Monet – Cézanne – Matisse. The Scharf Collection

Artists

Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard

Press release

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. 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.