Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Building

The current gallery sits in the southwest corner of the Kulturforum, a modern-styled answer to the old Museumsinsel (Museum Island). The gallery was designed by Munich architects Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler. The building consists of 72 rooms providing a two-kilometer (1.25 mi) floor. Upstairs the rooms flow around a large central hall, described by the museum as a "meditation hall". The hall sometimes displays sculpture, but is mostly empty, allowing easy crossing between rooms, and somewhere for school parties to sit. There are also works downstairs, a gallery devoted to frames, and a digital gallery.

Aborted relocation

In 2012, the gallery's collection faced a pending move to a temporary site on Berlin's Museumsinsel, to make room for the expansion of the Neue Nationalgalerie and the 20th-century collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, bequeathed on condition that it be displayed in its entirety. The proposal has provoked controversy and criticism, particularly since there are no permanent plans for a new structure that would house the collection in its full scope.

The plan to move the collection was later scrapped following the public backlash and financial considerations regarding the new buildings. The paintings will remain in their current location.

History

The collection was first opened to the public in 1830, on completion of construction of the Royal Museum, now called the Altes Museum ("Old Museum"), designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and sited by the Lustgarten opposite the Royal Palace on the other side of Unter den Linden. The paintings occupied the upper floor with the collection of antiquities on the lower. At this point, the collection contained nearly 1200 paintings, with a core of 160 from the 17th-century collection of Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, bought in Paris in 1815. An even more important purchase was 677 paintings from the collection formed in Berlin by the English merchant Edward Solly, which were acquired in 1821; Solly was an early collector of Italian Trecento and Quattrocento paintings and Early Netherlandish painting.

Purchases continued throughout the 19th century, with 345 works acquired during the inaugural directorship of Gustav Friedrich Waagen from 1830 to 1868, though paintings competed with antiquities for rather reduced purchasing budgets.

After Berlin became the capital of the new German Empire in 1871 the funds available greatly increased, and purchases accelerated, as Berlin strove to catch up with the greatest European collections. In 1874 the collection acquired the best of the collection of mostly north European art formed by the industrialist Barthold Suermondt of Aachen after his business collapsed. This was handled for the museum by the art historian Wilhelm von Bode, who had joined in 1872, and was to be the Berlin Museums' greatest Director. He headed the sculpture collections from 1883, then the paintings from 1890, becoming general head of the Berlin Museums from 1890 to 1920. A specialist in Rembrandt and Dutch painting, he made very significant additions in those areas but did not neglect Italian painting. His leadership marked the rise of the Gemäldegalerie to international prominence.

In 1904 the Gemäldegalerie moved to the newly built Kaiser Friedrich Museum, now the Bode Museum, where the collection continued to expand. The museum was badly damaged during World War II, but most of the collection survived the war in shelters across Germany. At the end of the war, however, 400 works that were regarded as too large to take to the remoter hiding places were destroyed in a fire in a Flak tower that served as a bomb shelter. Many important altarpieces and other large works were lost, and the collection remains short of very large works compared to the other major European collections. Furthermore, several hundred paintings were looted by Russian or American soldiers or confiscated by the Red Army and never returned, although in June 2006 a small painting by Alessandro Allori, missing since 1944, was returned by the British journalist Charles Wheeler, who had been given it at the end of the war in Berlin. The surviving collection was divided between East Berlin (mostly at the Bode Museum on Museumsinsel) and West Berlin in Berlin-Dahlem, where from the 1950s they were housed in a building originally used for the Asiatic collections, built in 1923, with post-war additions.

Purchases for the West Berlin collection eventually resumed after the war, with Dutch Golden Age painting, Italian Baroque painting, and the creation of a small section for English painting being priorities for successive directors before the Re-unification of Germany. In 1992 the museum administrations of East and West were re-united, but uniting the collections physically took longer. The current building on the Kulturforum was completed in 1998, and displays some 1,250 paintings, although yet another move currently seems likely (see below). Other works are displayed elsewhere, as the museum forms part of the Berlin State Museums and does not own a distinct collection as most museums do. For example, L'Enseigne de Gersaint, or "Gersaint's Shopsign", (1720), a famous painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, is displayed with other works in the appropriate setting of Charlottenburg Palace. The whole collection of Old Master Western paintings in the Berlin State Museums is usually said to be around 3,000.

In 1999 the Gemäldegalerie restituted to the heirs of the Jewish art collector Federico Gentili di Giuseppe a painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, entitled Rinaldo Abandoning Armida. Gentili di Giuseppe's art collection had been plundered by Nazis and disposed of via a series of Paris sales in 1942; the Gemäldegalerie had acquired it from the French art dealer Cailleux, in 1979.

In 2019, Berlin's Gemäldegalerie (Old Master Gallery) returned two late medieval panels to the heirs of a famous Jewish art collector Harry Fuld Senior who had been looted by Nazis. In 1940 the panels by the Italian artist Giovanni di Paolo, The Clothing of St. Clare By St. Francis, and St. Clare Rescuing the Shipwrecked, (c 1455), were acquired via the art dealer Carl Bümming by what was then called the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum.

In 2020 Berlin's Gemäldegalerie restituted a 16th-century painting by Hans Baldung Grien to the heirs of Hans Purrmann was forced to sell the work from his collection after losing his livelihood due to Nazi persecution.

Directors

• Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794–1868), 1823 until 1868
• Julius Meyer (1830–1893), 1872 until 1890
• Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929), 1890 until 1920
• Max Jakob Friedländer (1867–1958), 1924 until 1933
• Karl Koetschau (1868–1949), 1933 until 1936
• Ernst Heinrich Zimmermann (1886–1971), 1936 until 1945

West Berlin:

• • Ernst Heinrich Zimmermann, since 1957
  • Cornelius Müller Hofstede (1898–1974), 1957 until 1964
  • Robert Oertel (1907–1981), 1964 until 1973
  • Henning Bock (* 1931), 1973 until 1990

East Berlin:

• Ludwig Justi (1876–1957), 1946 until 1957
• Hans Werner Grohn (1929–2009), 1957 until 1960
• Irene Geismeier, 1960 until 1990

After Reunion, 1990

• • Henning Bock, 1990 until 1996
  • Jan Kelch (1939–2017), 1996 until 2004
  • Bernd Wolfgang Lindemann (* 1951), 2004 until 2016
  • Michael Eissenhauer (* 1956), 2016 until 2021
  • Dagmar Hirschfelder (* 1973), since 2021