Berlin Museums

Today we went to Berlin's museum for European paintings, the Gemäldegalerie.  This an amazingly good collection of paintings; housed in a fairly nondescript modern building, it is not a major tourist attraction.  It should be.  In Paris, everyone who visits goes to the Louvre; in Berlin no one seems to go to the Gemäldegalerie.  It was a wonderful viewing experience; quiet and spacious, the museum even has the great idea of setting aside small rooms with comfortable seats and no paintings, so that one can take a breather.  There are about 20 Rembrandts, 2 Vermeers, and a number of iconic paintings such as Breughel's "Proverbs".   Also, several Bosch-like paintings by Cranach, and an excellent collection of works by Durer.

I liked this de Hooch a lot, though the official photo doesn't do it any justice.

 

I also went to the Berggruen Museum, which contains part of the collection of the eponymous art collector and dealer.  It has over 100 works by Picasso on display, as well as around 70 works by Klee, plus Matisse, Cezanne, etc.   I went for the Klee, and was thoroughly entranced; it was like a retrospective.   I think I began to have a sense of how Klee works with color;  every painting has a different color palette, but within each painting I think there is a sense of "harmony" in the same sense that we think of harmony in music.  Klee may very well have written about this, and I know nothing.  I was particularly excited by the colors in a painting called "Necropolis", as in the Egyptian Pyramids.  I wanted to take it home; if I ever have a career as an art thief, it will have started here.  An iPhone shot:

I was so satiated after looking at the Klees that I skipped the Picassos...


Lastly, I had some time before I was scheduled to meet Vera, and stumbled upon a show at the Emil Nolde Siftung (who knew?) entitled "Nolde and Switzerland".   I didn't know anything about his work, other than the well known early expressionist work.   These were mostly water colors, dating up until the 1950's, semi abstract.  Beautiful colors, and not that different from his early work.  Another iPhone shot: