The Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) at the
Kulturforum is a museum for
modern art
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the tradi ...
in Berlin, with its main focus on the early 20th century. It is part of the
National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director ...
of the
Berlin State Museums
The Berlin State Museums (german: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) are a group of institutions in Berlin, Germany, comprising seventeen museums in five clusters, several research institutes, libraries, and supporting facilities. They are oversee ...
. The museum building and its sculpture gardens were designed by
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloy ...
and opened in 1968.
The gallery closed in 2015 for renovation. The work, by David Chipperfield Architects, was completed in 2021, and the museum reopened in August 2021 with an exhibition of works by American sculptor
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and hi ...
.
Collection
The collection features a number of unique highlights of modern 20th-century art. Particularly well represented are
Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...
,
Expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it ra ...
, the
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 20 ...
and
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to ...
. The collection owns masterpieces of artists like
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
,
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century ...
,
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà ( , , ; 20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) was a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona ...
,
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
and
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense o ...
. The design of the building, despite its large size, allows for the display of only a small part of the collection, and the displays are therefore changed at intervals.
Architecture
Dimensions, specifications and materials
![Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie June 2002](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Berlin_Neue_Nationalgalerie_June_2002.jpg)
The plan of the Neue Nationalgalerie is divided into two distinct stories. The upper story serves as an entrance hall as well as the primary special exhibit gallery, totaling of space. It is elevated from street level and only accessible by three flights of steps. Though it only comprises a small portion of the total gallery space, the exhibition pavilion stands boldly as the building's primary architectural expression. Eight cruciform columns, two on each length placed so as to avoid corners, support a square pre-stressed steel roof plate thick and painted black. An
cantilever
A cantilever is a rigid structural element that extends horizontally and is supported at only one end. Typically it extends from a flat vertical surface such as a wall, to which it must be firmly attached. Like other structural elements, a cant ...
allows for ample space between the gallery's glazed façade and eight supporting columns. Mies' office studied this cantilever extensively in various scaled models in order to ensure its structural stability as well as the seeming flatness of the roof plate. The floor-to-ceiling height reaches , and the space is laid out on a square dimensional grid. Black anodized aluminum "egg crates" fit within the grid house lighting fixtures, with air ducts suspended above.
The lower story serves primarily as housing for the gallery's permanent collection, though it also includes a library, offices, and a shop and café, and totals about of space. It is three-quarters below ground so as to allow for safe storage of the artwork. Its sole glazed façade looks out on the museum's sloping sculpture garden and provides ample indirect interior lighting.
A rooftop plaza further extends the museum's exhibition space.
Contemporaneous projects
In 1956, José M. Bosch, President of
Ron Bacardí y Compañía approached Mies to commission the design of a new office space. He was particularly interested in a very open plan, and the relatively simple idea Mies came up with involved a square roof plate supported on each side by two columns. Though initial structural challenges had to be dealt with, the resulting pavilion
typology
Typology is the study of types or the systematic classification of the types of something according to their common characteristics. Typology is the act of finding, counting and classification facts with the help of eyes, other senses and logic. Ty ...
became integral to Mies' architectural lexicon, in many ways the epitome of his universal conception of space.
The Bacardí Building was abandoned in September 1960 due to general political unrest in Cuba, but at the same time, two other museum commissions were brought to Mies' office.
Georg Schaefer, a wealthy industrialist living in
Schweinfurt
Schweinfurt ( , ; ) is a city in the district of Lower Franconia in Bavaria, Germany. It is the administrative centre of the surrounding district (''Landkreis'') of Schweinfurt and a major industrial, cultural and educational hub. The urban ag ...
approached Mies about the construction of a museum for his nineteenth-century art collection during the summer of 1960. A modest initial plan was drawn for the structure, but later that year Mies decided to reconfigure the unbuilt Bacardí project to fit Schaefer's program as he wished to see it built. Consequently, a scaled-down model of the Bacardí project this time rendered in steel rather than concrete was created. In March 1961, Mies also received a letter from the Senator for Building and Housing in Berlin, inviting him to build what was to be called the Neue Nationalgalerie, an exhibition space for the state's collection of early twentieth-century art. The two museum projects, though slightly different in scale, where to be essentially identical in form, both a version in steel of the original Barcardí design. Though the Schweinfurt project never came to fruition, the reductive exercise of continual reconfiguration allowed for the perfection of Mies' expression in Berlin, and the Neue Nationalgalerie remains as the sole built form of the initial tripartite conception.
