Over four generations, one German family built a sprawling collection of European masterpieces. Now, those artworks are on public display for the first time.
Titled “The Scharf Collection: Goya—Monet—Cézanne—Bonnard—Grosse,” the exhibition is on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin through February 15, 2026. It spotlights about 150 artworks by renowned painters across three centuries, including old masters like Francisco Goya, Impressionists like Claude Monet, modernists like Pablo Picasso and contemporary artists like Germany’s Katharina Grosse.
“We go from Goya to Grosse,” said René Scharf, the current owner of the collection, at the exhibition’s opening, per the Associated Press’ Geir Moulson.
Scharf said he hopes visitors will draw connections between artworks from different time periods and genres—such as how Monet’s hazy blue Waterloo Bridge (1903) informs Grosse’s works, which were created a century later.
The exhibition begins with etchings by Goya, such as his series Disasters of War (1810-1820), according to Euronews’ Leticia Batista Cabanas. It continues through Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Finally, the show ends with modern and contemporary artworks, such as Daniel Richter’s We’ll Never Stop Living This Way (2009).
In addition to seeing renowned artworks in person, visitors will “dive deep into the historical developments” and “learn about the different personalities who have been collecting and preserving the collection,” Anette Hüsch, director of the Alte Nationalgalerie, tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred.
The collection was started by Scharf’s great-grandfather, Otto Gerstenberg, who led a life insurance company in Berlin. Born in 1848, Gerstenberg began his art collection by acquiring prints by old masters like Albrecht Dürer, Goya and Rembrandt, according to the museum. Around 1900, he started collecting French impressionists like Monet and Edgar Degas. As his interests continued to expand, he acquired a large collection of art by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and some of these works are “a centerpiece of the show,” per the AP.
When Gerstenberg died in 1935, he had collected some 2,200 artworks. During World War II, some pieces were destroyed by air raids or looted by Russian soldiers, but his daughter, Margarethe Scharf, saved most of the collection. In 1961, the surviving artworks went to her sons, Walther and Dieter Scharf, who incorporated them into their own art collections.
Dieter developed an interest in Surrealists like Salvador Dalí, while Walther and his wife, Eve, maintained a focus on 19th-century French art, according to Artnet. The couple added more Impressionist paintings by Monet, Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, along with works by Post-Impressionists like Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard. Their son, René Scharf, is the current owner of the collection. René and his wife, Christiane, have since added contemporary paintings by artists such as Grosse, Richter and Sam Francis.
The family has loaned individual pieces from the collection to museums, but many of the artworks in the exhibition have never been publicly displayed. As Scharf tells the AP, when the Alte Nationalgalerie first contacted him about showing the collection, “We asked ourselves, ‘What happens if we do nothing?’ Then maybe 30, 40 or 50 people per year will see the collection, and only a very small part of it, because we can’t hang everything at home.”
In the end, the family decided that the artworks should be displayed for anyone who wants to see them. “The collection deserves to be seen publicly,” he says.
“The Scharf Collection: Goya—Monet—Cézanne—Bonnard—Grosse” is on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin through February 15, 2026.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/author/sonja-anderson/
