Although I lived in Berlin for a year, and before and after that I would spend weeks in the city, I never managed to visit my favorite German cultural institution - the New National Gallery - once again. Years passed, decades passed. Until this May weekend in 2025, when I simply went there.
I was walking with my companion along the Embankment of Max Reichpich - a sailor who paid with his life for his pacifist rebellion when the imperial army sentenced him to death in 1917. He did not live to see his 23rd birthday. It's the same with Berlin - a surplus of history at every turn.
I finally see a building that delighted me with its modern transparency several decades ago.
The gallery was built over three years, until 1968. It was the last work of a German architectural genius who fled to America in 1938 and successfully built his buildings there. His name was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and he was born in Aachen, the German city that, Berlin will forgive me, I love the most. His buildings are often just "skin and bone" - steel and glass. Historians say that the New National Gallery is perhaps Van der Rohe's best work. His architectural testament.
The gallery has been renovated for over five years, starting in 2015. It reopened in August 2021. The building in my memory and the one I am entering are completely identical. This is a sign that the restorers have done a good job, respecting the author's handwriting.
Since the building itself is a work of art, tours of the building with an expert guide are offered on Wednesdays and Sundays.
Already at the entrance, I am faced with the unusual fact that the Gallery is currently hosting three exhibitions. The exhibition with which the Gallery celebrates itself is called "Burden. Art between Politics and Society". Everything collected here from post-World War II art is sorted along the lines of the ideological and aesthetic fractures and divisions of that era. The Cold War disintegration of the world was not only the fate of art but – this is what the exhibition is about – also its chance to take unexpected paths. Realism or abstraction? Everyday life or pop? Feminism, identity, ecology. It's all there. Since Berlin was the central point – a divided city of a divided world – the confrontation of what was created on both sides of the Wall is extremely interesting. Thus, Picasso and Warhol become neighbors with names that many have barely heard of.
Pop i propaganda
For example, Hans Tiha. He was expelled from what was then Czechoslovakia in 1946 with his family. He later became the only East German pop artist. He lived in the war ruins of East Berlin. Tiha became the most sought-after East German graphic artist and book illustrator, and he also wrote for children. He was followed by the GDR State Security, the notorious Stasi. In his studio, before leaving it, he would turn the paintings towards the wall, leaning their frames against each other. He would place pieces of paper between the frames. When he entered the studio, he would check whether the pieces of paper were in their place, so that he would know whether the secret service had seen any of his paintings that could be interpreted as criticism of the communist state.
I was drawn to his canvas, which undoubtedly owes a lot to both Dadaist pacifism and Pop Art.
Among the multitude of works, I was equally interested in a great name in East German art. Harold Mackas is represented by the canvas "Transport of the Six-Armed Goddess".
Nazis and forced laborers dismantle a six-armed stone deity. It is one of the rare artistic messages that shows how totalitarian ideology works when unwanted cultural or religious heritage gets in its way. Mackas's irony has brought him recognition but also trouble. "A painter with the tendencies of a circus clown" – that's how a Berlin daily recently described the painter.
Lothar Lang, one of the most important art historians and critics in the German Democratic Republic - GDR - once wrote: "Mackes's sensual realism in his best works offers 'a feast for the eyes'."
The same exhibition deliberately promoted non-figurative art, such as abstract expressionism, as a counterpoint. Its originator, the American Barnett Newman, is represented with work that is impossible to overlook.
The canvas "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV" was completed in 1970. That was the year the artist died. But something about the radiance of pure color from his canvas, something magical in those bright geometric surfaces, still holds the gaze of the living 55 years after Newman's death.
From the United States, a work signed by Li Bonteku also arrives - some critics saw in her creation of reliefs from parts of industrial engines and machines a provocative attempt to depict certain human openings. I will admit, that was not my first association. I thought of the tail of a jet plane. But the human imagination is endless, especially when it plays out in a Freudian way.
The exhibition included video installations, objects, and canvases of distinct figurativeness and radical abstraction. Art that confirmed and even celebrated the order in which it found itself, as well as that which intentionally or openly opposed it.
Heinrich Drake, one of the leading sculptors of the late East German state, was the kind of artist that every regime needs.
He exhibited as a young man during the Nazi era, gained full recognition in the GDR, and died in the reunited country and city in 1994.
The character of Marx was familiar to everyone who grew up in Yugoslav socialism from a young age, but due to the frequency of his appearance in public space, he was mostly banal. I approached him anyway, to find out what makes Drake's Marx special. Maybe it's the sharpness of his facial features. It occurred to me that not a single Marx character I had encountered in my life showed any trace of happiness or humor. And we know that he loved to make children and joke.
