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WD_172/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 34.7 x 23.2 | | Size (mm): | 841 x 594 | | Catalog #: | WD_0172 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Berlin for art lovers - With historical museums, contemporary galleries and a population of young artists, the reunified Berlin shines as a cultural capital" BY CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT*
*THE LOS ANGELES TIMES; Christopher Knight is art critic for the Los Angeles Times.
August 7, 2005:
For Westerners, the center of Berlin suddenly shifted east when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The geographic heart of the metropolis still lies in the bohemian neighborhood of Kreuzberg, with its big, loft-like apartments and sometimes raucous night life. But reunification of East and West has meant that the city's spiritual core has returned to Museumsinsel - Museum Island - a spot of land in the Spree River that is home to an array of seminal art museums stuffed with astounding collections.
Nearby, the once drab East Berlin neighborhood around Auguststrasse, just a short walk across the river, has metamorphosed into the liveliest contemporary gallery scene in Europe.
I've joined that throng of fans. After a 17-year hiatus, I returned to Berlin to renew old art acquaintances and encounter new ones. Back when Germany was divided, Berlin was a bubble - a fragile space station of contested earthly values, tethered on one side to Washington and on the other side to Moscow. That bubble burst, but the fizz remains.
Shedding its past:
Freewheeling Weimar liberalism, unspeakable fascist barbarism and the kabuki dance of Cold War posturing - evidence of the city's last century lingers around every street corner. Today a new, not yet fully defined profile is being added. The new Berlin seeks to come to terms with Germany's dark past while building on its better self to emerge as an incomparable cultural capital. The city is in the throes of growing pains, with all the excitement - and anxiety - that assertive urban evolution entails.
For me, an art critic, surprises were in store. The amazing mix of great historical art museums, ambitious contemporary galleries and eager young artists now flocking here for inexpensive studio space has put Berlin in an enviable, even unrivaled position.
Encompassing 344 square miles, Berlin is less a concentrated urban center than a sprawling, multiethnic metropolitan region with urban pockets. (At about 350 years old, it's also Europe's youngest major city.) Public transportation is excellent, taxis are abundant if not inexpensive, bicycles are common, and a car is helpful. Boats ply 120 miles of urban waterways.
From my hotel, the sleekly efficient Radisson SAS in Mitte, Museum Island and the galleries around Auguststrasse can be reached on foot.
An eye for art history:
To understand Berlin's museums, it's important to know two things. First, Germans have been voracious collectors since the 17th century, when the princely enterprise of art collecting reached its first maturity all over Europe. Second, Germans were among the first to view treasures of the past in what we now regard as a modern way. By the 19th century, they had begun to invent the discipline of art history, as a way to organize the booty.
The scope of their ambition is nowhere more apparent than in the Pergamon Museum, which opened in 1930 as the newest and final attraction on Museum Island, home to five museums and declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999. It's now the city's most popular tourist destination, with more than 850,000 visitors a year, and houses classical antiquities, ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art.
The big draws are the monumental architectural ensembles - ancient buildings reconstructed inside the museum.
There's the Pergamon Altar from 2nd century BC Greece, with its magnificent Hellenistic frieze depicting a fearsome battle between gods and giants; the Roman Market Gate of Miletus, now partly obscured by scaffolding during restoration; and Babylon's cobalt blue Ishtar Gate, with its stately procession of animals, both real and mythological.
Museum Island was severely damaged during World War II - strafe marks are still visible on stone walls - and restoration is ongoing. The Bode Museum, with collections of coins, sculpture and Byzantine art, will reopen in 2006; in 2009, the Neues (or New) Museum, after renovation, will house the city's renowned Egyptian collection - including the famous one-eyed bust of Queen Nefertiti.
The spectacular 1876 Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery) was restored and reopened in 2001. Its rooms and picture bays, lined in gilded paneling and crimson fabric, are devoted to 19th century art. Skylights in the top floor mean that no artificial illumination spoils the viewing of 11 works that span the career of Caspar David Friedrich, the Dresden Romantic genius. The centerpiece is "Monk by the Sea" (1808-10), showing a tiny, hooded holy man standing at the shore and confronting an immense, darkly luminous void. The painting astounded viewers 200 years ago - and still does.
An elegant revival:
So, in another way, was the Altes Museum (Old Museum), the first of the island's museums. It was built between 1823 and 1830 according to the neoclassical designs of hometown hero Karl Friedrich Schinkel and rebuilt after burning to the ground in 1944.
