Gemaeldegalerie

About 1,200 paintings on display, European, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, hung as nine departments in a single circuit of just under two kilometres. The museum names its core strengths as German and Italian painting of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries and Netherlandish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth, and the hang bears that out: the early Netherlandish sequence, with van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Hugo van der Goes, Bosch, Bruegel and Gossart, is the reason specialists come, and the Italian trecento cabinets at the far end hold Giotto, Simone Martini and Masaccio. The seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish department is the largest and holds 20 Rembrandts, two Vermeers, two Frans Halses and four Rubenses by the museum's own counts. The eighteenth century is thin by comparison, three cabinets for England, France and Germany together. This is not an encyclopaedic museum and it was never meant to be one: it was assembled from 1830 as a scholarly survey of the history of painting, and its value is that the survey is still legible room by room.

The Gemaeldegalerie opened as a public institution in 1830, in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Royal Museum on the Lustgarten, the building now called the Altes Museum. What it opened with was not bought for the public: the nucleus was the combined art collection of Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg and Frederick the Great, assembled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as princely property. What made the new institution different from a princely cabinet was its first director. Gustav Friedrich Waagen arranged and expanded the Berlin holdings according to systematic scholarly criteria rather than personal taste, and the museum's own account calls that genuinely innovative for its moment.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A collection hung by taste is a record of one man's eye; a collection hung as a survey is an argument about the history of art, and it can be checked. Almost everything good and everything difficult about this museum follows from that decision of the 1830s. The survey principle is why there are 72 galleries rather than twenty, why the eighteenth century gets three cabinets and the fifteenth gets halls, and why a proposal to show a smaller and better selection reads here as an attack on the collection's reason for existing rather than as good curating.

The gallery's international standing was made by Wilhelm von Bode, director from 1890 to 1929. The museum credits his connoisseurship and his energy with a string of acquisitions that produced what it calls a near complete survey of European painting from the thirteenth century onwards. He also solved the funding problem by inventing a mechanism: in 1897 he founded the Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein, a society of wealthy Prussian citizens who bought pictures for the state galleries. The Verein is still active and still owns things on these walls. Giotto's Death of the Virgin is credited to it on the museum's own collection page, and so is Schongauer's Nativity. In 1904 the swollen collection moved into a purpose-built home, the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum, now the Bode-Museum, conceived as a museum of Renaissance art in which painting and sculpture were shown together.

Bode's authority is also the reason this archive has a record of one of the pictures in the Dutch rooms. In 1897 the Verein bought The Man with the Golden Helmet as an autograph Rembrandt. The two most formidable Rembrandt scholars of the day, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Abraham Bredius, doubted it from the moment it arrived. Bode's endorsement carried the field, and the doubts dropped out of the literature for most of a century. A collection built by a director of great judgement inherits his misjudgements at the same rate, and a museum that has been right in public is institutionally worse placed to say later that it was wrong.

The museum's own account is blunt about the break. The Second World War ended what it calls a long and illustrious period of continuous development: the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum was badly damaged in the aerial bombardment, and over 400 large-scale works were lost. Those are not pictures in storage somewhere. The museum keeps a separate loss documentation for the Gemaeldegalerie, which is the honest institutional response to a hole that cannot be filled, and it is worth saying plainly that a survey collection with 400 large paintings burned out of it is a survey with gaps in the middle of it.

Then the city was divided and the collection was divided with it. From the Cold War until 1997 there were two Gemaeldegalerien: one in Berlin-Dahlem in the West, holding what the Burlington Magazine later described as the more significant part, and one in the Bode-Museum on the Museumsinsel in the East. Fifty years of separate hanging, separate cataloguing and separate scholarship on one collection. It was reunited and put on show at the Kulturforum in 1998. The collection has therefore been in one place, under one roof, for 28 years out of its 196, and that is the fact to hold on to before reading anything about where it should go next.

