Pablo Picasso | Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1901

Artists from all countries came to Paris to find a connection to the modern era.

On his first trip to Paris, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) painted a street in Montmartre, the neighborhood that was popular among artists, in the Impressionist style.

The picture is part of a group of about thirty works that the then nineteen-year-old artist presented at his solo exhibition in the Galerie Ambroise Vollard in 1901 in Paris. | Source: © Museum Barberini, Potsdam

Pablo Picasso | Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1901 | Museum Barberini, Potsdam

Gustave Caillebotte at the Museum Barberini

Gustave Caillebotte | Couple on a Walk, 1881 | Museum Barberini

In the 1860s the seaside resorts in Normandy became the most popular summer retreats of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Here a young couple (likely the artist and his partner, Charlotte Berthier) are strolling past the luxurious Villa italiennein Trouville.

The red parasol adds an accent to the picture, in which fresh green tones are dominant. The depiction of the figures from behind allows viewers to put themselves in the role of the vacationers.

Every summer from 1880-1884, Gustave Caillebotte spent a number of weeks in Normandy, where he sailed in regattas and painted.

During this time he produced around fifty depictions of the area surrounding Trouville, a beach resort that had grown into a favorite holiday destination of the Parisian upper classes since the mid-nineteenth century.

Claude Monet at the Museum Barberini

The Hasso Plattner Collection - Museum Barberini - contains more than 100 works by Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters, including 34 paintings by Claude Monet.

With over one hundred paintings, the Museum Barberini presented from 22 February - 19 July 2020, the largest retrospective ever to be devoted to the Impressionist painter Claude Monet in a German museum.

The exhibition drew primarily on the Hasso Plattner Collection and the Impressionist holdings of the Denver Art Museum, augmented by numerous loans from museums and private collections in many different countries, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Claude Monet | The River, 1881 | Museum Barberini

Claude Monet depicted an evening on the river using a reduced formal vocabulary. The impulsive play of lines seems to be rapidly set down, as if the painter had wanted to complete the composition just before the sun disappeared.

Several branches glow in the red light of its last rays. Although the picture has the appearance of a sketch, the artist’s signature indicates that he considered it an independent, completed work.

According to Academic standards, a finished painting was characterized by a polished surface in which even subordinate elements should be developed in some detail.

Monet resisted this aesthetic of the fini by dissolving the traditional distinction between the preparatory sketch (esquisse or étude) and the painting intended for exhibition (tableau).