Exhibitions
Run on Caspar David Friedrich in Berlin
Around 75,000 individual tickets have been sold in advance for the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition. photo
© Jens Kalaene/dpa
The romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich is celebrated. After Hamburg, the artist’s works attract visitors to Berlin. Patience is sometimes necessary for tickets.
The run on Caspar David Friedrich is unbroken. After the success in Hamburg, tickets for the exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie are now available Berlin is in great demand. Long queues form in front of the building in the heart of the capital on opening days. After the first eight days, the museum was already expecting around 20,000 visits. A total of around 75,000 individual tickets have been sold in advance for the exhibition, which runs until the beginning of August.
“Enormous response from the audience”
In addition to the online quotas, which are quickly booked up, the museum also has some tickets available for day visits to the tourist hotspot Museum Island. Many interested parties are waiting patiently for access to the exhibition “Infinite Landscapes” in the anniversary year of the 250th birthday of the painter and German romantic Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840).
“We are pleased about the audience’s enormous response to our Caspar David Friedrich exhibition,” said Ralph Gleis, director of the Alte Nationalgalerie, to the dpa in Berlin. “The main focus is not on a record number of visitors, but rather that a visit to the Alte Nationalgalerie remains a real art experience and that people can enjoy their visit.” Tickets are still available every day at the box office.
“Monk by the Sea” and “Chalk Cliffs on Rügen”
Following the success in Hamburg, where works by the most important German Romantic painter attracted around 335,000 people in recent months, visiting hours on Berlin’s Museum Island have already been extended. Another show will follow in Dresden in autumn.
In addition to the famous pair of pictures “Monk by the Sea” (1808-1810) and “Abtei im Eichwald” (1809-1810), there are such well-known works as “The Sea of Ice” (1823/24), “Chalk Cliffs on Rügen” (1818/1819) or “Stages of Life” (1834). In total, more than 60 paintings and 50 drawings from home and abroad will be shown in cooperation with the copper engraving cabinet of the Berlin State Museums.
Bringing German romantics closer to the US audience
The Berlin exhibition is part of a series of thematically independent shows for the anniversary year in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Dresden State Art Collections. The three houses have the most important holdings of Friedrich’s works in the world.
In Hamburg it was about Friedrich in relation to modern art, Berlin is concentrating on Friedrich’s work and influence, in Dresden the Albertinum and Kupferstich-Kabinett have taken a look at “Where it all began” from August onwards.
Next year, the participating institutions will also loan works to New York, where the Metropolitan Museum wants to bring the German romantic Friedrich Friedrich closer to the American public from February to May 2025.