Paul Sullivan visits the Berlinische Galerie and takes a deep dive into a century of art made in Berlin…
Founded privately by an association in 1975, the Berlinische Galerie was officially taken on by the city as a public museum in 1994. Between its inception and 2004, the project was generally itinerant—at some points completely homeless—exhibiting and hopping between a slew of esteemed cultural venues, including the Akademie der Künste, the Neue Nationalgalerie, what is now the Museum of Photography, and the Martin Gropius Bau, where it stayed for twelve years (1986-1998).
In 2004 it finally found a permanent home: a glass warehouse, constructed in 1965, set close enough to the western side of the Berlin Wall that the West Berlin government used it to store window panes in case of a blockade. The warehouse’s capacious interior (4,000 square meters) and eleven-meter-high walls were already ideal for an exhibition space, but it still cost a slick six million euros to update the security aspects of the building and add distinctive elements like operable walls, and the highly Instagrammable crossover staircase in the middle of the main hall, which gives access to the upper level.
This upper level is where the gallery’s permanent exhibition, “Art in Berlin 1880–1980” is located. Overhauled in November 2020 (it’s updated every five years) the exhibition traces locally created art from the late nineteenth century up to the 1980s, via around 250 works that span paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and archive materials. Organised throughout seventeen rooms, arranged chronologically and thematically, it traces the city’s rollercoaster journey through monarchy and democracy, war and division, fascism and communism, and the especially vibrant dialectic between art and society during the twentieth century.
The Advent Of Modernism
The first couple of rooms introduce the first major tension that arose in the late 19th century between the Kaiser (Wilhelm II)—famed for his rigid conservatism—and the encroaching influence of modernism, which at that time meant predominantly Impressionism, a movement that had been slowly gaining ground in France since the famous 1863 Salon des Refusés, as well as Art Nouveau, also from France.
The establishment view of art at this time was upheld by Berlin artists such as Anton von Werner, who became the official court painter (even tutoring the Kaiser himself) and director of the Prussian Academy of Arts. Known for his highly idealised depictions of major historical events and public occasions, his most famous work is the “Proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles”, which he painted several times, including a version specifically for Otto von Bismarck.
In Room #1 (“Conservatives and Modernists”), we find a different von Werner painting, namely his “Unveiling of the Richard-Wagner-Monument in the Tiergarten” from 1908. Three meters wide, the painting took five years to paint, and in terms of the almost photographically accurate style of formal realism—so beloved of the Kaiser—it is undeniably an impressive work of art. But a closer inspection highlights some of the radical changes the city and its art establishment were experiencing.
Despite its overall depiction of Wilheminian pomp and pageantry, both the Wagner sculpture—which still sits in the Tiergarten today, beneath a protective plexiglass pavilion, opposite the Indian embassy—and the painting were commissioned by a wealthy cosmetics manufacturer and opera singer, Ludwig Leichner. And not only is Leichner himself featured in the painting (at the foot of the statue), the assembled crowd includes a mixture of industrialists and artists (Peter Breuer, Hermann Ende, Ludwig Knaus, Adolph von Menzel) alongside military and aristocratic personnel, including Prince Eitel Friedrich (the Kaiser’s second son) and Prince Friedrich Heinrich of Prussia.
The rapid industrialisation of the city during the mid-late 19th century—and especially following 1871, when Berlin became the capital of a newly unified Germany—created innumerable changes in daily life that helped set the tone and context for new concepts of art to emerge. The room illustrates these ongoing tensions well: On one hand, we see Wilhelm Gallhof’s “Temptation of the Knight”, a pastel-hued depiction of a naked woman being presented to an armoured knight, shows that patriarchal values and conservative forms of sexuality were still prevalent in 1910; on the other, there’s a 1901 portrait of progressive artist, writer and art collector Fritz Rumpf by Gallhof’s teacher, Lovis Corinth.