Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Die Zauberflöte, Oper von Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Entwurf zur Dekoration, Die Sternenhalle der Königin der Nacht, Detail / Bildnachweis: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Jörg P. Anders

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Die Zauberflöte, Oper von Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Entwurf zur Dekoration, Die Sternenhalle der Königin der Nacht, Detail / Bildnachweis: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Jörg P. Anders

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Modern Times
The Collection. 1900-1945. Neue Nationalgalerie

12.03.2010 to 03.10.2011

Neue Nationalgalerie
Neue Nationalgalerie

The true extent of the wealth of artworks owned by the Nationalgalerie is to be revealed as never before. From March 2010 onwards, paintings and sculptures from the classical modernist period up to 1945 will go on display to the public. This will be followed by a second show featuring works from the period after the Second World War.

There are few other museums where history has played as instrumental a role in shaping the collection as it has done in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Most damaging of all in the pre-war years was the splintering of the collection by the Nazi campaign against Degenerate Art in 1937. Countless Expressionist masterpieces such as Franz Marc's Tower of the Blue Horses vanished from the collection and are still sorely missed to this day. The most important of these lost key works will be integrated into the great showcase of the collection in March in the form of a “shadow gallery“.

The partition of Germany also manifested itself in the differing strategies adopted in maintaining the collection: while in West Berlin the formal innovations of various avant-garde trends came to the forefront, in the East Berlin Nationalgalerie, the emphasis lay firmly on the art's content. The merger of the two collections resulted in several groups of works complementing each other, as seen in the abstract artist and Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy, whose work is now juxtaposed with that of Oskar Nerlinger, who uses similar elements in relation with people and machines to illustrate the city, technology and work.