IMPRESIONISM / colectia Hasso Platner

The making of Impressionism 

A new permanent display of Hasso Plattner’s collection represents democratisation at work in the art world 

 Monet’s ‘Meules’ (1890), a painting of a cropped, monumental haystack, sold for a record $110.7m at auction 

 A moment of joy, a beacon of hope, a spirit of generosity, a homage to nature: amid many cancelled exhibitions, there could not be a more upbeat inauguration of Europe’s autumn art season than the new permanent installation, launching on September 7, of collector Hasso Plattner’s 100 supreme impressionist and modern paintings, almost all landscapes, in Potsdam’s Museum Barberini. Beginning with breezy seascapes by Monet’s teacher Eugène Boudin, travelling via Cézanne’s blue-green sous-bois forest glades, Sisley’s purple-shadowed Louveciennes snow scenes, Renoir’s softly fluttering “Pear Tree” in blossom, to conclude with Vlaminck’s flamboyant Fauve transformations of impressionist sites — “The Bridge at Chatou”, “Seine Embankment at Bougival” — into dabs of incandescent colour, Plattner’s is Europe’s biggest, most important collection of 19th and early 20th-century French painting outside Paris. It lifts Berlin’s cultural offering and, building on the city’s acquisition in 2000 of Heinz Berggruen’s Picasso collection, makes the German capital a must-see destination for the birth of modern art. And it is all so fresh, amassed in the past two decades — many highlights acquired in the past two years — with a dedication and discernment bringing something new to familiar territory. 

Renoir’s ‘The Pear Tree’ (1877) © Hasso Plattner Collection 

 Cézanne’s ‘Forest Interior’ (1897/98) © Hasso Plattner Collection Plattner made his $15bn fortune as co-founder of software company SAP and until 2017 was better known globally as a pillar of German industry than as a collector. Even at the opening of the Barberini that year he shunned the limelight; then last May he was revealed as buyer of “Meules”, a painting of a cropped, monumental haystack, elemental, vital, burnished pink and gold by a diagonal beam from the setting sun, which sold for $110.7m — a record for Monet and Impressionism. Potsdam’s “Mona Lisa”? Balancing fecundity and growth against the sense of fleeting time, even by the standards of the great series this particular “Meules” is exceptional in its richness of feeling and form. But it is in the context of Plattner’s other recent purchases, now displayed together, that it becomes clear why he craved it. Monets constitute more than a third of this collection — its intellectual and emotional heart — and include a score of riveting works from 1880-90, the artist’s most restless, experimental, psychologically disturbed and least cohesively studied period, for which the Barberini is now a resource both scholarly and visually spectacular. For almost a century “Meules” belonged to Chicago’s Potter-Palmer family, and its return to Europe demonstrates the transatlantic shift characteristic of Plattner's top acquisitions, especially of decommissioned museum Monets from the under-appreciated 1880s. Between 2011 and 2015 Plattner brought at auction “Poplars”, the dappled frieze of riverside trees, one row still bright in the sunset, the second already cast in violet shadow, sold by New York’s Museum of Modern Art; “On the Cliffs at Pourville”, the vigorous seascape of wind rustling tall grass in a briny haze coming off the ocean, sold by the Metropolitan Museum; “Wheatfield”, the crops, meadow, cirrus clouds abstracted into sweeping horizontal bands, sold by Cleveland Museum; and “Antibes, the Fort”, with its melting pink-turquoise harmony, sold by Boston’s Museum of Fine Art.  It is quite a haul — America’s loss, Europe’s gain — and gives insight into the extremes to which Monet pushed himself in the 1880s at home and abroad. Seeking ever more sensational responses to nature, he travelled far, playing the wild North Sea against Mediterranean sweetness — Plattner also shows three superb “Bordighera” canvases, chromatically nuanced, flooded with light, marking the artist’s exhilarated, daunted discovery of Italy in 1884. Simultaneously, in rural isolation in Giverny, Monet explored diverse painterly modes — refined delicacy for the fragile poplars, the robust, broadly-brushed field.  “Meules” (1890) is the climax to this period, the humble haystack transfigured by an excited radiance of colour and emotion. With the Meules originated Monet’s radical device of painting in series, evolved from the turbulent 1880s landscape campaigns, and inestimably important to the development of 20th-century art.  Plattner’s collection systematically, sparklingly, affirms Impressionism’s centrality to European cultural history. Within two months in spring 2019, he acquired at separate auctions Pissarro’s shimmering aerial view “Boulevard Montmartre” (1897) and adolescent Picasso’s tour-de-force assimilation of it, in broken impressionist strokes and contrasting hues, “Boulevard de Clichy” (1901). Another trophy purchase last year, for £19.5m, was Signac’s “The Port at Sunset”: a boat gliding towards the viewer, its sails curving in rhythm to the hills behind St Tropez, depicted in intricate pointillist technique. Signac told Monet that he painted “having had as a model only your works and following the great path you have opened for us”. “The Port” extends Impressionism in one vein; as powerful yet different a continuation is the flat patterning and rushing space in Raoul Dufy’s exuberant “The White Sail”, 1906.  

 Signac’s ‘The Port at Sunset’ (1892) © Hasso Plattner Collection 

“The paintings involve us as viewers in a very direct way. We feel the wind on our skin and the temperature of the water when we look at Monet’s sailboats on the Seine. No other art can do that. The Impressionists are geniuses of communication,” Plattner says. He is a sailor himself, as well as a pioneer of new communications methods — the basis of his business and also of his scholarship: his Wildenstein Plattner Institute, founded 2016, makes digitally available the august Wildenstein scholar/dealer catalogues. There is a leitmotif of widened access here. Napoleon III’s arts minister Nieuwerkerke repudiated Impressionism as “the painting of democrats”; the movement prevailed during the Third Republic as an expression of progressive democratic humanism, leisure, pleasure. In Potsdam this feels more urgent than in Paris. “Due to national resentments, French Impressionism was only rarely collected during the imperial era in Germany,” Plattner says. “I would like my collection in the Museum Barberini — particularly due to its location in eastern Germany — to be a place of French-German friendship, cultural openness, international exchange”. 

 Monet’s ‘Palazzo Contarini’ (1908) © Hasso Plattner Collection Exploring his pictures’ provenances is a masterclass in shifting sociopolitical realities. Plattner has returned to Germany, also from America, many pieces restituted from Nazi forced sales and confiscations. Hermann Göring once owned the tremulous, rare “Still Life with Spanish Melon”, painted in 1879 weeks after the death of Monet’s first wife. The resplendent/melancholy “Ducal Palace” from the 1908-11 Venice series — Monet’s mourning tribute to his second wife — comes from the Goldschmidt collection, confiscated in Berlin in 1941, returned following litigation to the Goldschmidts in New York. The Venice standout here, the “Palazzo Contarini”, the palace’s darkened windows a void of grief staring over dense water, was acquired along with several other works from the Nahmad collection, passing from secretive private hands to permanent public display now: a triumph of democratic intent paralleling the egalitarian impulse of these seminal paintings.