Museum Barberini: the small museum mixing it up with Berlin’s big hitters
Museum Barberini, located in Potsdam outside Berlin, is centred on entrepreneur Hasso Plattner's extraordinary collection of Impressionist paintings
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When the Museum Barberini was inaugurated, in January 2017, the guests of honour included Bill Gates and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. The latter described the venue in a single word: ‘breathtaking’. Since then, 2.3 million visitors have passed through its doors.

‘In a short space of time, we like to think we’ve become one of the main cultural sites in Germany,’ says the museum’s director, Ortrud Westheider. Given the plethora of historic opera houses, theatres and concert halls in the country — let alone museums and art galleries — this is an impressive claim. All the more impressive as the Barberini is not located at the heart of a big city, but rather in modestly sized Potsdam, 40 minutes south-west of Berlin.

The attraction is essentially two-fold: a strong programme of temporary exhibitions (more on which shortly) and a collection of more than 110 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings on long-term display, by the likes of by Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte and Paul Signac.

‘Many people are surprised that works of such importance are housed in Potsdam,’ says Westheider with a smile. ‘But we like to surprise people.’ The paintings are on permanent loan from the collection of Hasso Plattner, the museum’s founder.

Berlin-born Plattner, 80, co-founded the multinational software giant SAP in the early 1970s and acquired his first artworks around the same time — before starting to build a collection in earnest in 1988, after SAP went public.

Initially, a lifelong love of sailing influenced his purchases. Plattner’s collection duly features a core of coastal scenes, such as Signac’s Pointillist masterpiece The Port at Sunset, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez). In time, however, his taste extended beyond the sea to include landscapes of various kinds, and these predominate at the Barberini. Encountering them is an uplifting experience.

Plattner continues to collect — and, indeed, add to the museum’s offering — today. A recent addition was Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1903), one of Monet’s atmospheric visions across the River Thames of the Palace of Westminster in London. The Barberini has a total of 39 paintings by the Frenchman on show, more than any venue outside Paris.

‘Monet was trying to paint the atmosphere between himself and the subjects and objects before him,’ says Westheider. ‘Impressionist paintings are immersive. They’re true to nature in a way which — with their exploration of weather conditions — makes them relevant in our climate-conscious age today.’

The museum is spread over three floors and has 2,200 square metres of exhibition space. For Westheider, this makes it ‘the perfect size for spending a few hours without feeling overwhelmed’. It allows visitors — mostly day-tripping Berliners or international tourists staying in Berlin — ‘to twin a visit to the Barberini with some time enjoying the rest of Potsdam’.

To explain the museum’s name, and also its layout, one has to look back 250 years. Specifically, to the reign of the Prussian king, Frederick the Great (r. 1740-86), who saw Potsdam as a place to escape the pressures of political life in his capital, Berlin. Among the buildings he constructed there was Sanssouci, a splendid summer palace with gardens. As a lover of philosophy and the arts, Frederick welcomed the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach to Potsdam — as well as Voltaire, who was such a frequent visitor to Sanssouci that he even had his own room.

In 1771, the king commissioned a building closely modelled on the Palazzo Barberini in Rome: a Baroque palace from the previous century designed by three of that day’s leading architects, Carlo Maderno, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini.

The Palais Barberini, as Potsdam’s new building was known, boasted a superb location to go along with its grand appearance — opposite St Nicholas’s Church, on the east side of the main square, the Alter Markt, backing onto the River Havel. The building had many different functions over the years, and at one point it was home to the city’s first cinema.

Thanks to the construction efforts of Frederick the Great’s successors, Potsdam itself continued to grow over the decades, becoming an opulent royal city — only for Allied bombing in 1945 to reduce much of it, including the Palais Barberini, to rubble. The city became part of the GDR (East Germany) after the Second World War, and the site previously occupied by the Palais was used as a car park.

Fast-forward to the start of the 21st century, with Germany reunified, and the city authorities decided that the historic centre of Potsdam should be reconstructed. For his part, Plattner agreed — through a foundation in his name — to rebuild the Palais Barberini as close to its erstwhile form as possible, with the floorplan, proportions and façade all corresponding to the original structure.

Work was carried out between 2013 and 2016, and the Museum Barberini was the result.

‘I visited Potsdam’s Alter Markt for the first time three decades ago, and it was a totally empty place,’ says Westheider, who has been the museum’s director since its launch. ‘Back then, you could still see the destruction of the war. The city is much livelier now, and continues to grow livelier still. The Barberini has played a part in that change.’

Berlin hardly lacks for world-class museums. What do the long-established institutions make of the upstarts at the Barberini? ‘It’s a collaborative, rather than competitive, relationship,’ Westheider says. ‘We recently ran an Edvard Munch exhibition, for example, which overlapped with a separate Munch show at the Berlinische Galerie, and we worked on a big marketing campaign together for the two of them.’

Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth attracted 185,000 visitors in its run between November 2023 and April 2024, making it one of the Barberini’s most popular exhibitions to date. As Westheider says, ‘the spatial limits of the building mean we won’t ever match’ the footfall of certain venues in Berlin. On the flipside, though, does she think there’s a vitality that comes with being a young museum?

‘Yes, and also with being privately funded. We’re able to make plans far in advance — to confirm exhibition loans, get curatorial teams on board, consolidate our communications, and so on — because we know we have funding in place for the years ahead.’

Unlike the bulk of Germany’s museums, which receive generous state support, the Barberini is self-sufficient: two-thirds of its funding comes from the Hasso Plattner Foundation, and the remaining third from the revenue it generates through ticket sales, its shop and its café.

The aforementioned vitality is evident in the museum’s temporary exhibitions programme. There are three shows each year. These tend to be devoted to artists in some way linked to the main collection, and have developed a reputation for challenging accepted wisdom or focusing on a little-known aspect of a well-known artist’s career.

The Munch show, for instance, examined its subject’s relationship with nature. An exhibition in 2019-20 focused on Van Gogh’s still-life paintings. A new show on Modigliani, in turn, rejects the widely held notion of that artist as a bohemian figure, exploring his intellectualism instead.

‘Our process for every exhibition is the same,’ says Westheider. ‘We employ a strong team of researchers from the start, who are able to investigate a subject in depth. We’ll then host a symposium on the show’s topic, 12 to 18 months before it opens. We invite scholars and students to join those symposia and help us hone our ideas.’

Plattner, who today lives between Germany and the US, had many reasons for choosing Potsdam as the venue for his museum, among them fond childhood memories of sailing on the lakes around the city. He hailed from south-west Berlin, which meant that those lakes were close by. His excursions would be curtailed once the Berlin Wall went up.

Next up at the Barberini, alongside the Modigliani show, is a programme marking the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, which was held in Paris in the spring of 1874. This will include a public symposium on Impressionism. ‘We’re also working hard on our list of future exhibitions,’ Westheider says, ‘one of which will be about unicorns — looking at their appearances in art, from ancient Persia through the Renaissance to contemporary practice.’

This may seem a departure for the Barberini, but if the past seven years have proved anything, it’s that this is a museum that doesn’t stand still.

For further details on the Museum Barberini, click here.

Modigliani: Modern Gazes runs until 18 August 2024