An elegant cross between an ancient Greek temple and Rome's Pantheon, the Altes now houses extraordinary collections of Cycladic, Greek and Etruscan art, Scythian gold and some Roman art. (Egyptian art, including Nefertiti, will be house temporarily on the second floor, starting Aug. 13.) The Greek vases are especially fine. The domed rotunda is the key to Schinkel's radical invention. Ringed with 16 classical statues of Greek gods, alternating with elaborate Roman Corinthian columns, it created a secular temple to classical principles of order and harmony, as embodied in Art-with-a-capital-A. This new Greco-Roman motif became the template for art museums from London to California built during the next century and beyond. The Altes is the ur-museum for the modern world.
The idea of Museum Island is itself something of an artistic fantasia. Across town a sparkling version of Antoine Watteau's most famous painting, "Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera" (1717), hangs in Charlottenburg Palace. (Another is in the Louvre.) Its depiction of leisurely folks enjoying enchanted pleasures on the remote island of love, far from the cares of the everyday world, seems almost to describe the place.
Another, newer echo is found nearby in the Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz, an awkward urban cluster of cultural edifices planned in the 1960s. The Kulturforum was West Berlin's Modernist paraphrase of Museum Island, then locked away behind the Wall.
Symbol of looking ahead:
The 1968 Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), meant for 20th century art, was the first museum to open in the complex. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the celebrated architect of the Neue, had fled Germany for the United States in 1937. Nobody could miss the symbolism of gracing a new cultural district with a Modern art museum designed by a Bauhaus architect. It was pointedly intended as atonement for Germany's past.
Half a century before, Nazi "cultural cleansing" swept away Modern art with charges of degeneracy, and the adventurous Bauhaus was closed. Now they were back - and in a profoundly moving way. Mies' Neue is a rectangular pavilion of transparent glass and black steel, standing atop a pedestal. Architecturally, it reinterprets Schinkel's groundbreaking design for the Altes museum, but now in the modern, abstract language of industrial form. Everything old was new again.
Conceptual brilliance aside, alas, the Neue never functioned too well as an art museum. The fine collection of German Expressionist and other Modern art is shown in a warren of galleries inside the pedestal, while the glass pavilion above it is left empty - beautifully so.
Nearby, the Gemäldegalerie, or Picture Gallery, is exactly the reverse. Marvelous exhibition spaces are inside an ugly bunker. A functional series of 72 rooms is housed in a 1996 design by Munich architects Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler that exudes all the charm of your average state-university student union.
A long, rectangular building flanks a central sculpture court. Galleries to the right chart Northern European art; galleries to the left do the same for the south. Most are bathed in shadow-free natural light filtered from skylights, showing to perfection 500 years of paintings, from early Renaissance to Old Masters.
The collection is staggering. Since reunification, works have been brought together from disparate locations in East and West Berlin. Now calmly established among the world's great European painting collections - and, on the day of my recent visit, blissfully short on other visitors - the museum offers unsurpassed pleasures. There is quantity - eight paintings by Albrecht Dürer, for example, and 16 by Rembrandt - and abundant quality. The Dürer panels span 1497 to 1526, virtually all the Renaissance master's working life; the Rembrandt pictures are the best such assembly I've seen outside the Netherlands. And with a couple of Caravaggios, a pair of Vermeers, three Raphaels, great Frans Hals, Botticelli, Velázquez and more, the most strenuous difficulty is choosing where to linger.
The contemporary art scene in Berlin has been transformed since reunification. Currently, four cities stand atop the globalized art-world heap - New York, Los Angeles, London and Berlin. New York and London are commercial centers, where art old and new is principally bought and sold. L.A. and Berlin are production centers for new art, drawing a steady stream of eager young artists. Established and emerging artists, as well as young aspiring artists, both European and North American, live and work in Berlin. These generational layers keep pumping life into a place already stressed by a modern network of social and artistic fault lines, which chart histories at once horrible and remarkable, glorious and grim.
Within a few blocks of the enormous blue and gold dome of Mitte's New Synagogue, left in ruins in the wake of Kristallnacht and Allied bombing but now restored as a history museum, several dozen galleries have opened shop. The once-scruffy neighborhood around Auguststrasse has been likened to New York's East Village in the 1980s. But, with fashionable eateries and design shops stuffed with as much Lucite furniture, shag carpeting and lime-and-orange knickknacks as a consignment store specializing in mid-20th Century artifacts, it's more like "instant SoHo," fueled by cash from Moscow and Cologne.
Other galleries nestle behind a big, unused (but spanking new) office building by the river; another cluster is up the street from Checkpoint Charlie, the former immigration station between East Berlin and the American sector. Go to any gallery and you can pick up "Index," a fold-out guide with helpful maps. Don't go before noon, though; several galleries listed with earlier hours didn't open until then - perhaps a legacy of Berlin's fabled night life.
-www.nynewsday.com
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