The urban context of museums

Part 2: The Neues Museum, Berlin

MúzeumCafé 16.

In 1840, a decade after the Altes Museum opened, the Prussian king Frederick William III commissioned August Stüler, a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to design a new museum.

The nature of the collections and the changes in theoretical approaches to art accounted for the essential difference between the two museums. While the Altes Museum represented the pinacotheca of ancient Greek and European high culture, the Neues Museum presented traditions from very different geographical areas involving a far more historicising attitude to the ancient world. Correspondingly, for example, the Egyptian collection from the Montbijou Palace moved and became the focus of the Neues Museum, where the plaster collections also played a key role. Frederick William IV, who succeeded to the throne in 1840, showed a great interest in architecture and cultural policy, and closely followed the reconstruction of the Dome between the museum and the royal palace. After Schinkel suffered a stroke, Frederick William IV commissioned Stüler and Ignaz Olfers to continue his plans. Except for the Neues Museum, nothing materialized during Frederick William IV’s reign as the monarch had imagined. The different collections of the Neues Museum were continuously presented to the public between 1850 and 1859. Then, following Richard Lepsius’s trips to Egypt, an increasingly rich collection was displayed, with the bust of Nefertiti in 1912 being regarded as an icon of the museum. Plaster copies, which, as elsewhere, by the 20th century had lost their significance, played a central role in the first decades of the museum. The archaeological collections of the Prehistoric Age, Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Periods, and the Bronze and Iron Age precisely corresponded to the requirements of historic relativity. The museum did not simply consist of two large collections, but a series of different ones with dissimilar origin, meaning and significance. Thus national archaeology played as important a role as Egyptology, classical archaeology, collections of papyri, drawings and prints. The collections spanned the space and time from the Middle East to Scandinavia and the Paleolithic Period to the Middle Ages, the Hegelian spirit creating a clear evolutionary order and link between them. Processes which began with the Neues Museum have not yet come to rest – the continuous rearrangement of Prussian (Berlin) public museum collections has been determined by art historical and philosophical considerations, historical pressures, the duplicated museum structure of the bisected city, as well as post-1945 renewal following war damage. Neither the collections nor the way they were exhibited remained unchanged between 1850 and 1939 when they were put in a safe place due to the war. In Berlin in the second half of the 19th and early part of the 20th century several museums opened whose collections concerned the Neues Museum in various ways. While the rotunda or pantheon was central to Schinkel’s plans, Stüler’s design focused on the giant staircase which still dominates the whole museum. On entering the visitor was confronted by the frescos of Wilhelm von Kaulbach and, ascending the steps, passed paintings relating to the cultural history of mankind. The vast frescos, dating from 1847 to 1866, presented mythological and biblical scenes, thus in the staircase of the Neues Museum visitors could justly feel like participants of historical development. Today restoration touches on several difficult philosophical and political issues. In Berlin major architectural conversions are inevitably part of the ‘Holocaust discourse’, thus simply ‘returning to the past’ could demonstrate amnesia. In recent years the approach can be interpreted as extending the spirit of the Museum Island to the palace. The international tender for architectural plans in relation to the area would end the post-1990 conversion of Berlin’s museum structure.