The story
The palace that houses this museum is not as old as it looks. The original Barberini, an 18th-century building on Potsdam's old market square, was destroyed in a 1945 air raid and left as an empty lot for decades in what became East Germany. Hasso Plattner, a co-founder of the software company SAP, paid to rebuild it from old plans, and opened it as a museum in 2017.
He filled it with his own collection, weighted heavily toward Impressionism. It holds around forty paintings by Claude Monet, more than any venue in Europe outside Paris, so that a small city better known for Prussian palaces has become a place people travel to for Monet's haystacks and water lilies, with Renoir, Morisot and Caillebotte hanging nearby.
