1920s Dada
Grosz, Dix and Hannah Hoch from the Weimar years.
Foto Christoph Rehbach — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Beniaminnimus — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Anagoria — CC BY 3.0 · Anagoria — CC BY 3.0
It was the term the Nazi regime used for modern art it considered contrary to its official taste — expressionism, Dada and abstraction generally. Thousands of works were seized from German museums in 1937 and some shown in a travelling exhibition of ridicule before being sold or destroyed. Many artists in this collection fled or were banned from working, and that rupture is visible in the sequence of rooms here.
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The Berlinische Galerie is a museum with a precisely defined brief: art made in Berlin, from 1870 to the present. No Italian paintings, no French impressionism — every work here was made by an artist who lived and worked in this city, which makes the collection a visual biography of Berlin itself across a century and a half of upheaval. And upheaval is effectively the subject: the Berlin Secession at the turn of the century, then expressionism and Dada in the raucous Weimar 1920s (Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Hoch), then the complete rupture under the Nazis when most of those artists were branded degenerate, then the city's division and eastern art against western, then the wave after 1989. The building is a former glass warehouse skilfully converted into wide, high-ceilinged halls lit from above. Its position in Kreuzberg is close to the Jewish Museum, and the two combine easily into half a day. The museum is far quieter than those on Museum Island despite the quality of its collection.
Grosz, Dix and Hannah Hoch from the Weimar years.
East against West before 1989.
Alte Jakobstrasse 124-128, 10969 Berlin