Design proposals were submitted to an architectural competition in 1986 and the contract went to Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler the following year. The museum describes the result in its own words as having a distinctly Prussian austerity of expression, a simple building rising above a sloping piazzetta, with the individual galleries grouped around a light-filled central hall, and it says the plainness of the facade is deliberately reminiscent of Schinkel's Altes Museum. That is a claim of descent from the building the collection started in, made by a building put up 168 years later.

What it produces in use is a sequence with one surprise in it. The exterior gives nothing away and carries no name of its own; the lettering on the piazza wall says Kulturforum, and lists the Gemaeldegalerie first among the institutions behind it. You enter a small polygonal hall lit through a coffered ring of glass blocks and a round oculus, which is the one deliberately theatrical thing in the building. That opens into the Central Hall, an enormous top-lit space with two rows of square columns, a shallow vault pierced by circular skylights and a low water basin set into the floor holding a sculptural installation. The floor plan gives the hall to special exhibitions. Everything else is arranged around it, so the hall is also the room you keep crossing, and its scale is the most divisive thing about the building: it is either the calm centre the museum intended or a great deal of empty stone between you and the pictures.

In June 2012 the Budget Committee of the German Parliament allocated ten million euros to convert the fabric-lined galleries of this museum into space suited to modern art. The Burlington Magazine's editorial that October reported that the decision appeared to have caught the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz unawares, and that it was driven by two pressures: the Neue Nationalgalerie was to close for refurbishment in 2015, and 150 works of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art given to Berlin by Heiner and Ulla Pietzsch came with a condition that a significant part be permanently displayed in the context of the Neue Nationalgalerie's holdings. Under the plan the old masters would move into cramped shared accommodation in the Bode-Museum, alongside the sculpture collection in Bode's spirit, until new galleries could be built across the Kupfergraben. The editorial recorded that the date for those galleries had already slipped from beyond 2018 to not before 2022, that no feasibility study had been done, no architect appointed and no money raised, and that a brochure inviting sponsors had nonetheless been produced. It reported the affair being called a Kulturkampf between new art and old, Willibald Sauerlaender likening it to Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Stiftung's president suggesting a smaller temporary display might be superior since not every work was first rate, which art historians received as an insult to a collection built on depth.

What has happened since is that the twentieth century got its own building instead. A new museum, berlin modern, is under construction on the Kulturforum beside the Neue Nationalgalerie to a design by Herzog and de Meuron, with a groundbreaking in December 2019 and a foundation stone laid in February 2024, and the museum's own account of it describes a revised, more sustainable and more participatory scheme with free exhibition space and a street gallery. So the pressure that would have emptied these galleries has been built next door rather than resolved at their expense. The Gemaeldegalerie's own collection page nonetheless still states that plans are being devised to return the collection to the Museumsinsel, to show the paintings in dialogue with sculpture of the same period. That is the same idea the 2012 editorial argued against, still in the museum's own words, with no date and no building attached to it.

A museum is a party to provenance, not a neutral host, and the Gemaeldegalerie's own news pages are the best evidence of how it handles that. Two cases are published there in detail. In the first, the Stiftung restituted five works to the heirs of Heinrich Ueberall, a Berlin art and antiques dealer whose customers had included the German Foreign Office until 1933, who was forced to give up his business between 1936 and 1938, obtained a British visa in 1939 too late to use it, and died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in September 1939. His widow Rebekka took her own life in 1942 after receiving a deportation notice, destitute in a so-called Jewish apartment. Three of the five works came from this museum: Matthias Stom's Sarah Leading Hagar to Abraham of 1642 to 1650, a seventeenth-century copy after Bartholomeus van der Helst, and a still life by Frans Ykens. They had entered the collection through a 1935 purchase facilitated by the Dresdner Bank, part of a mixed lot of over 4,000 artworks the state of Prussia acquired from the bank, much of it held as loan collateral. The Stiftung has run a provenance project on that lot since the beginning of 2018 and states it had long suspected it contained works confiscated through persecution.

