Stucco in the past: Here’s a brief history of Berlin’s building façades, from the Gründerzeit to the present. (Exberliner, 5/15/23)
Rafaël Newman considers the tumultuous lifespan of painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935) and an intriguing new exhibit at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, “Roads Not Taken,” on key caesuras in German history between 1989 and 1848. (3 Quarks Daily, 1/30/23)
Beautiful! “German photographer Jan Prengel looks beyond still life—instead capturing flowers and plant stems in motion, over an exposure time of 2–3 seconds.” (Aesthetica, 1/19/23)
Sebastian Smee contemplates Two Men Contemplating the Moon, one of Caspar David Friedrich’s best-known masterpieces. (The Washington Post, 1/4/23)
Emanuel Leutze painted his two versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware in Düsseldorf, shortly after the failed revolutions of 1848. “His intention was not to ignite the patriotic passions of Americans, but to inspire his fellow Germans to be as patriotic as he knew Americans were.” (The Washington Post, 12/25/22)
“FANTASTIC FUTURISTIC FATALISTIC”: See how Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was marketed to audiences all over the world through this gallery of vintage movie posters. (Open Culture, 12/16/22)
Onkel Toms Hütte is one of Berlin’s most distinctive U-Bahn stations, with a name that references Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, a long-gone Biergarten, and a modernist housing development designed by Bruno Taut. Once a flashpoint in the great “roof war” of 1928, it’s now the center of a 21st-century controversy about the anti-Black slur that “Uncle Tom” has become. NPR, (7/30/08; Atlas Obscura, 1/19/17; The Washington Post, 11/27/22)
“Almost safe, she returned to Munich and lost her painting and her life”: A Renaissance portrait owned by Ilse Hesselberger, who was deported and murdered in 1941, is now being auctioned to benefit Holocaust survivors and other charitable causes. (The New York Times, 11/22/22)
Dylan Moriarty had no grand plans for his trip to Germany, but he knew he wanted to illustrate it: “A camera is one way to capture the world, but the meditation of re-creating moments in ink felt like a better, more personal tribute.” (The Washington Post, 10/15/22)
A “showpiece of socialist realist architecture” in Potsdam gets a new lease on life as the Minsk Kunsthaus. (The Guardian, 10/2/22)
The Slavs and Tatars art collective in Berlin, with activities “rooted in the giant swath of land between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China,” publishes books, puts on interactive performances and installations, and runs Pickle Bar pop-ups around the world. (The New York Times, 9/22/22)
Meet Winold Reiss, “the German modernist who painted a multicultural United States.” His subjects included Langston Hughes, members of the Blackfeet Nation, and a very young Isamu Noguchi. (Hyperallergic, 8/25/22; The New York Times, 8/25/22)
“By collecting water towers the way someone else might collect cookie jars, they cut industry down to size.” Bernd and Hilla Becher are at last getting their due at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (The Art Newspaper, 7/13/22; The New York Times, 7/28/22)
In praise of the Plattenbau: “In a new book, Jesse Simon presents these structures in all their grid-like beauty.” (Aesthetica, 2/24/22)
“It was wrong to take the bronzes and it was wrong to keep them.” Germany is returning two Benin bronzes and more than one thousand other items from its museums’ collections to Nigeria. (Artnet, 6/29/22; The Guardian, 7/1/22)
Documenta 15 couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start, but there’s a lot more to see—including vegetable plots, a skateboard halfpipe, a sauna on the lawn of a Baroque castle, and a floating stage on the Fulda River. (The Guardian, 6/23/22; The New York Times, 6/24/22; Hyperallergic, 6/28/22)
A mural with offensive imagery is removed, and a panel on antisemitism hastily convened, at Documenta 15. (Artnet, 6/21/22; ARTnews, 6/29/22; The New Fascism Syllabus, 7/24/22)
Candida Höfer’s stunning photographs of empty museums, libraries, cathedrals, and theaters “have acquired a haunting resonance during the pandemic.” (Financial Times, 2/19/22)