How did a small group of young painters whose work was first met with rejection become perhaps the most popular movement of modern art? That is the question behind “Die Impressionisten. Monet, Morisot, Renoir und ihr Netzwerk” (“The Impressionists: Monet, Morisot, Renoir and Their Network”), which opened at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam on 7 November 2026 and runs until 21 February 2027. It is the anniversary exhibition for a museum that opened in 2017 and has drawn almost three million visitors since.
Ten rooms, ten stories
Instead of a chronology, the show is built from ten stories — ten years, ten rooms, ten central paintings. Each begins with a work from the Hasso Plattner Collection, the core of the Barberini’s holdings, and follows the people connected to it: the artists who made it, the friends they worked with, the collectors who believed in them early, the dealers who created a market, and the critics and exhibition-makers who made them known. Provenance becomes the narrative thread, sometimes leading from a French château to a Paris gallery, an American private collection and a museum of today. The exhibition is curated by director Ortrud Westheider and Sterre Barentsen.
One room is called “Without friends, nothing works”. It recalls the young painters roaming the forest of Fontainebleau in the early 1860s, and Frédéric Bazille, from a wealthy family, who shared a studio with Renoir and supported him for six years until Bazille’s early death in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Gustave Caillebotte bought works by his colleagues; after his death forty paintings from his collection went to the French state. The baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure owned 68 works by Manet alone, and the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought hundreds of pictures by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley in the early 1870s before taking the movement to the United States.
Women who shaped the market
The title deliberately puts Berthe Morisot between Monet and Renoir. The exhibition also highlights the American collector Bertha Palmer, shown in a towering 1893 portrait by Anders Zorn: in her Chicago home hung nine of Monet’s haystack paintings, and she lent some 90 Monets to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Mary Cassatt’s prints are among the discoveries. A sobering exhibit is a 1941 auction catalogue for the collection of the Jewish banker Jakob Goldschmidt, who had left Germany in 1933 and whose house stood close to Potsdam.
Loans from around the world
More than 100 works are on view, including 61 by Claude Monet. Highlights include Monet’s Bazille and Camille (1865) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, his Rouen Cathedral (1894) from the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Manet’s Portrait of Berthe Morisot Reclining (1873) from the Musée Marmottan Monet, Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe (1876) from Geneva, Renoir’s The Bay of Naples (1881) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Cézanne still life from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Lenders also include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay, the Belvedere, the Kröller-Müller Museum and the Royal Academy. Alongside the show, the Barberini and two sister organisations of the Hasso Plattner Foundation launched a free online platform, Networks of Impressionism, which maps the provenance of the 115 paintings in the Plattner collection.