Art In Berlin Research Articles

Old Uigur medical fragment in Syriac script

The Museum of Asian Art in Berlin holds a single-folio fragment (shelf-mark M 152) of an Old Uigur medical text written in the Syriac script. It is the only known manuscript in the entire collection of Old Uigur texts of the Church of the East that deals with medicine. The present article provides a new edition of the fragment including a transliteration, transcription, English translation, commentary and glossary.

In your face! Bringing Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial to Thuringia: reaffirming German memory culture through creative place-taking

ABSTRACT This article analyses one act of informal creative place-making/taking. In 2017, the Berlin art collective Centre for Political Beauty installed a partial replica of Peter Eisenman’s 2005 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in a back garden in the Thuringian village of Bornhagen. The site was chosen because of who lived next door: a leading figure in the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), Björn Höcke. This DIY, guerrilla-like intervention by activist artists raises broader questions about both “informality” and “place-making.” As we suggest, the work Deine Stele (2017-ongoing) represents a profound paradox: an otherwise highly critical art collective, not least towards the government, replicates an official state-sanctioned memorial in order to defend and enforce the so painfully won hegemonic memory culture. Both the work and its realisation combine complex elements of formality and informality. Moreover, while located very intentionally in Bornhagen, Deine Stele sits somewhere between, and connects, Berlin, Bornhagen and digital space. Rather than engaging deeply with local stories, it makes a more abstract theme – German commitment to Holocaust memory – concrete. We read this antagonistic intervention as a playfully provocative act of creative place-taking rather than place-making.

Deutsch-dänische Kunstbeziehungen 1820 bis 1920

Deutsch-dänische Kunstbeziehungen 1820 bis 1920

B12: research or die: The festival for contemporary dance and performance art in Berlin, summer event, July 2022

b12: research or die: The festival for contemporary dance and performance art in Berlin, summer event, July 2022

Islam, Art, and Migration: The Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, Heimat for Muslim communities?

À la suite du 11 septembre 2001, la question de la place des communautés musulmanes dans les sociétés européennes a atteint un sommet. Face à l’islamophobie grandissante, politiques et intellectuels ont appelé à montrer une autre image de l’Islam et des citoyens appartenant à cette religion et/ou à ces cultures. Pour effectuer cette tâche, les politiques se sont tournés vers les musées. Quoi de mieux qu’un musée possédant une collection d’arts islamiques pour servir de médiateur entre les citoyens et répondre au « problème musulman » ? Cet intérêt soudain pour les arts de l’Islam s’est traduit par un boom muséal. Berlin, Toronto, Doha, Kuala Lumpur ont vu la naissance de nouveaux musées ou le réaménagement de leurs salles dédiées à ces arts. Mais les arts peuvent-ils aider à déconstruire les clichés et les préjugés, et à réconcilier les citoyens entre eux ? La difficulté rencontrée est que les arts de l’Islam s’arrêtent au XIXe siècle, et ne représentent, de ce fait, qu’un passé révolu de ces cultures. Ce passé est mythifié pour démontrer la beauté de ces cultures face à l’image péjorative de l’Islam contemporain perçu, de manière erronée, sous le regard de l’islamophobie. Entre volonté politique et exposition, il y a un écart de taille. Toutefois, au-delà de la présentation des objets, la participation inclusive des communautés musulmanes pourrait être un outil pour faciliter ce dialogue. S’appuyant sur une étude empirique, cet article vise à montrer par l’analyse de deux projets, Multaka et TAMAM, mis en place par le Museum für Islamische Kunst de Berlin, de quelles manières le musée se transforme en lieu d’identité à la fois pour les communautés musulmanes et les réfugiés du Moyen-Orient. En effet, Berlin s’inscrit également dans un autre contexte que celui du 11 septembre, celui de la crise des réfugiés de 2015 qui a notamment réitéré ce questionnement au sujet de l’appartenance des musulmans et de leur patrimoine à l’Allemagne. Le musée par la participation vise à inclure ces communautés, devenant une « zone de contact » entre les communautés et leur patrimoine. Ainsi, il tente de répondre aux attentes de la société en permettant aux communautés de se réapproprier leur patrimoine. Mais jusqu’à quel point ces communautés participent-elles à l’élaboration de nouveaux discours ? Ces voix sont-elles accessibles pour les autres publics dans les salles d’exposition ? Cela permet-il un dialogue entre eux ? Face aux débats sur l’islam, et à la réponse forte du gouvernement allemand par le président Christian Wulff avec sa phrase : « l’islam appartient à l’Allemagne », le musée se veut un Heimat pour les communautés musulmanes. En revanche, définir ce lieu comme unique Heimat des communautés musulmanes ne crée-t-il pas au contraire une zone d’exclusion ? En l’absence de réponses à ces questions, la recherche doit se poursuivre.