In the second, the museum restituted a fragment of a painting of Lot of about 1537 by Hans Baldung Grien to the heirs of the painter Hans Purrmann. Purrmann sold it to the Berlin museums in May 1937. The museum's own account concedes the crucial point rather than hiding behind it: the price he was paid matched the market value at the time, and he sold only because his persecution as a so-called degenerate artist had destroyed his livelihood. A fair price under those conditions is not a fair transaction. The heirs lent the fragment back for ten years, so the picture in the German galleries is on loan from the family it was taken from. Both cases are on the museum's site under its own name, and in both it identifies itself as a beneficiary of the persecution of Jews and of artists. That is a good deal more than most institutions of this rank put in writing.

Somewhere in the Dutch and Flemish rooms hangs a head of an old man in an iron gorget under an ornamental helmet loaded with gold paint so thick it stands off the canvas. For most of the twentieth century The Man with the Golden Helmet was among the most reproduced pictures in Germany, hanging as a print and in embroidery in a very large number of ordinary homes. It was bought for Berlin in 1897 as a Rembrandt. In 1986, after technical examination, this museum concluded that it is not by Rembrandt but by a painter of his circle.

The precision of that conclusion is the reason this archive treats the Gemaeldegalerie as a subject and not just a location. The museum withdrew an attribution. It did not find a forgery and has never suggested one; the curator who announced the result said in as many words that it is not a fake and remains a great and masterly work. No replacement name has been adopted, though Carel van den Pluym, Heyman Dullaert and Johann Ulrich Mayr have all been proposed, and the label reads anonymous. The examination that unmade the attribution also found that the canvas had been cut down on all sides and that large areas, chiefly in the face, had been filled in or painted over by restorers under an ochre varnish that gave the picture exactly the warm tone by which generations had recognised it as Rembrandtesque. A century of connoisseurship had been judging a surface that was substantially not the painter's. The picture is inventory 811A and it belongs to Bode's Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein, not to the state, which means the society Bode founded to buy pictures still owns the one that cost him most.

The museum's own numbers are the planning tool: just under two kilometres, some 72 halls and cabinets, about 1,200 paintings, and nine departments. Nobody sees that properly in one visit and the ticket does not require you to. Day tickets admit at any time during opening hours on the date printed, they are sold at the counter as well as online up to four weeks ahead, and the museum's only advice is that booking online saves the queue. There is no timed entry to work around and no evening opening: Tuesday to Sunday, ten until six, closed Monday.

The honest strategy is to pick a department and finish it. The early Netherlandish halls, IV to VI, are the strongest thing here and take an hour properly. The Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century, halls VII to XI with cabinets 8 to 19 around them, is the largest and holds the Rembrandts, the two Vermeers and the picture this archive follows. Hall XVIII and the cabinets from 35 to 41 at the far end are the Italian thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and are the quietest rooms in the building on most days. At 14.00 EUR for the collection display, coming back twice costs less than one ticket to several better-known museums, and the 22.00 EUR Kulturforum ticket admits to the Kupferstichkabinett, the Kunstbibliothek and the Kunstgewerbemuseum in the same building. The Walther Koenig bookshop keeps the museum's hours and the cafe is on the upper level of the shared foyer. Cabinet 23 is closed, and what is currently away on loan or in conservation is listed on the museum's own Paintings on Tour page rather than guessed at on the wall.

We publish no visitor prose and cite no platform average, so what follows is built from the museum's own statements and from named published criticism. The museum's case for itself is depth: about 1,200 paintings over a circuit of just under two kilometres through some 72 halls and cabinets, arranged as a continuous survey of European painting from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, with 20 Rembrandts in a gallery it says holds a leading position reflected in its central place in the plan. The price is low for what is behind the door, 14.00 EUR for the whole collection display and half that on concession. What is repeatedly said against it is not about the pictures. It is that the collection has spent three decades being told it is in the wrong building: it was split between two cities until 1997, opened at the Kulturforum in 1998, was nearly evicted from it in 2012 to make room for twentieth-century art, and the museum's own collection page still says plans are being devised to move it to the Museumsinsel. No date is given. A visitor who wants to know where these pictures will be in ten years cannot find out from the institution that holds them.