..Die Neue Nationalgallerie (New National Gallery) – Berlin
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The New National Gallery is one of three principal venues holding and exhibiting the collections of the National Gallery, the others being Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie), currently under renovation (9/99), and the Hamburger Bahnhof, carved out of a redesigned railway station. The Old National generally holds nineteenth century collections, the New holds twentieth century modernist work, and the Hamburger Bahnhof is the venue for contemporary art.
The New National, completed in 1968, is handsomely housed in a classic Mies van der Rohe Bauhaus box of steel and glass, with the main galleries located below street level in rooms whose only windows are a wall of glass in the rear facing a sculpture garden. The upper, street level is surrounded by open terracing where additional significant large scale sculpture is displayed, including the delightful Calder (see photo, left), Tetes et Queue (Heads and Tails) and a massive Henry Moore bronze, Archer, sadly defaced with graffiti at a recent viewing.
With the great size of the museum’s accumulated collections, only part of its holdings will be on display at any given point of time. Special exhibitions, which include both works from the collections and works borrowed from others’, also may be seen, such as the fascinating current show exploring themes in twentieth century German art (and its non-German influences), an exhibit that spreads over all three venues of the National Gallery, through January 9, 2000.
The New National’s segment of the exhibit, Matter and spirit, "highlights the dematerialisation of art under the influence of philosophy, religion, scholarship, and science and at the same time outlines the development of art into a sheer boundless expansion of our consciousness and faculties of perception." Make of that what you will; a stroll through the gallery is richly rewarding with an interesting selection of works, many from the permanent collections. The keystone work of the exhibit is a great American painting, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue IV, a huge Barnett Newman canvas from 1969-1970, two large rectangles, primary red and primary yellow, separated by a narrower band of dark blue. Newman, a powerfully influential participant in midcentury abstractionist development in New York, is seen as tremendously influential on German art as well.
In a somewhat lighter vein, there is a delightful group of paintings by Paul Klee. His 1920 Harlequin on the Bridge displays the typical charm and wit of this Swiss master. Less familiar is a larger work, Unfangen (The Embrace), 1932, which is totally abstract with a pointillist look and evokes Aboriginal "dreamings." A large new installation piece by Raffael Rheisberg, Antiquity Doesn’t Know Us, arranges over 100 architectural elements in carefully composed lines on a painted white base.
Other artists with substantial representation in this show are Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polk, Wassily Kandinsky, and Max Beckman. There is a group of works from the optical art explorations of the early 1980’s, with lots of fluorescent intensity. But the section that most struck this viewer was a selection of recent works exploring the deconstruction of the human form. A "C-print," a digitally manipulated photograph by Aziz + Cucker called "Chris" is a large sized photo of a man’s face; its super-realist look is confounded by the missing eyes and mouth, replaced by natural looking morphed continuations of the skin patterns. Effective and disturbing. A bronze has the figures of two women each missing the lower part of one leg and, nearby, mounted on the wall, two bronze heads of the women with a toe lodged where their foreheads meet. The figures are beautifully rendered; the images are curious, edgy, provocative.
With ambitious exhibitions, scholarly (and very serious) curation, and a major collection to draw on, the New National Gallery must be seen as a required – and highly pleasurable – stop on the art lover’s itinerary.
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