200 Years of Art from the Scharf Collection

One of the season’s most anticipated artistic events in Genoa will bring the renowned Scharf Collection to the Palazzo Ducale.

From October 15, 2026, to May 2, 2027, the exhibition ” Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne. 200 Years of Art from the Scharf Collection” will offer the Italian public an unmissable opportunity to discover up close over 140 masterpieces from a prestigious private collection that has long remained secret. Curated by Ilaria Bonacossa, director of Palazzo Ducale, and produced in close collaboration between The Scharf Collection and MondoMostre, the exhibition arrives in Italy building on the extraordinary response it received in its only two previous international tours, at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.

Visiting the exhibition “Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne” is like embarking on a true journey through the history of art, exploring a living legacy that intertwines great painting with the human and cultural events of Europe over the past two centuries. Founded and nurtured over time by a family of German collectors passionate about French art, the Scharf Collection embodies a vision of a united and borderless Europe ante litteram , capable of overcoming national barriers and geopolitical tensions through the universal value of culture.

Born in Berlin at the height of the Modernist avant-garde, the collection has maintained a narrative of rare coherence over the decades, grounded in a continuous dialogue between form, light, and color. Few art collections have so directly traversed the dramas and transformations of the twentieth century: from the optimism of the Belle Époque to the tragedies of both world wars, from the works rescued from the Nazis to their confiscation by the Red Army as spoils of war, all the way to postwar reconstruction and the birth of a globalized contemporary art system. Beyond the historical and artistic value of the individual paintings, each exhibited work carries with it a rich history of resistance, displacement, and extraordinary acts of care.

The exhibition unfolds chronologically, beginning with Francisco Goya ‘s etchings and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot ‘s life studies , delving into the plein air revolution of the great masters of Impressionism. Monet, Renoir, and Degas transformed light and color into the canvas’s undisputed protagonists, paving the way for Paul Cézanne ‘s Post-Impressionism and the refined experiments of Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, imbued with Eastern influences. The exhibition then unfolds through Henri Matisse ‘s expressive exploration of the body and color , while the Cubist decompositions of Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger paved the way for the linguistic freedom of the late twentieth century. From Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, the itinerary culminates in the languages ​​of contemporary art with works by masters such as Sam Francis, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Daniel Richter, Tony Cragg and Katharina Grosse.