Neue Nationalgalerie

The Nationalgalerie's twentieth-century holdings: Cubism, German Expressionism, Bauhaus-era abstraction and Surrealism, with Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro and Barnett Newman among the names the museum's own material and Wikipedia's account both put forward. The building itself is the limiting factor on how much of it a visitor ever sees: the single upper hall is reserved for temporary shows and the permanent collection lives on a below-ground level built for practicality rather than drama, so the museum rotates its own holdings rather than displaying them in full. An expansion building, berlin modern, is under construction on the Kulturforum beside the Neue Nationalgalerie to a design by Herzog and de Meuron, intended to relieve exactly this space constraint.

The museum's own account of its name is direct: Neue Nationalgalerie, the New National Gallery, signalled a deliberate break from the old and the start of a new chapter, the cultural rebirth of West Berlin after the war. It opened on 15 September 1968 as part of the Kulturforum, the cultural district Hans Scharoun planned at what was then the edge of West Berlin, hard against the wall dividing the city. The building was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's last major completed work. He attended the cornerstone laying in September 1965 and watched the enormous steel roof raised hydraulically into place two years later; he died within months of the building's opening, so the Neue Nationalgalerie is, among other things, the last building its own architect saw finished.

Mies had been developing the idea behind this building for years before Berlin commissioned it, through earlier unbuilt projects for a column-free pavilion meant to hold very large works and let them function as elements of the space itself rather than objects hung against a wall. What was built is a single glass hall of about 2,683 square metres, raised on three flights of steps, carried on eight cruciform steel columns, with an 18-metre cantilever between the glazed facade and the columns and an 8.4-metre ceiling on a 3.6-metre grid. It is, by any account, one of the purest statements of Mies's late architectural language anywhere. It is also, by the same accounts, a genuinely difficult room to hang art in: the granite floor and glass walls flood the hall with natural light that creates hazy, shifting shadow, and smaller works have needed freestanding or hanging partitions to be shown at all, which works against the openness the design was built to achieve. The bulk of the actual museum, the permanent collection, the library, offices, shop and cafe, sits on a second level built three-quarters underground beneath the plaza, out of sight and doing the practical work the glass hall above was never meant to do.

The building closed in early 2015 for what became a five-year renovation led by David Chipperfield Architects, and it reopened on 21 August 2021 with an Alexander Calder exhibition. The Bundesamt fuer Bauwesen estimated the cost at 101 million EUR in January 2015; by completion in April 2021 the actual figure had reached about 140 million EUR. The method was closer to conservation archaeology than ordinary refurbishment: the architects worked from archival material held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Library of Congress to establish the building's original condition, and original elements, handrails and shelving among them, were removed, restored and reinstalled in their previous positions rather than replaced with new fabric. The steel roof structure and the glass facade both underwent comprehensive restoration, including the replacement of 56 upper facade panes with new safety glass. Deferred modernisation was addressed at the same time: air conditioning, lighting, security, accessibility and the electrical and art-handling infrastructure a 1968 building was never built with. Mies himself had refused proposals to alter the building during his own lifetime, reportedly on the grounds that doing so would ruin its proportions; the 2015-to-2021 project is the first renovation the building has had since, and it was designed explicitly to restore rather than to update his original intentions.

The plaza and terrace around the glass hall carry large outdoor sculpture as a matter of permanent policy rather than temporary display: Henry Moore's Three Way Piece No. 2, The Archer, of 1964 to 1965; Alexander Calder's Tetes et Queue of 1965, from the same year the roof itself went up; and, extending the collection into the later twentieth century, Richard Serra's Berlin Block for Charlie Chaplin of 1978. None of the three requires a ticket to see, which is consistent with Mies's own stated ambition for the building, art encountered in the same continuous space as the city around it rather than sealed off from it.

The Nationalgalerie's twentieth-century collection, Cubism, Expressionism, Bauhaus and Surrealism, with Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro and Barnett Newman among the names most associated with it, is larger than the building was ever designed to show in full. The single upper hall goes to temporary exhibitions, currently Ruin and Rush: Berlin 1910 to 1930, a showcase of about 35 works from the museum's own Weimar-era holdings, organised around the city's contradictions of excess and poverty, emancipation and extremism, with paintings by Otto Dix, Hannah Hoech and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and film footage from Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. The permanent collection rotates below ground rather than hanging in full, and a dedicated expansion building for twentieth-century art, berlin modern, is now under construction on the Kulturforum beside this museum to a design by Herzog and de Meuron, intended to give the collection room the Mies building was never meant to provide.

Twenty euros covers every exhibition in the building, fourteen for the collection alone, and the 22 EUR Kulturforum ticket extends the same admission to the Gemaeldegalerie, the Kupferstichkabinett and the Kunstgewerbemuseum on the same site, worth buying if more than one stop is planned. Under-18s are free with ID at any time. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00, with a late Thursday closing at 20:00, and closed Monday; the current Brancusi exhibition extends Friday and Saturday evening hours to 20:00 on specific dates, which is worth checking against the museum's own calendar before a late visit. Most visitors clear the building, upper hall and lower galleries together, in an hour to ninety minutes; the sculpture terrace outside costs nothing extra and can be seen without a ticket at all.

The museum publishes no visitor prose and no platform rating on its own pages, so this rests on the institution's own material and on published architectural assessment. The building itself, rather than any single work inside it, is what the Neue Nationalgalerie is chiefly known for: Mies van der Rohe's last major work, a glass pavilion raised on eight columns under an 18-metre cantilever, treated internationally as a canonical statement of his late style. The building's own limitations are equally well documented: its single vast upper hall was never a practical exhibition space for a broad collection, which is why the permanent holdings live below ground and only a rotating fraction is ever on view, and the 2015-to-2021 restoration ran 39 million EUR over its original estimate.