Still Berlin
Jul. 14th, 2012 06:13 pmSo I never wrote about the tours of the art galleries. Both were excellent.
The first was to see Der Geteilte Himmel - Divided Heaven - which is also the name of a novel by Christa Wolf. It shows the collection of the mostly German art from both halves of Germany from 1948-1968. The East got Museum Island (although not all the art because some had been liberated by the Americans), so the West had to build their own art museums. So they built the New Museum, although it wasn't actually completed and opened until much later.
It was fantastic to see Berlin art and German art. They had some international stuff as well, including the Bruce Nauman that I liked and that now means I can't just dismiss his stuff.
The second trip was to the Gemäldergalerie - the old Masters' collection. No as much to my taste, but they have some great stuff. I got to pratice wandering through everything and looking at what catches my eyes. It's kind of hillarious, because it'll be Rubens or Vermeer or Claude Lorraine or an artist I've studied at Uni (Gaspar Dughet, Pieter de Hooch). They also have a lot of Rembrants, including a fantastic hugh one, 20 years later than the one in the NGV, which I've done a close analysis of. It is quite differernt, but expresses the same idea in the same way. And has the same table cloth in it.
Is morning I caught two trains and a bus out to the Brücke Museum. Finally! It was great. The exhibition at the moment is a whole lot of self drawn postcards that they sent people. It's always interesting to see artists's sketches, but this was also better because they are sketches that were meant to be see by people, that were meant to stand on their own, even if they'e not polished.
Tomorrow I'm going to Hannover. It looks interesting and it's about half way between Berlin and Kassle. Although that's not really a concern because Germany is not very wide. It takes a while to get from the top to the bottom but even then not more than a day, really.
Oh, the other thing I've done, other than classes and lunch out with my class and eating more icecream and the tour of Prenzlauerberg is I walked along the East Side Gallery at 8:30 at night. Because it was still light enough!
Prenzlauerberg is old East Berlin. Now the kid central of Berlin. They instuted policies to encourage young families into the area. Now they have a joke new logo: the Berlin bear pushing a pram. When the wall came down, even until the mid ninties, I think, there were a lot of places that didn't have inside toilets. Sometimes buildings had just one bathroom on a floor. There were also a lot of appartments in the back courtyard of the buildings that didn't get proper natural light. Obviously increasing housing costs are a product of the modernisation and 'sanitisation' (restoration, sometimes, but re-plumbing, re-wiring, bring the bathroom in side). This is still a tense topic. They have groovy shops and excellent icecream, though.
The first was to see Der Geteilte Himmel - Divided Heaven - which is also the name of a novel by Christa Wolf. It shows the collection of the mostly German art from both halves of Germany from 1948-1968. The East got Museum Island (although not all the art because some had been liberated by the Americans), so the West had to build their own art museums. So they built the New Museum, although it wasn't actually completed and opened until much later.
It was fantastic to see Berlin art and German art. They had some international stuff as well, including the Bruce Nauman that I liked and that now means I can't just dismiss his stuff.
The second trip was to the Gemäldergalerie - the old Masters' collection. No as much to my taste, but they have some great stuff. I got to pratice wandering through everything and looking at what catches my eyes. It's kind of hillarious, because it'll be Rubens or Vermeer or Claude Lorraine or an artist I've studied at Uni (Gaspar Dughet, Pieter de Hooch). They also have a lot of Rembrants, including a fantastic hugh one, 20 years later than the one in the NGV, which I've done a close analysis of. It is quite differernt, but expresses the same idea in the same way. And has the same table cloth in it.
Is morning I caught two trains and a bus out to the Brücke Museum. Finally! It was great. The exhibition at the moment is a whole lot of self drawn postcards that they sent people. It's always interesting to see artists's sketches, but this was also better because they are sketches that were meant to be see by people, that were meant to stand on their own, even if they'e not polished.
Tomorrow I'm going to Hannover. It looks interesting and it's about half way between Berlin and Kassle. Although that's not really a concern because Germany is not very wide. It takes a while to get from the top to the bottom but even then not more than a day, really.
Oh, the other thing I've done, other than classes and lunch out with my class and eating more icecream and the tour of Prenzlauerberg is I walked along the East Side Gallery at 8:30 at night. Because it was still light enough!
Prenzlauerberg is old East Berlin. Now the kid central of Berlin. They instuted policies to encourage young families into the area. Now they have a joke new logo: the Berlin bear pushing a pram. When the wall came down, even until the mid ninties, I think, there were a lot of places that didn't have inside toilets. Sometimes buildings had just one bathroom on a floor. There were also a lot of appartments in the back courtyard of the buildings that didn't get proper natural light. Obviously increasing housing costs are a product of the modernisation and 'sanitisation' (restoration, sometimes, but re-plumbing, re-wiring, bring the bathroom in side). This is still a tense topic. They have groovy shops and excellent icecream, though.