Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection

The Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection shows lines of development in fantastic art, beginning with works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Francisco de Goya, which culminate in the house's most extensive body of work: the surrealism of Max Ernst and René Magritte, for example.

The collection, like the Berggruen Museum opposite , is due to a private passion for collecting. Both exhibition venues of the National Gallery, which also includes the Old National Gallery , New National Gallery , Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art – Berlin and Friedrichswerder Church , can be found in Charlottenburg.

The buildings of the Berggruen Museum and the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection were built between 1851 and 1859 on behalf of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Their architect Friedrich August Stüler later also designed the Old National Gallery. In terms of urban planning, the neoclassical twin buildings with their domes refer to the opposite Charlottenburg Palace and form the prelude to Schloßstraße. In 1855 Friedrich Wilhelm IV had the garrison building inspector Wilhelm Drewitz build a stable on the east side, in which the Scharf-Gesternberg Collection is also exhibited today, as a single-storey wing with an attached square residential building, which also includes a coach house.

The function of both Stüler buildings was both practical and aesthetic: they housed the officers' barracks of the Gardes du Corps and at the same time distracted the eye from the stable buildings. From the 1920s onwards, the eastern Stüler building was used by the police. Damaged in World War II, it was renovated by the state curator and Bauhaus student Hinnerk Scheper in 1955. In 1960 a police station moved in.