Wilhelm von Bode's Way of Art Appraisal

Wilhelm von Bode, 1845-1929, whose full name is Arnold Wilhelm von Bode, added the word "Feng" to his family name after being granted the title of nobility in 1914. He was a famous German art historian, museum director and founder of museology in the 19th century, and served as the general curator of the Berlin Museum from 1905 to 1920. In Bode's more than half a century long art museum work and art appraisal activities, he has identified countless works of art, and it is impossible to accurately count how many works of art he has evaluated and collected for the Berlin Art Museum and other art museums in Germany. His achievements in art appraisal have almost become a legend. These events recorded in the art history present Bode's specific details and ideas in the work of art appraisal, and more clearly delineate the intricate relationship between art appraisal and other social factors in the country's cultural construction.

Создатель Товарищества пролетарского искусства в Берлине Фридрих Вильгельм Брасс: первый опыт биографии

The purpose of this article is to study the life and activity of Friedrich Wilhelm Brass, founder of Genossenschaft for Proletarian Art in Berlin (1920). Friedrich Wilhelm Brass (1873–1931) throughout his life sought to combine the commercial interests of a contemporary art dealer with the ideas of the social reorganization of the world. One of the first to call himself a communist in Germany, he created in 1920 in Berlin the Genossenschaft for Proletarian Art, the collection of which became the first contemporary western art brought to Soviet Russia. On the basis of this collection kept in the Hermitage and the Russian Academy of Arts, archival materials and work in museum collections in Germany, the history of the emergence of the Genossenschaft in Berlin in 1920, the composition of the participants and the biography of its creator are reconstructed. The relevance and novelty of the article is due to the lack of scientific research on this issue discovered by the author in his works. The life path of F.W. Brass is consistently considered. Trained as a craftsman in Krefeld, Brass made several attempts to establish an art trade there, primarily aimed at the workers’ milieu. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, he tried to interest the party in the prospect of such educational and agitational work. These initiatives proved to be financially untenable. Brass later worked at the German Workshops Hellerau, where the manufacturer Karl Schmidt implemented a project for the mass production of furniture designed by leading European designers and oriented to the widest and most democratic market. During the First World War, Brass was mobilized and spent several years in captivity in Russia, where he met the revolution and returned to Germany in 1919 as a convinced supporter of the communist reorganization of the world. After the November Revolution, several artistic organizations arose in Berlin, whose activities were directed towards the proletariat (the Workers’ Council for Art, the Association of Socialist Artists, the Union for Proletarian Culture, the Proletarian Theatre of Erwin Piscator, etc.). Among them was the Genossenschaft for Proletarian Art of the communist Brass, who collected the works of left-wing artists, mainly expressionists of the first and second generation. Like most of these artistic initiatives, the Brass Genossenschaft could not survive the economic crisis. The unique collection of the Genossenschaft was acquired during a trip to Germany by Comintern Chairman G. Zinoviev in October 1920 and brought to Soviet Russia. Later, during the years of the Weimar Republic, Brass no longer undertook such ambitious projects, continuing to trade in the works of left-wing artists. He worked in Hagen and Düsseldorf, where he died in 1931. The author comes to the conclusion that the figure of Brass represents a new type of entrepreneur for the art market of the 20th century, focused primarily on the promotion of the latest art among the workers, agitation for a new life in the language of art.

