Berlin Museums plus

We started getting to know Berlin by setting many of their many art museums as our targets. The Kulturforum where we found several museums and the Opera House, contains many post-war, mostly modern buildings.

Top of Opera House on Cloudy Day with Sony "tent" in Back ground

Opera House looks better on a sunny day

The Neue National Gallery, built in 1968 and designed by Mies Van der Rohe, has a large modern art collection.

 Mies solved the problem that paintings don’t do well exposed to sunlight by putting the actual museum underground. That lovely glass box with a floating roof is mostly just to get  art lovers in the door and sell us tickets. There was a temporary exhibit with large wooden crates in the lobby that blocked the building's transparency in a way we don't think Mies would have liked.

Max Lingner

Werner Tubke - detail from Recollections of the Life of Dr Justice Shulze III

Dynamic Light show

Love this piece - read the part on the left

On Museum Island, the slightly older European art (16C -19C) is at the Alte National Gallery,

Alte Dome - ya really had to be there

Tiny elevator in the Alte

and the really old incredible stuff (13C to 16C) at the Gemalde Gallery, back at the Kulturforum.

Dome at the Gemalde gallery

In Kreuzberg, the Berliner Modern held many paintings by artists we'd never before seen.  Also there was a great exhibit of East German photographs from pre-war to re-unification, not shown below.

and the Jewish museum, just around the corner to the south, had a special exhibition of R.B. Kitaj (no photos.)  It has presentations covering nearly 1000 years of German-Jewish cultural history and fascinating architecture, representing a broken Star of David.

Memorial 

One part of the exterior

Interior

Interior

We also enjoyed the Bauhaus Archive which allowed no pictures, but good exhibits.

The Schloss (Palace) Charlottenburg, among many palaces for Frederick the Great and his wife Sophia, was beautiful, but allowed no interior photos. It has mostly been rebuilt since the war, although the huge collection of Chinese porcelain must have been preserved in underground shelters during the bombings.

The guards

Gigantic beautiful garden

Nearby is the Sammlung Sharf-Gerstenberg  museum with Surreal art which included Klee and Magrite. It also allowed no photos.  The Berggruen Collection across the street promised Picassos and other modern artists, but it was closed for remodel.

Danice is reading an old Kurt Vonnegutt book in which he quotes an “abstract expressionist” friend saying, “If you want to know the difference between a  good painting and a bad painting, just look at a million paintings.”  I’m pretty sure both of us together haven’t seen a million, more likely 100,000, but I do know when I’m weary and tired, hurrying through a series of 40 rooms to take a needed break, I can be stopped dead in my tracks and stand slack jawed in front of some 15th C Botticelli.

 The Vermeer paintings also upstage everything else in the room.  But we still don’t “get it” why so many great artists felt the world needed yet another painting of Madonna and child.  Does anyone get through rooms and rooms of those without glazed over eyes?

Berlin has historically been a city filled with big important buildings: Palaces, Museums and Churches.  It’s surprising how  much was destroyed by the bombings of WWII that has been rebuilt, more or less, as it was.  
There has  been a huge architectural boom since the wall came down.  Berliners wanted to see lovely new buildings in the empty space between the East and the West.  So now there are big beautiful office buildings, residential towers, and peaceful parks in the area once referred to as the Killing Zone, since anyone caught fleeing from East to West Berlin was shot there. There are a few memorials, but the reunification program has been successful and we don’t realize as we cross back and forth from the old west to the old east and back again.

In Potsdamer Platz all the buildings have gone up since the wall came down.  There is an exciting modern Sony Center

with a high glass circus roof over an open space filled with restaurants between tall glass buildings.

And down the Platz is a clinker brick office building by Renzo Piano.

Hard to see those clinker bricks on Piano building on the  right

More big buildings and those big open spaces.

In the Pariser Platz behind the Brandenburg Gate, Frank Geary designed a rather sedate facade for DZ Bank in keeping with the Platz’s building code,

but once inside is his requisite organic fish-like structure which housed a very large conference room.

Berlin being the seat of Germany’s government there are many large embassy buildings, most trying to make a statement..

Definitely the most exciting to us is the Netherlands Embassy designed by Rem Koolhaus

One curious feature of Berlin is the presence of pink, blue and lavender pipes running across and along streets about 15-20 feet above ground.

It turns out that was the fastest way to bring utilities into areas in need as part of the reunification program. Pipes are color coded for water, electricity and gas.  They are being  replaced underground over time, but there are many still visible 23 years later.