Board_Advisors_etc 3..5

(nextflipdebug2) #1

various German cities. Left in ruins after World
War II, the building was not to reopen until 1981,
with minimal alteration, to house large exhibitions.
The Berlin Wall stood behind the building. The
Galerie used this space until 1997. The building
was further renovated for large exhibitions in 1999.
The Galerie then used space in the Lapidarium,
once Berlin’s pumping station from 1873–1876 and
also home to magnificent large sculptures that once
decorated the Avenue of Victory in Berlin’sTier-
garten. The Galerie also sponsored exhibits in dif-
ferent sections of the city of particular significance
were itsLa ̈ngschnitte(sections) and Querschnitte
(cross sections) held at Jebenstrasse near the Zoo
Station, in space previously used by the Gallery of
the Twentieth Century. From February 2002 to
April 2003, the Berlinische Galerie sponsored a ser-
ies of five exhibits, ‘‘Zwischenspiel’’ at the Berlin
Grundkreditbank. In 2003 the Berlinische Galerie
finalized a contract to purchase and renovate a
former glass warehouse at 124–128 Jakobstrasse,
10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg, near the Jewish Museum
designed by Daniel Liebeskind. Scheduled to open
in October 2004, the new Berlinische Galerie space
with its wide expanses would be able to mount sig-
nificant and innovative exhibitions that celebrated
and examined the richness of Berlin’s art from 1870
to the present. The new museum space would also
include a library, study rooms, workshop space for
restoration projects, office space, and a restaurant.
TwolargeinitialgoalsfortheGalerieweretobring
renewed recognition to those artists who had been
termed ‘‘entartet’’ or degenerate under Hitler’s rule
and to establish respect for contemporary artists.
Examplesofthe Galerie’searly exhibitsinclude: Ber-
lin Artists of the Twenties: Feldberg Collection
(1978); Art in Berlin from 1960 to the present
(1979);ArtinBerlin1930–1960,(1980);GeorgeTap-
pert, A Berlin Expressionist, (1980); Berlin Realism,
1890–1980 (1981); Dada Montage, (1982); Aus Ber-
lin Ernigriert (Artists forced to leave Berlin after
1933), (1983); Berlin at 1900, (1984). Later the Gale-
rie sponsored exhibits including,Self Portraits of the
Twenties(2004),Russians in Berlin from the Twenties
(2003),andMenschenuntereinander(Mentogether):
Graphics and Photography 1918–1933, (2002). A
major exhibit that the Galerie mounted with the
Pushkin Museum in Moscow was ‘‘Berlin-Moscow/
Moscow-Berlin1900’’thatwasshowninBerlininthe
Martin Gropius Bau in 2003.
The museum’s collection now includes approxi-
mately 7,000 paintings, 1,500 sculptures, 150,000
works on paper, and 250,000 photographs. In addi-
tion to its focus on Berlin art, the collection also
includes major international works of modern art,


such as the avant garde of Eastern Europe. The col-
lection reflects the revolutionary experiments in
Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, the Bau-
haus, and so on. and the larger historical currents
that accompanied two world wars, the social crisis
between the wars, the reign of National Socialism,
the Cold War, and a divided Germany and Berlin, as
well as current trends since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 1979 a major acquisition to the permanent
collection was the Hannah Ho ̈ch Archive with its
collection of paintings, collages, and graphics.
Ho ̈ch’s Dada experiments, her scrapbooks, etc.
provide a window on a stimulating and active per-
iod of German and European cultural and art his-
tory. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ho ̈ch in
1989, the Galerie produced ‘‘Hannah Ho ̈ch—Eine
Lebenscollage,’’ volume I, containing significant
archival material.
The photographic collection is an important part
of the museum’s holdings. Under the initiative of
Janos Frecot, the collection has grown to contain
major holdings in the history of photography. The
oldest materials are portrait daguerreotypes from
various Berlin ateliers in the 1840s. The oldest archi-
tectural photographs include images of the magni-
ficent synagogue on Orangienburger Strasse, taken
in 1866. Architectural photographs by Max Panc-
kow later in the nineteenth century show new build-
ings representing the rise of industry and villas in
new suburbs of Berlin. Further, one finds images of
F. Albert Schwartz, the urban photographer, show-
ing landscape scenes, iron works, and general city
views. Heinrich Zille, working between 1900 and
1910, shows a darker side of Berlin, the working
class, broken down dwellings, rubbish piles, etc.
The fashionable and elite were recorded in the Art
Nouveau portraits of Nicola Perscheid, who
worked summers in Baden-Baden and winters in
Berlin. Experiments with geometry and abstraction
in photographs, photo-grams, and photo-montages
are seen in the collection’s holdings of El Lissitzky,
La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy, and Heinz Hajek-Halke. The
great Weimar Republic photojournalist, Erich Sal-
omon, is well represented with glass and film nega-
tives, slides, and vintage prints. One can see, for
example, the English prime minister, Ramsay Mac-
Donald in conversation with Albert Einstein, along
with Max Planck, and Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs, Julius Curtius, in 1931, or Marlene Dietrich
with her daughter in Berlin in 1930. Salomon’s illu-
strated reports on sessions of the Reichstag, on
conferences in Berlin, Paris, the Hague, London,
Geneva, etc. were greatly respected and widely
read. Other photojournalists represented in the col-
lection include: Felix H. Man, Martin Munkacsi,

BERLINISCHE GALERIE

Free download pdf