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
KUNSTPALAST, DUSSELDORF
Ehrenhof 4-5, 40479 Düsseldorf
