Art & Museums
Museum Island and its treasures, the Berlin Secession, the galleries, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the city’s deep and contested visual culture.
Part of Berlin
15 moments in this segment.
- - Museum Island. The UNESCO ensemble of five great museums on an island in the Spree, Berlin's acropolis of art.
- - The Berlin Secession. The 1898 breakaway of Liebermann, Corinth and Slevogt from the academy, German Impressionism's home.
- - Max Liebermann. The grand old man of German Impressionism, who painted from his villa on the Wannsee.
- - The Bode Museum. The domed museum at the tip of Museum Island, home to Byzantine art and one of the great sculpture collections.
- - The Bust of Nefertiti. The 3,300-year-old painted limestone queen, jewel of the Neues Museum and a magnet of controversy.
- - The Ishtar Gate. The glazed-brick gate of ancient Babylon, reconstructed in blazing blue in the Pergamon Museum.
- - The Pergamon Altar. The colossal Hellenistic altar with its writhing frieze of gods and giants, centerpiece of the Pergamon Museum.
- - Käthe Kollwitz. The Berlin artist of grief and war, her "Mother with her Dead Son" sculpture sits in the Neue Wache.
- - Neue Nationalgalerie. Mies van der Rohe's glass-and-steel temple of modern art (1968), his last building, a Berlin landmark.
- - Hamburger Bahnhof. A former railway station turned museum of contemporary art, Beuys, Warhol, Kiefer under its great iron roof.
- - The Berggruen collection. Picasso, Klee, Matisse, the dealer Heinz Berggruen's gift of modern masters back to his native city.
- - The Gemäldegalerie. One of the world's great collections of European painting, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Dürer, Caravaggio.
- - C/O Berlin. The city's great photography institution, housed in the historic Amerika Haus.
- - The Jewish Museum. Daniel Libeskind's zinc-clad zigzag (2001), voids, the Holocaust Tower, and the Garden of Exile.
- - The Boros Bunker. A WWII air-raid bunker turned private contemporary-art collection, Berlin's most striking gallery space.
