The Old National Gallery in Berlin is currently showcasing the remarkable Scharf Collection, spanning from the French theatrical world of the late 19th century to contemporary art. This significant painting collection, owned by the Scharf-Gerstenberg family for four generations, reveals what makes French art so uniquely captivating and provocative. The exhibition features 148 works that demonstrate how Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art was once considered revolutionary and dangerous.

Impressionists are always popular today, but there was a time, particularly in Germany, when they were completely rejected. Displaying or collecting such works was a bold statement that provoked the guardians of academicism, who viewed these artists with deep suspicion. They saw the color-drenched works of painters like Auguste Renoir as a Trojan horse, threatening to inject corrupting influence into the healthy German artistic tradition. Kaiser Wilhelm II himself railed against what he called "gutter art" that was beginning to spread in his capital city.

The controversy reached the highest levels of German cultural institutions when Hugo von Tschudi, director of the National Gallery, began acquiring French works around 1900. His actions inspired others in the provinces, including Count Harry Kessler, who invited French artists and even controversial writers like André Gide to Weimar. While Kessler was eventually dismissed by the Grand Duke of Thuringia, the movement toward progressive, internationally-minded art seemed unstoppable in Berlin.

Among the pioneering collectors was Otto Gerstenberg (1848-1935), the successful founder of Viktoria Insurance Company and a businessman with cultural ambitions. Working parallel to Tschudi, Gerstenberg purchased cutting-edge works from the Paris art market through his agents. Before World War I, he had assembled the world's largest and most complete collection of graphic works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died in 1901 at just 37 years old.

This collection remains the most extensive body of work by the artist who, more than any other 19th-century painter, made the hedonistic fringes of society suitable for salons and galleries. Toulouse-Lautrec depicted clowns, dancers, singers, prostitutes, street performers, and others who had abandoned bourgeois respectability and heteronormativity. As a descendant of one of France's oldest noble families, he counted himself among these social outcasts. Remarkably, this collection not only came to Germany but has remained with the same family for four generations, now under the stewardship of René Scharf and his wife Christiane.

The Scharf-Gerstenbergs' collecting philosophy has always emphasized contextualizing their core holdings. They traced the lineage of innovative, rebellious French 19th-century art both backward into history and forward to contemporary times. Otto Gerstenberg correctly understood that the Impressionists emerged from socially critical corners of the art world, inspired by artists like Honoré Daumier, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Courbet, who had each challenged the establishment in their own ways.

Gerstenberg's early collection included a grotesque gallery of 19 bronze heads of French politicians from the era of early capitalist July Monarchy, as well as works by revolutionary Gustave Courbet. During the 1871 Paris Commune, Courbet ordered the destruction of the great column on Place Vendôme, crowned with Napoleon's statue, as a symbol against tyrannical rule. The counter-revolution imprisoned him for this act. One of his famous still lifes painted in dark tones while imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie prison in Paris now hangs in the Old National Gallery, alongside his portrait of philosopher Trapadoux, who sits in a cell-like chamber reading an album with evident displeasure.

The collection continues through the Post-Impressionist period, following the path of subversive innovations. It reflects the Cubism of Paris-based painters like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris, while also turning to colorist abstract artists, particularly Maurice Estève. Since 1945, the focus has expanded internationally to include parallel developments by Americans like Sam Francis and Jasper Johns, extending to contemporary Germans such as Katharina Grosse and Anselm Reyle.

Pierre Bonnard, often misunderstood as someone who continued the cheerful approach of first-generation Impressionists in a flatter style, reveals darker complexities in this exhibition. His large-format work "The Big Bathtub," which greets visitors first, demonstrates that the Post-Impressionist born in 1867 was not a painter of happiness. The recent biographical film "The Bonnards" by Martin Provost illustrates that the idyll of Le Cannet above Cannes, where Pierre lived with his wife Marthe, was far from the paradise he depicted in many paintings.

In "The Big Bathtub," a woman lies in the tub, presumably Marthe, but the faceless, delicate body appears preserved in murky liquid, trapped within itself and emanating a sinister aura. Rarely has human depressive disorder been portrayed so disturbingly as in this strange portrait Bonnard painted of his life companion, who opened her veins in the bathtub. Once attuned to this perspective, viewers see Bonnard's interiors and still lifes differently, noting how objects huddle together while vast white foregrounds remain empty and desolate.

The exhibition offers numerous such discoveries, including a small tribute to Berlin hidden in a large poster by Toulouse-Lautrec advertising Victor Joze's novel "Babylon Germany." It shows a Berlin policeman in a spiked helmet gazing longingly at a blonde mounted officer, combining German militarism with what the French then called "vice allemand" (German vice), their euphemism for homosexuality. This pleased the graphic documentarian of Montmartre's dissolute life, who also grandly depicted a lesbian couple from the demimonde looking lovingly at each other in a theater box as if they were royalty.

The Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection has been known in Berlin primarily for its Surrealism holdings, housed in a separate building opposite Charlottenburg Palace. Now the Old National Gallery opens the curtain on an even more complex spectacle: the world theater of 19th-century France and its capital. This extensive presentation of "Douce France" and its bitter underside represents the most comprehensive such exhibition Berlin has seen in years, running until February 15, 2026.