2023-11-21 12:18:54
Opinion New National Gallery Berlin
So true and so threatening
As of: 2:17 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
“Kosmonauten” – Propaganda by Yuri Korolev, 1982
Source: © Jurij Korolev / Courtesy: Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen, on loan from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation
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The New National Gallery in Berlin has always been a plaything in world politics, a hinge between East and West. The new presentation of the collection of “Art from 1945 to 2000” is now becoming a great school for the eyes – it fuels the image dispute and shows the tornness of the world.
Two young men sleep in the evening sun. There is silence. If you get closer to Boris Nemensky’s monumental painting “On the Nameless Heights” from 1961, the openness dissolves; These men don’t sleep, they lie there hunched over, as if they had faced each other and met their end at the moment of impending eye contact, not a meter was missing before they would have fallen into each other’s arms. But now they are dead, their rifles lie next to them, in the background a third man in uniform, lifeless like everyone else. Just the shine of the sun, it’s still warm.
It is a monstrous painting. Just a few years ago people would have preferred to leave this form of realism in storage; they couldn’t tolerate it because it didn’t correspond to the comfortable clichés: Socialist realism has to be propaganda, abstract expressionism is free. The Russian painter was actually supposed to show a picture of awakening and hope – it became an anti-war picture and is as relevant today as it was back then.
World politics sets the framework
So how would a painter in 2023 reconcile warring soldiers in death? Perhaps like Shahak Shapira, who posted photos of Israeli and Palestinian victims without captions and asked people to guess where they came from: „Killed in Gaza?“ – „Killed in Israel?“The realization remains that they “all look the same” and that they are simply human: “They bleed the same, they deserve better.” This line could also describe Nemenskij’s picture.
The painting now welcomes visitors in the first room of the collection presentation “Tearing Test. Art between Politics and Society” (1945 to 2000) in the Neue Nationalgalerie – and makes you think about the horrors from Butscha to the Middle East. It is comforting that there is currently hardly a museum in Germany that uses history to shed more light on our hopeless times than the Neue Nationalgalerie.
The curators Joachim Jäger, Marta Smolińska and Maike Steinkamp do not shy away from explaining connections using documentary means, recalling history through photos – and at the same time leaving the eye open to new references. Because in this museum, current world politics has always set the framework, no matter how minimalistic and strict the architecture of the Mies van der Rohe building may be.
Endre Tót’s “Berliner Gladness” from 1978
Source: © Endre Tót
The Federal Republic of Germany gathered a lot of international art in isolated West Berlin and, to put it simply, used abstract expressionism to distract itself from its own Nazi past. In the GDR, art was controlled, censored and used ideologically by the state, which can never go well. And so the Neue Nationalgalerie has been dealing with a “double collection history” since the fall of the Wall.
In the impressive 14-chapter show, which are intertwined like a complicated puzzle, you encounter many acquaintances, such as the painter Wolfgang Mattheuer and his “Excellent” from 1973/74 – a lackluster table, a chair, an older woman, listless she stares into space, a dreary bunch of tulips in front of her.
Heroine of the work
A disappointed “heroine of labor” in the socialist state. Robbed of their illusions – which could also burst beyond the wall. Franz Gertsch’s 1974 painting “Barbara and Gaby,” measuring 2.7 by 4.2 meters in plain sight, celebrates the energetic hedonism of capitalist youth. The artist documents his party life in Lucerne, observing two young women in the bathroom as they style themselves for the evening.
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All these locations, assignments to East and West, Germany and Russia, abstraction and figuration, creation and destruction are dissolved through the unusual combination of the historical embrace, new connections emerge, free associations become possible.
They do not mean an overthrow of art historical categories; they were already invoked in the trilogy of exhibitions from the collection from 2010 to 2014. With the global uncertainty caused by wars, jihadists and dictators, climate change and economic forecasts, our view of the art of the crisis-ridden 20th century has become even more sensitive. And everything seems so true and so threatening.
Ordeal. Art between politics and society. Collection of the National Gallery 1945 – 2000. Until September 25, 2025 in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin
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