David von Becker
Welcome in Potsdam!
New Monets in the Hasso Plattner Collection
In a special show, the Museum Barberini presents new works from the Hasso Plattner Collection. Four virtually unknown paintings by Claude Monet enrich the Impressionist holdings of the museum, which now boasts 107 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. With thirty-eight paintings by Monet, the collection represents the largest group of the artist’s works in Europe outside of Paris.
Four new paintings by Claude Monet join the Impressionist holdings of the Museum Barberini as permanent loans from the Hasso Plattner Foundation. Painted between 1874 and 1901, the works show a representative cross-section of Monet’s oeuvre, which constituted the focus of the 2020 exhibition Monet: Places at the Museum Barberini in cooperation with the Denver Art Museum.
Claude Monet: The Pond, Snow Effect, 1874/75, Hasso Plattner Collection
The paintings The Pond, Snow Effect (1874–75), The Ball-Shaped Tree, Argenteuil (1876), The Apple Tree (1879), and Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1901–03) were previously held in private collections and were virtually inaccessible to the public.
Houses of Parliament, Sunset und The Apple Tree were exhibited in 1904 and 1906 in Berlin, where they were presented by Paul Cassirer before being sold to American buyers. The newly acquired winter landscape has been exhibited only once before, in Paris in 1879. The painting from the series of the Houses of Parliament was last shown in public in 1976.
Claude Monet: The Ball-Shaped Tree, Argenteuil, 1876, Hasso Plattner Collection
Claude Monet: The Apple Tree, 1879, Hasso Plattner Collection
“The fact that a work as important as Houses of Parliament, Sunset has not been exhibited for almost thirty years shows what a momentous acquisition this is for the Museum Barberini. The four new paintings also represent new discoveries for scholars of Impressionism. To now be allowed to permanently exhibit them in the Museum Barberini is a sensation—in the best sense of the word,” says museum director Dr. Ortrud Westheider.
Dr. Daniel Zamani, curator of nineteenth-century French painting at the Museum Barberini, notes: “Other paintings from this series are found in the Kaiser Wilhelm-Museum in Krefeld, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Kunsthaus Zürich. The fact that we now have a painting from this series will enable the Museum Barberini to expand its network for international exhibition projects.”
Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1900-1903, Hasso Plattner Collection
The Hasso Plattner Collection now includes important examples from three of Monet’s series: the grainstacks, the water lilies, and now a piece from the nineteen-painting series of the Houses of Parliament, which Monet began in London during three trips to the city from 1899 to 1901 and completed in Giverny.
Currently on view in a room of their own, the new acquisitions will soon take their place in the thematic display of the collection in the Museum Barberini. The collection shows how artists from three generations—Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, and Fauves—created a new kind of landscape painting based on a trust in their own perception.