Private Half-Day Walking Tour of Berlin's Kulturforum and the Gemäldgalerie with Art Historian

When the Prussian collections got into serious difficulty housing its extensive artefacts, plans were made for a second museum hub in Berlin as early as the beginning of the 20th century. Yet it took until the 1950s before the Kulturforum, a collection of cultural buildings, was eventually designed and built at the edge of West-Berlin close to Potsdamer Platz (at that time right at the border where the Soviet, British and American sectors conjoined). Thus the Cold War division of the city was also mirrored in the public art collections that were once literally scattered on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The Kulturforum can also be understood as the modernist answer to the Museum Island. After a discussion about the modenist outlines of the Kulturforum, and a walk by such stunning buildings such as the Neue Nationalgalerie designed by Mies van der Rohe and the organic State Library and Philharmonie both by Hans Scharoun, we will concentrate on the spectacular paintings of the Gemäldegalerie.

During the Cold War the Old Master paintings ranging from the 13th to 18th centuries were in a temporary exhibition space in the suburban Dahlem district in West-Berlin. After the German reunification of 1990, these art works did not return to their historical home on the Museum Island. The Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) completed in 1998 was especially designed to be this historic collection’s new home. That is why the Gemäldegalerie presides over one of the world’s finest collections of European masterpieces by Van Eyck, Bruegel, Dürer, Raphael, Tizian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Vermeer and Rembrandt. Rembrandt’s Cornelis Claesz Anslo and his wife Aaltje and Samson threatening his father-in-law are neighbors of two of the finest works of the Dutch master Frans Hals, the almost impressionistic Malle Babbe and the portrait of the One-year-old Catharina Hoofdt and her nurse, a version of Sandro Botticelli’s Venus Rising and Antonio da Correggio’s Leda with the Swan.