English
A great event to enjoy Berlin in a different way is the exhibition that the New National Gallery on the collection of works of art, ´Modern Times. The Collection (1900-1945)´. which will be open until the 3rd of October. The exhibition is organized around the works of the modernist period and will give way to the exhibition that will cover the period after the Second World War.
The exhibition recovers the convulsive history that the Berlin National Gallery lived through these works. From 1900 until the end of the Second World War, both Berlin and the Gallery lived the avatars of a political era of great changes: two World Wars, oppressive politics and social convulsions. We just have to go back to 1937 when the Nazi regime imposed oppressive rules on art, qualifying expressionism as ´degenerate art´, banning the exhibition of artists of this trend, persecuting and murdering the artists who defied this rule. During that period, the Berlin National Gallery lost innumerable works of art, like the work of the German expressionist painter Franz Marc, ´Tower of Blue Horses´.
The division of Germany meant a rupture in the art trends that, until 1945, had built the most brilliant avant-garde in Europe. Many artists emigrated from Germany to the United States during the War and others fled to East Germany as a political compromise at the end of the war.
And so, while in East Germany the artists took up a role of art workers for the socialist ideology that the USSR dictated, in West Germany other avant-gardes came up who rebelled against capitalism and the industrial society.
The process of history and art in Germany until 1945 would be marked by expressionism, cubism, surrealism and the important theory of the Bauhaus School. The exhibitions shows the work of the Hungarian photographer and painter László Molí-Nagy, who was one of the theorists, art lecturers and photographer of the Bauhaus School to show the mark of this trend. As a contraposition, there´s the work of the painter, graphic artist and drawer representative of German abstract art, Oskar Nerlinger, who went back into German museums after the unification of Germany.
Oskar Nerlinger was one of the most interesting representatives of German abstract art at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 20s he joined the German Communist Party, which meant that in 1933, with the rise of Nazism, he was forbidden to participate in exhibitions. He was an active participant of the theoretical discussions on art and its role in society, that through the publication ´Visual Arts´, which he directed with Kart Hofer, he influenced a whole generation of artists. From 1949 he worked in the Weissensee Art Academy in Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic.
For more information: http://www.smb.museum/smb/kalender/details.php?objID=25055
Nancy Guzman
Modern Times. The Collection (1900-1945) is an interesting outlook on the effects of history on German art from the beginning of the 20th century, an exhibition that you can´t miss if you´re spending a few days in apartments in Berlin
Translated by: aleixgwilliam