In a solo show, the Museum Barberini presents the new works from the Hasso Plattner Collection. Four virtually unknown paintings by Claude Monet expand the Potsdam art museum’s Impressionist focus with its now 107 Impressionist paintings. With 38 paintings by Monet, it shows the largest complex of works by this artist in Europe outside of Paris. The museum is celebrating the new acquisitions with a reduced ticket summer special: from July 15th to August 31st 2022, visitors pay only ten euros daily from 4 pm to 7 pm and a reduced fee of eight euros to visit the Impressionism collection and the current exhibition “The Form of Freedom. International Abstraction after 1945”.
Image above: Claude Monet, The Parliament, Sunset, 1901-1903, Hasso Plattner Collection
Four new paintings by Claude Monet are on permanent loan from the Hasso Plattner Foundation to complement the Museum Barberini’s Impressionist holdings. They were painted between 1874 and 1901 and form a representative cross-section of Claude Monet’s work, to which the Museum Barberini, in cooperation with the Denver Art Museum, dedicated the exhibition Monet. Places. The paintings The Pond in the Snow (1874/75), The Spherical Tree in Argenteuil (1876), The Apple Tree (1879) and The Parliament, Sunset (1901-03) were previously in private collections and were not, or hardly, open to the public. Das Parlament, Sonnenuntergang and Der Apfelbaum were on view in Berlin in 1904 and 1906. Paul Cassirer presented them here before they were sold to the USA. The newly acquired Snow Landscape has only been exhibited once so far, in Paris in 1879, and the painting from the Houses of Parliament series was last on public display in 1976.
“The fact that such an important work as Das Parlament. Sunset was exhibited for the last time almost 30 years ago shows the significance of this acquisition for the Museum Barberini. The four new paintings are also new discoveries for Impressionism researchers. To be able to show them permanently in the Museum Barberini is a sensation – in the most beautiful sense of the word.
Ortrud Westheider, Museum Director
The museum is celebrating the arrival of the new acquisitions with a reduced ticket summer special: from July 15th to August 31st 2022, visitors to the museum will pay only ten euros daily from 4 pm to 7 pm and eight euros for a reduced fee.
With this painting from the 19-work series of the Houses of Parliament, three of Monet’s series of important examples are now represented in the Hasso Plattner Collection: the ricks of grain, the water lilies, and now a painting from the series begun during three painting campaigns between 1899 and 1901 in London and completed in Giverny.
“Other paintings from this series are in the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Kunsthaus Zürich. The fact that we now own a painting from this series with this work will enable the Museum Barberini to make further connections for international exhibition projects.”
Daniel Zamani, Curator of 19th Century French Painting at the Museum Barberini
Currently presented in a separate room, the new acquisitions will soon take their places in the thematic rooms of the collection presentation at Museum Barberini. The collection shows how artists from three generations – Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists and Fauvists – created a new landscape painting based on trust in their own perception. But the history of Impressionism is also placed in the context of its models: “Monet was inspired by William Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. This is shown by three of his paintings in Venice in the Museum Barberini as well as now the painting of Westminster Palace with the dramatic sunset in the typical London smog, which had already fascinated Turner,” says Ortrud Westheider.
Daniel Zamani highlights how the paintings in the collection enter into a dialogue: “In the context of the paintings by Alfred Sisley in the Hasso Plattner Collection, the new Snow Landscape shows how the artist friends pursued an Impressionist joint project – an artist collective from the very beginning”.
The Prolog Collection website, the online collection on the website and the publication Impressionism. The Hasso Plattner Collection provide further information on Impressionist artist friendships, early collectors and supporters, connections with the natural sciences and the provenance of the works. The painting The Parliament. Sunset will have a central place in next year’s exhibition (February 25th to June 11th 2023) Sun. Source of Light in Art, which Michael Philipp, chief curator of the Museum Barberini, is organising in cooperation with the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
In addition to the Impressionism collection, the Museum Barberini is currently showing the exhibition The Form of Freedom. International Abstraction after 1945. The show explores the creative interplay between Abstract Expressionism and Informal painting in transatlantic exchange and dialogue from the mid-1940s to the end of the Cold War. On display are around 100 works by some 50 artists, including Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, K. O. Götz, Lee Krasner, Georges Mathieu, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Judit Reigl, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Among the more than 30 international lenders are the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate in London, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
WHEN?
Ticket Summer Special (10€ and reduced 8€): Friday, 15. July to Wednesday, 31. August 2022 – 4:00 to 7:00 pm
Opening hours: Daily except Tuesdays – 10 am to 7 pm
WHERE?
Museum Barberini, Alter Markt
Humboldtstraße 5–6
14467 Potsdam