David von Becker
Paintings on Tour
Since the fall of 2020, over a hundred works of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism from the Hasso Plattner Collection have been on permanent display in the Museum Barberini, including masterpieces by Monet, Caillebotte, Renoir, and Signac. Occasionally, individual paintings will be lent to international exhibitions to support ongoing study of an artist and his oeuvre. Here you can read which of our pictures have traveled
Paul Signac, The Port at Sunset, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez), 1892
Paul Signac: The Port at Sunset, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez), 1892
This painting is part of the exhibition Face au Soleil. Un Astre dans les Arts, on view at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris from September 14, 2022, to January 19, 2023. From February 25 to June 11, 2023, the show will be presented at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam under the title The Sun: Source of Light in Art.
The point of departure for the exhibition is Claude Monet’s painting Impression. Soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which is celebrating its 150th birthday in 2022. Focusing on the motif of the sun in art, the show brings together works from a variety of epochs, cultures, and media, from the ancient vase to the twenty-first-century video. Artists represented include Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, and Otto Dix. The exhibition features three works from the Hasso Plattner Collection: this painting by Signac along with one work each by Camille Pissarro and Eugène Boudin.
This Pointillist work by Signac is composed of countless precisely placed dots of color. The port entrance of Saint-Tropez—which at that time was still a small fishing village—glows in luminous colors, an effect Signac produced by juxtaposing complementary hues of yellow and violet. The artist had discovered the south of France at the invitation of his friend Henri-Edmond Cross. He acquired a house at the seaside in Saint-Tropez and, bringing along his yacht Olympia, settled there permanently. This iconic work was painted shortly thereafter.
Camille Pissarro, View of Bazincourt, Snow Effect, Sunset, 1892
Camille Pissarro: View of Bazincourt, Snow Effect, Sunset, 1892
This painting is part of the exhibition Face au Soleil. Un Astre dans les Arts, on view at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris from September 14, 2022, to January 19, 2023. From February 25 to June 11, 2023, the show will be presented at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam under the title The Sun: Source of Light in Art.
The point of departure for the exhibition is Claude Monet’s painting Impression. Soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which is celebrating its 150th birthday in 2022. Focusing on the motif of the sun in art, the show brings together works from a variety of epochs, cultures, and media, from the ancient vase to the twenty-first-century video. Artists represented include Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, and Otto Dix. The exhibition features three works from the Hasso Plattner Collection: this painting by Pissarro along with one work each by Eugène Boudin and Paul Signac.
Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro met as young artists in London in 1870. From then on they enjoyed an intensive artists’ friendship as both of them developed their Impressionist handwriting. Through the influence of Seurat and Signac, Pissarro occasionally worked in the Pointillist style. Here, the pale sunlight bathes the sky and trees in a warm glow, while at the same time the snow-covered landscape evokes the sensation of a cold winter evening.
The same year, Pissarro painted View of Bazincourt, Sunset, which shows the same landscape with green meadows under a fiery sunset. It also belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection.
Eugène Boudin, Le Havre: Sunset on the Sea, 1885
Eugène Boudin: Le Havre: Sunset on the Sea, 1885
This painting is part of the exhibition Face au Soleil. Un Astre dans les Arts, on view at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris from September 14, 2022, to January 19, 2023. From February 25 to June 11, 2023, the show will be presented at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam under the title The Sun: Source of Light in Art.
The point of departure for the exhibition is Claude Monet’s painting Impression. Soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which is celebrating its 150th birthday in 2022. Focusing on the motif of the sun in art, the show brings together works from a variety of epochs, cultures, and media, from the ancient vase to the twenty-first-century video. Artists represented include Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, and Otto Dix. The exhibition features three works from the Hasso Plattner Collection: this painting by Boudin along with one work each by Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac.
In Le Havre: Sunset on the Sea, Eugène Boudin captures the light of the setting sun in delicate tones of yellow, orange, and pink. The luminous, whitish-yellow disk of the sun stands out on the horizon; it is the only element with sharp contours, while the other forms dissolve in the fading light. The low horizon in many of Boudin’s paintings allowed ample space for his masterful depiction of the heavens, which earned him the nickname “king of the sky.” Boudin is considered the first teacher of Claude Monet, whom he introduced to plein air painting.
Claude Monet, The Flowered Meadow, 1885
Claude Monet: The Flowered Meadow, 1885
The Museum Barberini has made this painting available to the Musée d’art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre for the exhibition The Wind. That Which Cannot Be Painted. The work will be on view there from June 25 to October 2.
In 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, where he renovated the vacant building of an old cider press (Le Pressoir) to serve his needs and those of his family. Here he was to reside until the end of his life.
Even after his move to Giverny, Monet continued to paint the rural environment along the Seine. Here he directs our gaze across the tall grass toward the children playing in the field. The meadow appeals to all of our senses. The blades of grass feel so close we could touch them; they embody the light and warmth of the spring day and evoke the fresh scent of a pasture landscape.
There is no path to lead our gaze into depth. Rather, the broad meadow and the sky framed by trees create two equally important fields of projection for the effects of the sun and the wind. This approach is typical of Monet. As he himself stated, his concern was to depict not the motifs in and of themselves, but that which surrounded them: air and light. This he described using the French word envelope — the envelope surrounding visible things.
Past loans
2022
The Museum Barberini granted this painting as a loan to the exhibition Le Décor impressionniste, which was on view at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris from March 2 to July 11, 2022.
The exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay explored the Impressionist turn to décor and decoration – a preoccupation that culminated in Claude Monet’s large-scale Water Lilies cycle at the Musée de l’Orangerie in the 1920s. In addition to numerous paintings by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others, the 80 works on display also included fans, ceramics, and works on paper. From the Hasso Plattner Collection, Monet’s Rose Bushes in the Garden at Montgeron was on view: a study for the large-scale painting Garden Corner in Montgeron (ca. 1876, State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg), commissioned by the textile magnate Ernest Hoschedé as a wall decoration for his residence, the luxurious Château de Rottembourg.
The Museum Barberini has granted this painting as a loan to the exhibition I: Max Liebermann – A European Artist. It was on view at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt from October 8, 2021, to January 8, 2022, and at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf from February 2 to May 8, 2022.
As a driving force of nineteenth-century German painting, Max Liebermann was closely connected with the wider European art scene. The painting traditions of France and the Netherlands, in particular, played a significant role in his work. The exhibition addressed Liebermann’s engagement with his European forebears and contemporaries, including Jean-François Millet and Claude Monet, and provided a direct juxtaposition with selected works. Among the numerous lenders were the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Teylers Museum in Haarlem.
This painting was granted as a loan for the exhibition The Art of Pál Szinyei Merse, which was on show at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest from November 11, 2021 to February 20, 2022.
Pál Szinyei Merse is one of the most important pioneers of modernism in Hungary. For his landscape paintings that he created in the 1870s and 1880s, he adopted the plein-air technique that had become a hallmark of French Impressionism by the end of the 19th century. The exhibition at the Szépművészeti Múzeum situated Szniyei’s work in the international context of his time, while also considering parallels with developments in France. Claude Monet’s Under the Poplars from the Hasso Plattner Collection was shown in the exhibition in a dialogue with Szniyei’s stylistically closely related work Poppy Field (1896).
This painting was granted as a loan to the exhibition Tracks to Modernity, which was on view at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels from October 15, 2021, to February 13, 2022.
Progress and modernization were central themes in the work of Gustave Caillebotte. The Argenteuil Bridge and the Seine is one of several paintings in which the Impressionists traced the rapidly advancing infrastructure in the Parisian countryside. In a radical rejection of established compositional formulas, Caillebotte has focused on just one of the metal bridge’s seven arches – an unusual pictorial arrangement that bears witness to the influence of contemporary photography. In the left-hand background, the artist included a view onto the highly modern railway bridge through which Argenteuil enjoyed a direct connection to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris since 1851. The exhibition in Brussels focused on the painterly fascination with the rapid changes brought about by the growing national and international interconnection, which the train facilitated as a new and quintessentially modern means of transportation.
2021
This painting was granted as a loan to the exhibition Caillebotte: Impressionist and Modern, which was on view at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny from June 18 to November 21, 2021.
With his participation at the second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1876, Gustave Caillebotte joined the burgeoning movement around Claude Monet. For a long time, his own contribution as a painter remained overshadowed by his fame as one of the earliest important patrons and collectors of Impressionism. The Fondation Pierre Gianadda revisited his entire development as an artist in a monographic show that assembled around 90 selected paintings. Amongst the numerous international lenders were the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Petit Palais in Geneva as well as the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. With overall six paintings, the Collection Hasso Plattner boasts the most significant holdings of works by the artist in Germany.
This painting was granted as a loan for the exhibition “Gardenside: From Monet to Bonnard", which was on view at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny from April 1 to November 1, 2021.
The garden was a key theme of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. The exhibition at the Musée des impressionnismes examined this motif at the intersection between the Impressionists around Claude Monet and the Nabi painters around Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Assembling around 100 paintings, drawings, and prints, it traced the role of the garden as the expression of a new artistic sensibility, marked by a longing for the harmonious union of man and nature. In light of his sympathies for anarchist ideals (including a belief in nature as a source of individual and social regeneration), the work of Camille Pissarro was key to this project. In addition to the painting from the Hasso Plattner Collection, the exhibition included several other important works by the artist, amongst them loans from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Musée d’art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre.
This painting was granted as a loan for the exhibition Monet in Étretat, on view at the Seattle Art Museum from July 1 to October 21, 2021.
In the 1880s, Claude Monet spent several painting stints at the Northern French fishing village of Étretat. There, he executed around 80 compositions, many of which evolved as variations around one and the same motif. Taking its cue from one of the works in its own collection (Fishing Boats at Étretat from 1885), the Seattle Art Museum explored the role of Étretat in Monet’s artistic evolution. The painting from the Hasso Plattner Collection was displayed in the context of other compositions, in which the artist focused on the dramatic rock formation of the so-called Porte d’Aval.
This painting was granted as a loan for the exhibition “Bon Voyage, Signac!”, which was on view at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne from April 16 to August 22, 2021.
With Paul Signac’s Constantinople: Yeni Djami (1909), the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne houses one of the artist’s late key works. The painting was the focus of the exhibition “Bon Voyage, Signac!”, which was laid out as an impressionist journey through the museum’s own collection and which, in addition to Signac, also included paintings by Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh. This museum’s own holdings of around 60 works were enriched by nine important Signac loans from collections in Europe and the USA, including paintings from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Museum Barberini supported the project with Signac’s The Port at Sunset (1892) – one of the first compositions the artist produced after his move to the Côte d’Azur. With a total of four works, the Hasso Plattner Collection has the most extensive holdings of Signac paintings anywhere in Germany.
To the collection