From Transcultural Entanglements to Integrated Learning Experiences? Transcultural Museum Education at Berlin's Museum of Islamic Art

Taking three educational initiatives at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin as case studies, this paper explores how the museum engages in transcultural museum education. While the exhibition parcours 'Objects in Transfer' highlights the transcultural entanglements of objects, 'Multaka' is a traineeship project preparing refugees from Syria and Iraq to become museum tour guides for Arabic-speaking visitors. 'Tamam', a joint initiative with mosque communities and Muslim associations across Germany, develops collection-centred educational material for young Muslims. The paper explores key findings from an evaluation of the interactive exhibition parcours 'Objects in Transfer' within the context of collaborative initiatives such as 'Multaka' and 'Tamam'.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

DODO The Berlin Years

DODO The Berlin Years Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Dodo, photographer unknown, 1928 [End Page 148] In 1923, when she turned sixteen, Dörte Clara Wolff, known since childhood as "Dodo," was expected to pursue a profession. She had grown up in Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar era in a liberal, middle-class Jewish household filled with art, music, and literature. The city was a thriving metropolis, and the family enjoyed the rich culture, making regular weekend trips to theaters, museums, and movie houses. Weimar ushered in the era of the New Woman. Young girls of Dodo's class and age were encouraged to lead adventurous, self-determined lives. Women in Germany had acquired the right to vote in 1918, and by the 1920s, they had even more hard-won freedoms: the rights to a professional life, to enter politics, to enjoy sexual liberties, and to play sports. The rise of the New Woman also challenged conventional thinking about gender roles, particularly in terms of dress and behavior. As did America's flapper and France's La Garçonne, the New Woman bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, shaved her legs, wore makeup, and mixed a stiff cocktail. In Berlin, while a lust for fashion cut across social classes, the New Woman dictated the trends. Young women's social lives were filled with dances, films, cafés, and bars as well as weekend sailing and rowing on Berlin lakes. They dressed during the day in sporty ensembles and at night in flowing drop-waisted dresses. Germany's defeat in World War I, followed by a long period of rationing and subsequent hyperinflation, had left people with a frantic need to enjoy life. Dodo too was eager to seize the day. She joined the ranks of the modern and emancipated women, adopting a chic and avant-garde look, more French in style than German. She went out to the most fashionable cabarets and coffee houses, filled with cigarette smoke, jazz, talk, and frenzied dancing. She had little sense of a future career. While she had not been a good student, Dodo did excel in art, spending all her free time in the classroom and at home drawing. Her work was often admired for its draftsmanship and creativity. After a stint at a finishing school, which her parents demanded, Dodo enrolled at the Schule Reimann, a private academy for fine and applied arts in Berlin. Classes were taught by professional freelancers, who, through rigorous instruction, prepared students for the reality of everyday work life. Through the academy's "practice-oriented" approach, students received broad artistic training while also exploring their unique talents. After she won school prizes for her costume designs, Dodo focused on fashion illustration. [End Page 149] Click for larger view View full resolution Dodo, Street Scene, 1928 [End Page 150] In 1926, Dodo launched her career as a freelance illustrator and began taking her portfolio around to the city's many newspapers and magazines. The fun-filled, artistic atmosphere of Berlin created a need for a wide range of society newspapers and fashion and women's journals. She was hired by ULK, an illustrated weekly magazine known for its humor and satire. The magazine preached the need for rationality and modernity in place of the emotion and sentimentality of the previous era. Distributed only to the finest places, the magazine reached a circulation of between 250,000 and 300,000 readers. ULK's editor, Mosse Verlag, demanded innovation in content and design. The work could not be purely decorative; it had to push into the boundaries of high art. Because Jeanne Mammen, an artist Dodo admired, was already working for the magazine, Dodo was eager to make her mark. Dodo's illustrations soon graced the front and back covers and filled two-page center spreads. She became known for her ability to capture the jazzy energy and vitality of Berlin while also depicting the antics and elegance of the high society in which she circulated. Influenced by New Objectivism, an artistic movement that rejected the heroic optimism of Expressionism in favor of treating its subjects with a social and satirical bent, she strove to...

