The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is campaigning not only on a right-wing extremist and anti-immigrant platform, but an explicitly anti-Bauhaus one: “a Trojan horse aiming for the heart of Germany’s open, liberal society.” (Financial Times, 6/20/26; The Guardian, 8/27/26)
For this year’s Venice Biennale, artist Sung Tieu has clad the German pavilion with a replica of the facade of the now-abandoned Gehrenseestraße complex where she grew up in eastern Berlin—”recreating the grey concrete and smudges of graffiti with three million mosaic stones made in Ravenna.” (Artforum, 5/6/26; The Guardian, 5/12/26)
Jérémie Queyras’s new portrait of Angela Merkel subtly features “one of the most Merkelesque quotes.” It’s now on display at the Bode Museum before it heads to Berlin chancellery. (The Guardian, 7/3/26)
“Making your way through ‘August Sander’s People of the 20th Century’ at the Yale University Art Gallery is like going through Grand Central Terminal at rush hour; it is crowded with every sort of person there is.” (The Wall Street Journal, 5/16/26; The New Yorker, 5/21/26)
The Neue Galerie New York will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its neighbor across Fifth Avenue, in 2028. The new “Met Neue Galerie” will retain its “jewelbox character” and its most famous work, Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. (The New York Times, 5/14/26; The Wall Street Journal, 5/19/26)
Hermione von Preuschen’s Mors Imperator was deemed too scandalous for exhibition by Berlin’s Akademie der Künste in 1887—but now it’s the centerpiece of a special exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie. (The Guardian, 3/21/26)
The Palais de Lomé was constructed as the German colonial governor’s residence in Togo in 1905. Now it’s the anchor of a 26-acre art and culture park. (ARTnews, 12/28/23)
Germany and France have established a €2.1 million, three-year fund to research the provenance of African heritage objects in their national museums—potentially preparing the ground for these objects’ return. (The Guardian, 1/19/24)
The year 2024 marks Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday, so get ready for a slew of special exhibitions. The first retrospective, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, has an appealing contemporary twist. (The Art Newspaper, 1/3/24; artnet, 1/8/24)
“This is art from the crucible of modern barbarism, the sickening aftermath of an idiotic war that left behind festering misery, broken bodies, shattered souls and political chaos.” “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years” is showing at NYC’s Neue Galerie through January 15. (Hyperallergic, 10/19/23; The Washington Post, 12/15/23)
“Inside the former Wismut mining company in Germany are thousands of artworks, painted while the company secretly mined uranium for Soviet atomic bombs.” (The Guardian, 9/21/23)
Berlin’s iconic Kino International, “a jewel of East German modernism,” turns 60 years old on November 15. (Exberliner, 11/15/23)
Stucco in the past: Here’s a brief history of Berlin’s building façades, from the Gründerzeit to the present. (Exberliner, 5/15/23)
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)