German Museums Move Closer to Reunification

Correction Appended

BERLIN, Nov. 23 — It may be a decade or more before this city’s monumental Museum Island finally shakes off the twin legacies of World War II and East Germany’s Communist regime, but with the reopening of the Bode Museum, this cultural park in the former East Berlin has taken another step toward recovering its place as one of the world’s great centers of art.

With the restoration of the Alte Nationalgalerie, or Old National Gallery, in 2001, two of the island’s five museums are now in fine shape. After an eight-year, $209 million refurbishment, the Bode probably has never looked better since its inauguration as the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1904.

Occupying a triangular plot overlooking the Spree River on the northern edge of the island, the museum is once again a true palace of art, welcoming visitors into its vast neo-Baroque entrance hall with an equestrian statue and leading them through naturally lighted galleries with marble floors and wood-paneled ceilings.

True to the ethos of its founding director, Wilhelm von Bode, who believed in mixing art collections, the museum is also now presenting Byzantine art, 15th- to 18th-century sculptures, and coins through the ages as well as a selection of Renaissance paintings and decorative arts. And it is doing so with a majestically spacious installation.

Nearby two other museums, the Pergamon and the Altes, or Old, Museum, continue to draw crowds as they await their moment of renovation, while work is well under way on the $387 million reconstruction of the Neues, or New, Museum, which was badly damaged by wartime bombing and left in ruins by the East German government.

That is not all. A $94 million visitors’ center designed by the British architect David Chipperfield will be built beside the Neues Museum. This glass-faced center, which will carry the name of the early-20th-century German-Jewish philanthropist James Simon, will in turn be linked to the Neues, Altes, Pergamon and Bode Museums by an underground passageway decorated with archaeological objects.

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Yet, remarkably, even these ambitious plans are only pieces of a huge puzzle created by the unification of Germany in 1990. For 45 years the city’s art treasures were divided and, with Museum Island in the east, West Berlin compensated by building its own Neue Nationalgalerie, or New National Gallery, and a Gemäldegalerie, or Picture Gallery. Once united, Berlin then found itself with art scattered — and often duplicated — across 17 state museums.

Thus, along with restoring Museum Island, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which owns the 17 museums, is gradually reorganizing the collections, which last year meant moving Egyptian art, including the famous bust of Princess Nefertiti, to the Altes Museum. Once this process is completed, perhaps by 2020, the Gemäldegalerie’s painting collection will be transferred to the Bode, and a new annex, and Museum Island will present all art from the ancient civilizations though 1900.

Under the foundation’s master plan, modern and contemporary art will then be assigned to the Gemäldegalerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof museum and other museums of former West Berlin, while Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie will be devoted principally to temporary exhibitions.

“Berlin will become a city of art,” said Peter-Klaus Schuster, director-general of Berlin’s state museums, “presenting everything from Babylon to Matthew Barney.”

Still, for at least a decade until its annex is built, the Bode’s present installation seems unlikely to change. And, in the view of some experts, it could hardly be bettered.

Writing in The Financial Times, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, hailed “the most comprehensive display of European sculpture anywhere.” He added: “It is no exaggeration to say that in the new Bode Museum, Europe will be able for the first time to read its history — aesthetic and religious, intellectual and political — in a three-dimensional form.”

It is of course a history strongly shaped by Christianity reaching back to the foundation of Constantinople and the twilight of the Roman empire and including stone reliefs and wood carvings from fifth-century Egypt. Ivory reliefs and triptychs from 10th-century Constantinople already define the artistic composition of Crucifixion scenes that would influence European sculptors and painters until the 18th century.

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The presentation of the collections is both geographic and chronological, with the Byzantine and Gothic art of northern and southern Europe displayed separately on the museum’s first floor and a similar regional division of Renaissance and Baroque art on its second floor. Yet what is perhaps most striking is that, despite the display of 1,700 sculptures, the museum feels anything but cluttered.

Daringly, the museum also presents most statues and sculptures without the protection of glass cases, offering visitors a rare intimacy with works of great beauty and fragility. And the masterpieces here are myriad, with the names of their artists often known as early as the 13th century, starting with the Tuscan sculptor Giovanni Pisano and later including the Florentine master Donatello, whose Virgin and Child marble relief is among the museum’s treasures.

The power of Marianism over early art is no less evident in wooden and marble statues, majolica sculptures and altar pieces, several of which are displayed in the so-called Basilica gallery, itself modeled after a Florentine Renaissance church. One invaluable 15th-century work, the Dangolsheim Madonna, a wooden polychrome statue by Nicolaus Gerhaert von Leiden, is given a small room to itself.

The museum’s second floor includes 150 paintings on loan from the Gemäldegalerie, among them works by Alessandro Allori, Tintoretto and Vasari, as well as some Renaissance ceramics and furniture. But here again, sculpture dominates, notably two powerful bronze busts by Taddeo Landini of Popes Sixtus V and Gregory XIII and allegorical statues by Bernini. Finally “Dancing Woman,” an 1809-12 marble statue by Antonio Canova, serves as a bridge to 19th-century art at the Alte Nationalgalerie.

Yet as much as the individual works, what impresses is how the museum has been able, in Mr. MacGregor’s words, “to suggest the overall aesthetic of an era and conjure the spirit of an age” at the same time as it preserves the coherence of a broad theme.

For this Mr. Schuster credits Bode himself. “He was a master of collage,” Mr. Schuster said of the museum’s founder. “He wanted to create the mood, to educate for good taste. He was devoted to the cult of beauty.”

No doubt by good fortune Bode died in 1929 — and James Simon, who financed many of his purchases, died in 1932 — shortly before Germany’s 20th-century nightmare began. Both men are now remembered here with small busts. Yet in a very real sense the entire museum today is the greatest homage to their dream reborn.