The Scharf Collection: Goya – Monet – Degas – Bonnard – Grosse

The Scharf Collection, a private German collection of 19th- and 20th-century French art and contemporary international art, is set to be presented in its entirety for the very first time.

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Detail, 1903

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Now managed by the fourth generation of the family, it maintains a branch of Berlin’s prominent Otto Gerstenberg collection, which spans the entire spectrum from the early days of modernism with Goya to the French avant-garde of the second half of the 19th century with Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Toulouse-Lautrec. Despite suffering a number of wartime losses, Gerstenberg’s daughter Margarethe Scharf was able to save most of the collection and bequeath it to her two sons Walther and Dieter Scharf.

After dividing the collection among the grandchildren, Walther Scharf, his wife Eve and son René opted to pursue the French focus and expanded the collection with works from a range of French artists including Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane have turned their focus to contemporary international art, with works including those by Sam Francis, Daniel Richter and Katharina Grosse. With their keen interest in the parameters of painting as a medium and the relationship between representational and abstract imagery, they are now bringing the family’s collecting tradition into the present.

A special exhibition of the Alte Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in cooperation with the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf

Runtime: Fri, 24/10/2025 to Sun, 01/03/2026

Takes place here:

• Alte Nationalgalerie

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