Image: Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
DÜSSELDORF — Visitors to Museum Kunstpalast have until 9 August 2026 to see 'Monet – Cézanne – Matisse. The Scharf Collection', a presentation that brings together around 180 works from the 19th century to the present. The exhibition features major names including Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Henri Matisse, and the museum says it traces the breadth of a private collection that had previously been shown only anonymously and through a limited number of loans.
The Kunstpalast’s newsletter describes the show as one of the museum’s current headline attractions in the run-up to a busy late-summer and autumn programme. It says the Scharf Collection has been assembled over four generations, and that the exhibition has been shaped from a diverse body of works to allow both “high-calibre” pieces by world-famous artists and room for new discoveries. In the newsletter, Kathrin DuBois, who leads the museum’s painting collection up to 1900, calls the building of such a collection over four generations a remarkable example of passionate collecting.
The exhibition title foregrounds Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, but the presentation extends beyond those names to show the range of the Scharf Collection across nearly two centuries. According to the museum’s materials, that range includes works from the early 19th century through to contemporary art, positioning the collection as more than a canonical survey of modern French painting. The emphasis on both major figures and lesser-known works suggests a display structured around the internal history of the collection as much as around any single art-historical period.
The final days of 'Monet – Cézanne – Matisse. The Scharf Collection' also mark a transition in the Kunstpalast’s programme. The newsletter notes that the museum is preparing to open 'Made in Düsseldorf #8. In Szene gesetzt' in cooperation with the Kunst- und Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf, followed in September by a new exhibition dedicated to Niki de Saint Phalle. The Scharf Collection therefore closes as part of a wider sequence of exhibitions already visible in the museum’s current programming.
The Kunstpalast website confirms the Scharf Collection’s dates as 12 March to 9 August 2026, and the museum’s ticketing pages list the exhibition among its current offerings during that period. Museum Kunstpalast is located in Düsseldorf’s Ehrenhof and presents the show alongside its broader programme of exhibitions, collection displays and events.
For viewers who want to see the works before they come down, the museum is treating the August deadline as the last opportunity to encounter the Scharf Collection in its Düsseldorf presentation. The exhibition remains open at the Kunstpalast until 9 August 2026.