Florence, Berlin and Beyond: Late nineteenth-century art markets and their social networks

In recent years, studies in the history of collecting have seen a shift away from the monographic towards an investigation of social and professional networks. Born from a double session at the 2018 College Art Association conference, with further invited contributions, this weighty volume takes the networks of Berlin art historian Wilhelm von Bode and Florentine art dealer Stefano Bardini as its point of departure. As complex connections are teased out in fourteen case-studies presenting meticulous archival research, the provenances of the works of art under discussion are revealed to be ‘anything but linear’, as editor Lynn Catterson puts it at the outset. This volume is, in many ways, an ode to Bode, who was less prominent in Catterson’s previous volume for Brill (Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860–1940, 2017). As Fulvia Zaninelli notes, to study Bode is to study dealers. Detailed analysis of Bode’s correspondence forms the backbone of many of these discussions, which trace works of art from post-unification Italy to their final resting places around the world. Jeremy Howard’s presentation of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s purchase of Botticelli’s Chigi Madonna includes a timely aside on contemporary debates around art patrimony, which complicates the backdrop against which many of these transactions take place.

Ismar David’s Quest for Original Hebrew Typographic Signs

Ismar David was a prolific calligrapher, type designer, graphic designer, and illustrator who also engaged in architectural design and taught calligraphy. He studied applied arts in Berlin, emigrating to Jerusalem in 1932 and to New York in 1952. From the 1930s to the 1990s, he created a wealth of unique designs, most importantly the David Hebrew typeface family. It was the first comprehensive Hebrew typeface family, comprising nine styles that include a true Hebrew italic style and a monolinear style, equivalent to a Latin sans serif. David Hebrew provides an example of how a research-based design process can help negotiate the tension between old and new, leading to an innovative, well-informed design solution. David not only excelled in his groundbreaking approach to Hebrew type design for existing glyphs, but he went a step further, expanding the character set. After David completed the design of his typeface family in 1954, it was partially cast for machine composition by the Intertype Corporation. During that period, David relocated to New York to pursue his creative career.

The ‘First Exhibition of Russian Art’ in Berlin: The Transnational Origins of Bolshevik Cultural Diplomacy, 1921–1922

The emergence of a Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s was hardly predictable. Bolsheviks’ propaganda for ‘world revolution’ reduced the image of Soviet Russia to one of Leninist-proletarian victory, while the rejection of diplomatic tradition and a distrust of artists and intellectuals precluded any commitment to cultural action abroad. This article explores how, when and why a Soviet cultural diplomacy developed. It focuses on two episodes related to the famine of 1921, including, based on new archival evidence, the First Exhibition of Russian Art in Berlin in October 1922. The exhibition's spectacular success paved the way for Soviet cultural diplomacy that moved away from overtly communist propaganda in order to address Western avant-garde literary and artistic milieus.

(Non)curating the Creative City: From 100 Grad to Performing Arts Festival Berlin

The independent performing arts in Berlin, counterpart to the established city and state theatre system, have undergone fundamental change over the last decades. As part of this change, the 100 Grad Festival, a crucial event for the scene for over twelve years, ended in 2015 and was replaced by the Performing Arts Festival (PAF), which addresses the city of Berlin as a whole. This paper will trace the institutional transition from 100 Grad to PAF by highlighting organizational continuity and differences, and by analyzing the discourse accompanying the shift in the field of Berlin’s independent performing arts. The point of departure for the paper are questions of curation, which both festivals reject, yet re-employ in different strategies, especially towards emergent artists. However, contextualizing the festivals within broader tendencies in city development – the governmentality of the ‘creative city’– shows that opposing strategies may equally fall in line with aesthetic capitalism, leading to a paradoxical outcome.