Aesthetic importance
Much of Mies' syntactical development throughout the three building progression leading up to the Neue Nationalgalerie was prefigured in an earlier project for a Museum for a Small City. This project was published in a special May 1943 edition of ''
Architectural Forum
''Architectural Forum'' was an American magazine that covered the homebuilding industry and architecture. Started in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1892 as ''The Brickbuilder'', it absorbed the magazine ''Architect's World'' in October 1938. Ownership ...
''. In his publication, Mies describes a seemingly floating roof plane, suspended above a single clear-span space punctuated by equidistant columns. This project is now seen as a significant move on Mies' part toward the alleviation of interior space by both defining and minimizing structural enclosure, thus joining exterior and interior space in a meaningful way. The structure itself, a composite of little more than ground plane, support and roof, thus becomes the building. The aesthetic importance of the clear-span was directly related to Mies' conception of museum space in general, a "defining, rather than confining space". The completely open nature of the plan also serves to eliminate the barrier between art and community, simultaneously breaking down the reverence enacted by severely partitioned spaces and inviting interaction between viewer and art. The overall aesthetic affect is thus one of vitalizing liberation. This infinitely transformative capability and universality is also seen in Mies' buildings from the intervening years, namely the
Farnsworth House in
Plano, Illinois
Plano is a city near Aurora in Kendall County, Illinois, United States, with a population of 11,847 as of the 2020 census. It is part of the Chicago metropolitan area, being about 55 miles (90 km) from Chicago. The city was home to the Plano Har ...
, and
Crown Hall
S. R. Crown Hall, designed by the German-American Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is the home of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois.
History
Before the building of Crown Hall ...
of the
Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has prog ...
campus. Various commentators have recognized the structure's ties to classical building, seeing it as a modern temple whose monumental simplicity evinces the immense skill behind its design and conception.
Criticism
The ability of clearly articulated external structures to alleviate façades and create large-scale universal spaces required certain boldness on the part of the client. The ineffable expression of the Neue Nationalgalerie's entrance pavilion had certain logistical downsides. Its smooth granite flooring reflects the warm natural light that floods the space, creating hazy shadow and making curatorial efforts notoriously complicated. The singular expression of the pavilion space also relegated the lower story to a secondary position, presenting further difficulties for the display of artwork involving a lack of natural lighting and relatively pedestrian layout of viewing space. When asked later to renovate and expand the building's lower story, Mies refused, as to do so would destroy the perfect proportions of the temple above. He originally conceived of the entrance pavilion as a place for very large works, allowing for unencumbered visual interaction and for use of the piece as space element in itself. An early collage included in the May 1943 ''
Architectural Forum
''Architectural Forum'' was an American magazine that covered the homebuilding industry and architecture. Started in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1892 as ''The Brickbuilder'', it absorbed the magazine ''Architect's World'' in October 1938. Ownership ...
'' article about Museum for a Small City includes
Picasso's ''
Guernica
Guernica (, ), official name (reflecting the Basque language) Gernika (), is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. The town of Guernica is one part (along with neighbouring Lumo) of the m ...
'', along with other large, plane-like paintings. Yet smaller works had to be shown on moveable freestanding walls or hanging partitions, making a curator's ability to effectively differentiate spaces difficult.
David Chipperfield renovation
Having had no thorough modernization since its inauguration, the Neue Nationalgalerie required upgrades to its air-conditioning, lighting, security, accessibility, visitor facilities and the behind-the-scenes infrastructure for moving art. In 2012 it was announced that British architect
David Chipperfield
Sir David Alan Chipperfield, (born 18 December 1953) is an English architect. He established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985.
His major works include the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (1989–1998); the Museu ...
would oversee a major renovation of the building. In a non-competitive selection process common for public contracts in Germany, his firm was chosen for the contract out of 24 architectural firms based on a two-stage negotiation process.
Originally planned for €101 million, the €140 million renovation project started in 2015 and was originally expected to last three years, during which time the museum was closed. Original building elements, such as handrails and shelves, were removed, restored and reinstalled in their previous locations. Archival material dating from the construction at the
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of t ...
in New York and the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...
in Washington, DC, helped the architects remain true to Mies’s design. Meanwhile, the structural framework of the roof, which rests on eight steel beams, and the glass facade was restored.
Permanent art installations
The Neue Nationalgalerie's ceiling, constructed as a grid of black-painted steel beams, has been used as an exhibit surface in itself for ''Installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie'', an installation of long lines of
LCD displays by artist
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, ...
in 2001, which continuously scrolled abstract patterns down their length.
The Neue Nationalgalerie's terrace provides a particularly prominent space for large-scale pieces of sculpture from the 20th century. Permanently installed sculptures include ''Gudari'' (1957) by
Eduardo Chillida
Eduardo Chillida Juantegui, or Eduardo Txillida Juantegi in Basque (10 January 1924 – 19 August 2002), was a Spanish Basque sculptor notable for his monumental abstract works.