On the other hand, the most famous name in American pop art, Andy Warhol, played with the symbol of the socialist camp - the hammer and sickle - amidst the deadly seriousness of the Cold War.
By reversing the order of the words – the painting is called Hammer and Sickle – Warhol separated these two objects, ironically freeing them from their overemphasized ideological symbolism.
Warhol created a series of such prints after a visit to Italy, where he saw graffiti on the walls of a hammer and sickle – the symbol of the then powerful Italian Communist Party. In New York, he bought a hammer and sickle from a nearby hardware store. He kept the American manufacturer's mark on the handle of his sickle. Warhol managed to artistically Americanize the main symbol of America's Cold War rival. An interesting reinterpretation emerged.
On the border of art
Directly opposite the entrance to this exhibition, in separate rooms, are exhibited the works of one of the greatest contemporary German painters, Gerhard Richter. His canvases fetch astronomical prices all over the world.
I recently wanted to see his exhibition in Düsseldorf, but it was so crowded that I had to give up. Now the Gallery has made up for that loss.
At the very entrance is the monumental work "Atelje 1985". Its playfulness leaves no doubt that the joy of creation is at the heart of this triptych, 2,6 meters high and six meters wide,
In his decade-long work, Richter has often been devoted to the question of the boundaries of art. His relationship to historical reality, factuality, is particularly evident in his relationship to photography. When he moved from East to West Germany in the early 1986s, he already brought with him his desire to "remake" photographs with color. One of the techniques was varnishing. He began to process his photographs in this way in XNUMX. Art critics believe that abstract visual art and objectivity collide here as rarely in his entire work.
Alongside this series of unusual photographs, I also find the artist's words: "Photography has almost no reality, it is almost entirely a painting. And painting always has reality, you can touch the color, it has presence; but it always gives some image, no matter, good or bad. That theory does not bring anything. I took small photographs that I smeared with colors. There was something gained from that issue, and it is good that it is so, better than what I could say about it."
One of Richter's most famous projects is "Birkenau". The series of plane trees was created based on a photographic template. The photographs were secretly taken by the camp inmates themselves, and were smuggled out of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp by a Polish woman in toothpaste. The artist added layers of paint over these shocking photographs, making them unrecognizable. Richter did two things with this – thanks to his status as an international art star, he drew attention to the camp horror that stood behind the photographs. And he proved that abstract paintings, based on the history of their creation and the heavy melancholy they carry within, can become shocking artistic insights into the world of that horror. In doing so, he once again pushed the boundaries of documentary and artistic memory.
Although I am always reserved when it comes to world-renowned artists, because it is not always possible to assess what has essentially contributed to their success, marketing strategy, speculation on the art market or a fashion trend, on the one hand, or pure aesthetic magnetism on the other - most often it is a successful mix of these elements - Gerhard Richter is certainly one of the artists who are rightfully at the top.
His work is so suggestive that I have to wait in the lobby for a while, in order to somehow mentally prepare myself for the next visual adventure.
Imagine peace
Yoko Ono, an influential conceptual artist and wife of John Lennon, with whom she publicly fought for world peace until his death, was presented at the National Gallery with an exhibition titled "Dreaming Together".
The artist wrote down the thought that gave the framework for the exhibition: "A dream that a person dreams alone is just a dream. A dream that is dreamed together is reality."
"Mend Piece" awaits visitors at the entrance - a concept of "unfinished art" that was known back in the 1960s. Only when the audience sits down at a table and begins to assemble the pieces of broken ceramic objects does this art come to life. Yoko Ono refers to Kintsugi, the traditional Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. The veins that indicate the place of the break, glued with gold-plated varnish, become a manuscript that tells the whole story of the object's former brokenness.
Yoko Ono wrote about it: "Repair with wisdom/Repair with love./That will repair the Earth at the same time."
The earth certainly needed repair 60 years ago, when Yoko Ono presented her work in London. I regret to say that in the meantime the damage has progressed.
The exhibition features the famous chessboards, all squares and pieces completely white. People can sit down and play a game without any opposition. "Play with Confidence" is the name of the conceptual project from 1966. The instructions for the players are to play until they can no longer distinguish between their own and their opponent's pieces.
I was most interested in the original advertisements in the New York Times and other reputable newspapers of the last century.
The words were printed across the pages: THE WAR IS OVER, and below that, in small letters - if you want it. It was a Christmas card from John and Yoko Lennon on Saturday, December 21, 1969.
Other advertisements from other decades read in various languages of the world: "Imagine peace."
I leave the New National Gallery with the thought that art still, in Aristotelian terms, does not speak so much about what is, but rather points to what could be.
Bonus video:
