Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne

200 Years of Art from The Scharf Collection

The Palazzo Ducale in Genoa announces its upcoming exhibition season: “Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne – 200 Years of Art from The Scharf Collection,” running from October 16, 2026, to May 2, 2027, will bring over 140 masterpieces to Italy for the first time, from a collection that has long remained private.

Thanks to a collaboration with The Scharf Collection and MondoMostre, the Palazzo Ducale Foundation in Genoa will be able to offer its visitors a journey through two centuries of art history, through a selection of works curated by the director of the Genoese institution, Ilaria Bonacossa: in addition to the masters mentioned in the exhibition’s title, works ranging from Goya to Tony Cragg and Katharina Grosse – including Corot, Bonnard, Matisse, and Léger, bearing witness to the significant and complex developments in the history of collecting over the past century.

Ranked among Germany’s most significant private collections, The Scharf Collection spans from Goya to Realism, through Impressionism, Cubism, and contemporary art. Its history is a family legacy spanning generations: it originated from Otto Gerstenberg’s famous Berlin collection, which focused on the pioneers of Modernism and the French avant-garde. His daughter, Margarethe Scharf, managed to save the core of the collection during World War II. Her grandsons, Walther and Dieter Scharf, each developed a separate branch of the collection. Dieter’s collection, which focuses on Surrealism, has been on permanent loan to The Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection in Charlottenburg since 2008.

Walther Scharf, his wife Eve, and their son René expanded the French section of the collection with works by Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane Scharf carry on the tradition into the present by collecting modern and contemporary art (including works by Sam Francis, Sean Scully, Daniel Richter, and Katharina Grosse), with a focus on the evolution of painting and the dialogue between figurative and abstract art.