Early life and career
Born in San Sebastián (Donostia) to Ped ...
, ''Polis'' (1968) by
Joannis Avramidis
Joannis Avramidis ( el, Iωάννης Aβραμίδης; born 23 September 1922 – 16 January 2016) was a contemporary Greek-Austrian sculptor. He was born in Batumi, Soviet Union to a family of Pontic Greeks.
He began studying painting at ...
, the kinetic metal sculpture ''Vier Vierecke im Geviert'' (1969) by
George Rickey
George Warren Rickey (June 6, 1907 – July 17, 2002) was an American kinetic sculptor.
Early life and education
Rickey was born on June 6, 1907, in South Bend, Indiana. When Rickey was still a child, his father, an executive with Singer S ...
, ''Three Way Piece No.2: The Archer'' (1964–65) by
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986) was an English artist. He is best known for his semi- abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. As well as sculpture, Moore produced ...
, ''Têtes et Queue'' (1965) by
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and hi ...
, and ''Berlin Block Charlie Chaplin'' (1978) by
Richard Serra
Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938) is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, Urban area, urban, and Architecture, architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material q ...
. In 2003, with the permission of the Barnett Newman Foundation, a fourth edition of the sculpture ''Broken Obelisk'' (1963) by
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense o ...
was cast and temporarily installed in front of the museum. In 2011,
Thomas Schütte
Thomas Schütte (born 16 November 1954) is a German contemporary artist. He sculpts, creates architectural designs, and draws. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Education
From 1973 to 1981 Schütte studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf al ...
's work ''Vater Staat'' (2010) was donated by
Nicolas Berggruen
Nicolas Berggruen (; born 10 August 1961) is a US-based billionaire investor and philanthropist. Born in Paris, France, he is a dual American and German citizen.Jeremy Kahn (October 25, 2011)''Bloomberg'' He is the founder and president of Berggru ...
and installed on the terrace. Many other pieces of sculpture - by artists from
Auguste Renoir to
Ulrich Rückriem
Ulrich Rückriem (born 30 September 1938) is a German sculptor notable for his monumental stone sculptures. He lives and works in Cologne and London.
His abstract works of art are often assigned to the style of minimalism and process art.
Lif ...
- are on permanent display in the museum's garden.
Directors
* 1967–1974:
Werner Haftmann
* 1974–1975:
Wieland Schmied
Wieland Schmied (5 February 1929 – 22 April 2014) was an Austrian art historian and critic, curator, literary scholar and writer. He was professor of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich since 1986 and its rector from 1988 unti ...
* 1975–1997:
Dieter Honisch
* 1999–2008:
Peter-Klaus Schuster
* 2008–2020:
Udo Kittelmann
* 2020:-2022
Joachim Jäger
* Since January 1, 2022:
Klaus Biesenbach
Klaus Biesenbach (born 1966)Erica Orden (December 26, 2009)Herr Zeitgeist''New York Magazine''. is a European American curator and the museum director. He is the Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Berggruen Museum and Scharf-Gerstenberg Co ...
Images
Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin - von oben.jpg, A view from above
Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie asv2021-11 img2.jpg, Entrance side with ''Three Way Piece No. 2: The Archer''
Neue Nationalgalerie P7130065.JPG, Interior view
Stamps of Germany (Berlin) 1986, MiNr 753.jpg, German stamp from 1986
See also
*
Alte Nationalgalerie
*
List of art museums
Africa
Algeria
* Algiers: Museum of Modern Art of Algiers, Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers
* Oran: Ahmed Zabana National Museum
----
Egypt
* Cairo: Egyptian Museum, Museum of ...
*
List of museums in Berlin
Active museums
This is a list of museums and non-commercial galleries in Berlin, Germany.
Defunct museums
References
External links Museumsportal Berlin
*
List of museums in Germany
References
*
*
*
Further reading
* Joachim Jäger, tr. Geoffrey Steinherz. ''Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin: Mies van der Rohe''. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz / Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2011.
* Bénédicte Savoy & Philippa Sissis (Hrsg.): ''Die Berliner Museumsinsel: Impressionen internationaler Besucher (1830–1990). Eine Anthologie.'' Böhlau, Wien/Köln/Weimar 2012, .
Natural stone in the Neue Nationalgalerie
External links
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
{{Authority control
Buildings and structures completed in 1968
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe buildings
Art museums and galleries in Berlin
Modern art museums in Germany
Modernist architecture in Germany
Art museums established in 1968
1968 establishments in Germany