Review: Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie and Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie

Abstract

Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie [Karl Friedrich Schinkel: History and Poetics] Kulturforum, Berlin 7 September 2012–6 January 2013 Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich 1 February–12 May 2013 More than thirty years have passed since the work of Germany’s preeminent nineteenth- century architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) was presented in a major retrospective in Berlin. In 1981, to mark the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, both parts of the divided city held separate exhibitions. East Berlin made use of the most obvious choice for such an event, Schinkel’s Altes Museum of 1825, and proudly focused on his buildings in the center of Berlin and Potsdam (both part of East Germany at that time), exhibiting a series of large models and architectural drawings. West Berlin’s museums had inherited Schinkel’s paintings, as well as some drawings, furniture, and furnishings, and— nolens volens— focused on those, downplaying his architecture and emphasizing the work of his pupils and followers. The site of the exhibition was the Martin-Gropius-Bau of 1881, designed by one of Schinkel’s students. The recent exhibition, conceived by an institution located in the western part of Berlin, at first sight seemed to have followed in the footsteps of its predecessor before the fall of the Wall. It too, downplayed Schinkel’s architecture, and instead emphasized his paintings, drawings, and sketches and his designs for furniture and furnishings. The reasons, however, were not Cold War constraints but a substantial research grant from the German Ministry of Education and Research to Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett (the drawing and print collection of Berlin’s State Museums, housed at the former West Berlin Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz), charging it to catalog, critically examine, and make accessible all of Schinkel’s approximately fifty-five hundred sketches, drawings, and paintings in its holdings. The multiyear research project was led by the director of the Kupferstichkabinett, Hein-Theodor Schulze Altcappenberg, an expert on the drawings of Botticelli and Tiepolo, with conservator Irene Bruckle and curator Rolf H. Johannssen, supported by a team of …