2024-07-17 14:52:09
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs Berlin’s museums and is often referred to as the most important cultural institution in Germany, will be headed by a woman for the first time. Next year, its president will be Marion Ackermann, who until now managed the State Art Collections of Dresden. He will replace 65-year-old Hermann Parzinger, who has been in office since 2008.
The DPA agency informed about the change. The new president was chosen by the board of directors, which includes representatives of the German federal government and the federal states. “Marion Ackermann is a great head of museums, an art expert, an excellent strategist, and she also has excellent international contacts,” said the German government’s commissioner for culture, Claudia Roth, who chairs the foundation’s board.
Marion Ackermann will take up the position on June 1, 2025, her contract is for five years. He wants to deepen cooperation with partners abroad, focus on making the foundation visible in the world and try to overcome the polarization of society with the help of art.
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, founded in 1957, is described by the DPA agency as the largest and most important cultural institution in Germany. It includes, among others, the Berlin State Library and the State Museums of Berlin, i.e. fifteen museums that have 4.7 million objects in their collections and employ more than 2,000 people.
The individual buildings are mainly located on the so-called Museum Island in Berlin. These include, for example, the New Museum with a collection of Egyptian art and a bust of Queen Nefertiti, the Pergamon Museum with a collection of classical ancient art including a copy of Ishtar’s Gate, or the recently renovated New National Gallery, whose headquarters were designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The foundation also includes the Old National Gallery, which has paintings by Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin in its collections, or the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, which exhibits canvases by Sandro Botticelli and Rembrandt. In 2019, the new James Simon Gallery was added to the museums.
The foundation operates, among other things, the New National Gallery in Berlin. | Photo: CTK/DPA
Every year, the foundation works with a budget of around 400 million euros, which is about 10 billion crowns. The largest part is paid by the federal government. According to the DPA agency, Ackermann’s appointment will be linked to the reform of the institution. It would need roughly 60 million euros more per year, for the time being it has been promised roughly half by the federal states. How much the federal government will increase its contribution is pending.
The individual components of the foundation should be more autonomous in the future, which should lead to better exhibitions, work with marketing, educational programs and overall greater public interest. “However, the reform is stuck because no one wants to finance it,” writes the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
According to him, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation has recently been plagued by a lack of money, as well as competence disputes between the president Hermann Parzinger and Michael Eissenhauer, who will lead the State Museums in Berlin until 2022. This year, due to savings, the foundation had to limit the opening hours of some museums and cut the budget. “The plan for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to catch up with world institutions such as the Louvre or the British Museum in the long term seems more like a farce,” criticizes the German daily.
Fifty-nine-year-old art historian Marion Ackermann began as a curator. At the beginning of the millennium, at the age of 38, she became the youngest director of a major German museum when she was appointed to head the Stuttgart Art Museum. In 2009, she left there for Düsseldorf, where she began managing the collections of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
In 2016, Ackermann took over the management of the State Art Collections of Dresden, whose fifteen museums are visited by over two million people every year. Among other things, she established cooperation with the National Gallery in Prague, then managed by Jiří Fajt, and is still a member of its scientific board, that is, the director’s advisory body.
Later, after his departure from Prague, Fajt was employed by Ackermann in the Dresden collections, where the Czech art historian still works today. Last spring this year, with the participation of President Petr Pavel, they opened an exhibition of the St. Vitus treasure, which went abroad for the first time. The show will last until September 8.
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