Reopening of the New National Gallery in Berlin – Culture

The BMW Art Car from 1975 is one of the last works that the sculptor Alexander Calder created in the year before his death he stood for kinetic sculptures like no other. A lavish selection of his moving works of art are now also on display in the great hall of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin. In addition to giant floor-to-ceiling works such as the fiery red “Five Swords” from 1975 – which should ideally not be moved at all because they fit so ideally here, after all, as we know, Mies designed his architecture for precisely such works – alongside such monumental sculptures So the Calder Foundation in New York has also borrowed a number of extremely filigree wire works only a few centimeters in size, which are now occasionally rotated by white-gloved staff so that the whole expansive, shadow-swirling charm of these works can still be unlocked today . Because from Sunday on, not only should the renovated museum building be accessible to the public again, but also the artistic one spirit for which it was built back then, from the mid-1960s.

Ferris would have enjoyed this moment: high school film throwback with art car and glass facade

When Sandy Rower, President of the Calder Foundation and grandson of the artist, also briefly started the Art Car, a 3.0 CSL, parked in front of Mies’ glass temple, so that the acoustic dimensions of the matter could also be opened up, it was rather a brief call Masterpiece from the eighties, namely the film “Ferris makes blue”. As is well known, there is also a confrontation between the sculptural sports car and the modernist glass facade in the finale. And that doesn’t get any less tricky when you know that the facade, which unfortunately breaks in the film, comes from E. James Speyer – a student of Mies van der Rohe. (In general, this is only superficially the funniest high school film of all time and actually an analysis of the late modern era and its fragile promises of freedom.) Anyone who was there looked at the glass wall of Mies’ National Gallery a bit worried at that moment: it has only just been completely renovated for six endless years , once dismantled and reassembled by Chipperfield Architects, and from Sunday on it was completely booked out again for weeks, because not only the Berliners actually missed the popular museum building beyond measure …

Then of course nothing happened. The very wagon-operatic sound of the engine was soon exhibited again, and the car itself was packed up again shortly after it opened. But what has remained from that moment is actually a new feeling of vulnerability and vulnerability: the Neue Nationalgalerie was closed at the end of 2014, in order to make it back to what it originally was with a lot of effort. It is now reopening at a time when people like to decree that the way it was, not only should not continue today, but ideally shouldn’t have been in the first place. In the words of Joachim Jäger, who now runs the house: At that time a kind of art temple was once again built here, with clear thresholds for the canon of those years; today, however, “everything is in question”.

The question that his small team therefore now asked itself is about the right compass to find a reasonably feasible path between the accusation of cold ignorance of newly perceived problems and, on the other hand, the accusation of populist overcorrections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it reopened, where ever since it has been pretended that it is there of all places that has always been about the greatest possible diversity gone and not in truth about the core business of canonicalization. The Art Car is not a painted cargo bike, Mies’ facade has no thermal insulation panels, Alexander Calder was undeniably a heterosexual white man who did not paint any figurative pictures of the civil rights movement – and in the Neue Nationalgalerie they are now fearless and smart enough not wanting to say anything else.

Rather, Jäger emphasizes timely problem awareness in front of the press, saying, for example, that “more non-male and more global positions” will have to be brought into the house in the future. Initially, however, this house was built shortly after the Wall was built as a counterpart to the East Berlin National Gallery on Museum Island and so ostentatiously filled with American post-war art that even the other Western occupying powers were allowed to feel underrepresented. He wanted to “curate with the building and in the sense of the building”, but let the present with its political claims only act as a comment on this shrine of the twentieth century. In the actual exhibition space in the basement, this falls to the Cuban Jorge Pardo, who orientates the café room inside the building, which is always somewhat sparse, in resolute friction with Mies’ “less is more” doctrine with masses of Moorish-looking light objects, but also Calder’s light -and-shadow-games thinks ahead. And there is also the Italian Rosa Barba, who lives in Berlin, who has a solo exhibition in the graphics hall that could fill an entire art gallery elsewhere. Your films are presented here in a construction that replicates the floor plan of a Mies country house. One of them deals explicitly with the renovation work on the Neue Nationalgalerie. In another, the camera floats around like one of his kinetic objects in Calder’s Roxbury studio, which has remained unchanged since his death. The two wise old men of the Midcentury Modernism are therefore still relevant for younger people.

The founding director has lost its radiance since more was known about his past

The personalities of the then founding director Werner Haftmann are clearly more delicate. Because his nimbus as the West German Pope of the Modern Age has, to put it more discreetly, lost its radiance since the extent of his involvement in Nazism and the atrocities of war was brought to light this year. Was this comment from the present even a bit too present and short-term for the new presentation of the collection? In any case, the reference to the Haftmann case is still strangely taciturn down here. That should or should change at the latest when post-war art becomes the topic here in about two years, the Cold War between the national galleries on both sides of the Wall and, of course, Haftmann’s role in the re-branding of the Federal Republic and himself.

Open detailed view

For the time being, the actual exhibition halls focus on classical modernism up to 1945, with the old holdings being supplemented by a noticeably large number of new acquisitions and even loans. Because even on this terrain, the ground is obviously no longer as sure-footed as it once appeared to be. And the deeper one delves into this new presentation of the supposedly well-known, the clearer it becomes that the renovation work on the old hero stories of the Haftmann era has long since begun. Suddenly there is talk of the women artists in Herwarth Walden’s expressionist gallery “Der Sturm”. There is a picture of the Frenchman Auguste Herbin that has never been seen here before, which has only just been portrayed as a portrait of the “most delicate anarchist in the world” (Berliner Tageblatt, 1908), namely Erich Mühsam, was identified.

The works of art behind our Weimar Republic images from film and television can also be seen here

There is not only Ludwig Meidner, who was also rediscovered late, with his apocalyptic visions, but also Jakob Steinhardt, who, like Meidner, went from pathetic expressionism to deeply rediscovering his own Judaism. Hilma af Klint, the spiritualist from Sweden who was recently recognized as indispensable for the history of abstraction, has a whole wall. The self-portraits of Renée Sintenis, of which most Berlin visitors are still only likely to know the bear sculptures at the motorway entrances, are lined up next to another: Christian Schad’s “Sonja” hangs around the corner, this short-haired woman who has become an icon Twenties; only with Sintenis’ self-portrait busts does the whole thing now also exist of one of these short-haired women herself. In a side cabinet such women appear next to men who are themselves styled like Josephine Baker, in a film by Julian Rosefeldt that looks like an essence analysis all of the current Weimar Republic topoi from “Babylon Berlin” to “Fabian” are effective. And then the collection around it proves how much of it doesn’t come from Berlin at all, but from a supposed province like Dresden. Not just because of the Brücke expressionists and Otto Dix. But because of people like Wilhelm Lachnit, Kurt Querner, Conrad Felixmüller, who, in addition to their stark realism, share a closeness to communism and their origins from the East Berlin collection of the National Gallery. Felixmüller’s “Redner” is even the cover motif of the catalog. It shows the Saxon left winger Otto Rühle, was destroyed by Felixmüller as a precaution during the Nazi era – and then repainted. But there are also pictures painted over for political reasons by the neo-objective Franz Radziwill, who was mocked as Nazi will in the left-wing Dresden painting circles for a reason. Almost every hall has a topic like this that would actually justify its own special exhibitions and publications, but the future is still long. Because when at the end of this show you see an aerial photo of the war-torn Tiergarten district, once heavily influenced by the Jewish bourgeoisie, which in turn was generously painted over with the Neue Nationalgalerie as part of a West Berlin “cultural forum”: Then the floor here still feels when you go out a little more fluctuating than before.