For Berlin Museum, a Modern Makeover That Doesn’t Deny the Wounds of War
BERLIN The Neues Museum briefly reopened here last weekend (was reborn, seems more like it), and local newspapers reported that more than 35,000 Berliners, many of them waiting hours in the cold in lines stretching nearly half a mile, filed into the still empty building over three days to see it.
The art that will go inside (Egyptian and pre- and early history, as in the prewar years) won’t be installed until the fall. This little preview was cooked up as a kind of civic ceremony. There was a ritual turning over of keys to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an occasion when the building could speak for itself.
And it does, poetically, and not just for itself. It’s at the heart of the so-called Museum Island, a complex at the center of the city, which the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV in the 19th century conceived as a public sanctuary of culture and learning, a modern Acropolis. The Neues Museum opened in 1855 as the island’s “focal point,” in the words of the building’s architect, Friedrich August Stüler; and with its displays of art and archeology, it was meant to cultivate, as he put it, “the most elevated interests of the people.”
Read entire article at NYT
The art that will go inside (Egyptian and pre- and early history, as in the prewar years) won’t be installed until the fall. This little preview was cooked up as a kind of civic ceremony. There was a ritual turning over of keys to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an occasion when the building could speak for itself.
And it does, poetically, and not just for itself. It’s at the heart of the so-called Museum Island, a complex at the center of the city, which the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV in the 19th century conceived as a public sanctuary of culture and learning, a modern Acropolis. The Neues Museum opened in 1855 as the island’s “focal point,” in the words of the building’s architect, Friedrich August Stüler; and with its displays of art and archeology, it was meant to cultivate, as he put it, “the most elevated interests of the people.”
3-11-09