The Collection. 1900-1945. New National Gallery. Paintings and sculptures from the classical modernist period are now on display
The Collection. 1900-1945. The true extent of the wealth of artworks owned by the musem is to be revealed as never before: paintings and sculptures from the classical modernist period are now on display. Most damaging of all in the pre-war years was the splintering of the collection by the Nazi campaign against 'Degenerate Art' in 1937. Countless Expressionist masterpieces such as Franz Marc's 'Tower of the Blue Horses' vanished from the collection and are still sorely missed to this day. The partition of Germany also manifested itself in the differing strategies adopted in maintaining the collection: while in West Berlin the formal innovations of various avant-garde trends came to the forefront, in the East Berlin National Gallery, the emphasis lay firmly on the art's content. The merger of the two collections resulted in several groups of works complementing each other, as seen in the abstract artist and Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose work is now juxtaposed with that of Oskar Nerlinger, who uses similar elements in relation with people and machines to illustrate the city, technology and work. This exhibition will be followed by a second show featuring works from the period after the Second World War.