When I went to London as a kid my mum would always take us to the National Gallery, a very different gallery from the Alte Nationale. I found the Alte Nationale surprisingly progressive for ‘old art’, and not religious at all. We had audio headsets again, so I really got to understand some of the pieces. I love marble statues and there were some great characters, and I am always in awe of how movement has been carefully captured in the stillness of such a solid medium.
The temporary exhibition on at the momnt is Fighting or Visibily: Women Artists in the Nationalgalerie before 1919. Exactly 100 years ago the first women were allowed to begin studies in art at the Berlin Art Academy, the same year women in the Weimar Republic first received the right to vote. However, many women had succeeded as artists before that time and this exhibition uncovers their work. Even after allowed to be artists, they still struggled to find space in the male-dominated art world.
A lot of artwork was destroyed during the Nazi Regime including work of Picasso, Dali, Vincent Van Gogh and any work labelled as degenerate. During the division of Germany, the 19th-century paintings that had survived the war in Western zones of occupation were housed in the Neue Nationalgalerie, starting in 1968, and in Schloss Charlottenburg’s Gallery of Romanticism from 1986. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the growing collections were united in their original building, now called the Alte Nationalgalerie, on Berlin’s Museums Island. Accommodating the collection meant repairing the damage the war had wrought to the building as well as adding new rooms. In March of 1998, the Alte Nationalgalerie was closed for renovations. The museum was finally re-opened in December 2001, marking its 125th anniversary. It is located on Museum island which I think is a really cool landmark of Berlin.
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