Museum Barberini

The Palazzo Barberini in Potsdam was built in 1771 to Frederick the Great's order as a copy of a Roman palace facade, destroyed in 1945 and left as an empty site for decades. The software entrepreneur Hasso Plattner funded a reconstruction, opened in 2017 as a museum, and in 2020 placed his collection there permanently, including over thirty Monets, the largest group outside Paris, along with Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Signac. The museum also shows East German painting and runs large temporary exhibitions. In 2022 two visitors threw mashed potato at a Monet in a climate protest; the picture was behind glass and unharmed.

Background

Ortrud Westheider directs the museum, whose range runs from the Old Masters to contemporary art, with impressionist painting at its centre. Each year it stages three temporary exhibitions, prepared through academic conferences and built on loans from museums and private collections abroad, while shorter displays called "art histories" place works from the collection in changing contexts. The opening year of 2017 brought four major shows. Later came a Beckmann retrospective in 2018 with more than 110 works, a Gerhard Richter show on abstraction in summer 2018 with around 80 works, the first retrospective in Germany of Henri-Edmond Cross from November 2018, and late Picasso drawn from the holdings of Jacqueline, his last wife, from March 9 to June 16, 2019.

Source: Wikipedia, "Museum Barberini"

What to look for

• The Monet collection - over thirty works, the largest group outside Paris.
• The impressionist holdings - Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Signac alongside.
• The rebuilt palace - a 1771 facade reconstructed and opened in 2017.
• The East German painting - a collection unusual in a museum of this kind.

When to go

Year-round; the museum closes Tuesdays and uses timed tickets, which sell out for popular exhibitions. Booking ahead is advisable.

What to expect

Timed tickets sell out for major shows. It closes Tuesdays. The building is a 2017 reconstruction, not historic fabric.

Nearby

The Dutch Quarter lies north; Sanssouci is west.

Key facts