(Non)curating the Creative City: From 100 Grad to Performing Arts Festival Berlin

The independent performing arts in Berlin, counterpart to the established city and state theatre system, have undergone fundamental change over the last decades. As part of this change, the 100 Grad Festival, a crucial event for the scene for over twelve years, ended in 2015 and was replaced by the Performing Arts Festival (PAF), which addresses the city of Berlin as a whole. This paper will trace the institutional transition from 100 Grad to PAF by highlighting organizational continuity and differences, and by analyzing the discourse accompanying the shift in the field of Berlin’s independent performing arts. The point of departure for the paper are questions of curation, which both festivals reject, yet re-employ in different strategies, especially towards emergent artists. However, contextualizing the festivals within broader tendencies in city development – the governmentality of the ‘creative city’ – shows that opposing strategies may equally fall in line with aesthetic capitalism, leading to a paradoxical outcome.

An Inverted Detective Thriller: Henry Ries and the Quakers’ Rescue of Stefanie Ries from Nazi Germany, 1939–41

An Inverted Detective Thriller: Henry Ries and the Quakers’ Rescue of Stefanie Ries from Nazi Germany, 1939–41 Vivien Green Fryd (bio) During the academic year of 2012–13, I had the opportunity to live in Berlin, Germany as the Terra Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität. My desire, or should I say compulsion, to bear witness to and try to piece together and understand my family’s history in the Holocaust and World War II brought me there. I had long thought about writing about the photographs taken by my uncle, Henry Ries (1917–2004), especially his Landing Arrival of the Candy Bombers in the Tempelhof Airport (fig. 1) of the Berlin Airlift, which has become an iconic image in both the U.S. and Germany. But after giving a tour to some of my friends and former students in February of the exhibition, “Art in Berlin, 1880– 1980,” an exhibit that included seven of his photographs in the Berlinische Galerie, I began to look through papers about my mother’s rescue from Nazi Germany. [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Henry Ries. Landeanflug eines “Rosinenbombers im Tempelhof Airport” (Landing Arrival of the Candy Bomber in the Tempelhof Airport). 1948. Photograph. © Henry Ries. Deutsches Historisches Museum. Invoice No. 2007/952, file PH009230. My brother, Kenneth Martin Green, and his daughter had gathered the material from the American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) archives, which at that time was located in the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia: correspondence about my uncle’s and the Quaker’s frustrating two-and-a-half-year attempt to get my mother, Stefanie Ries, out of Berlin. That year, twelve years after I had received those letters, I read them and felt as though I was reading a thriller with its dramatic rescue, its puzzles, its suspense, its villains, heroes, and heroines. Of course, I knew the outcome, my mother did escape, but the suspense was inverted. I knew neither the plot nor all the characters, and as with any mystery, I worked to unpack the many factors that resulted in my mother’s [End Page 32] safe passage to the U.S. in March 1941—six months before a worker for the AFSC reported that “emigration from Germany and German-controlled areas was largely choked off.”1 I knew the villains were the Nazis; the heroes the Quakers, my mother’s nanny, Maria Schönfeld (fondly referred to as Fräuchen), and my uncle; and the victim my mother. To my surprise as I read through the correspondence, I found a protagonist I had not much considered before—the U.S. State Department—the role of which became more troubling the more I dug beneath the surface. I learned that the person in the State Department responsible for impeding my mother’s escape from Nazi Germany, an individual whom I now consider a villain, was Avra Milvin Warren, Chief of the Visa Division. To my dismay and disappointment, I realized that not just Warren, but also others in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did their best to obstruct my mother’s rescue and that of many others. And I learned about three additional heroes—Senator John A. Danaher (CT), Jacob Weiss from New York City, and Benjamin Gross from Rockland County, New York. Many scholars have examined those in the U.S. State Department under President Roosevelt’s administration who expressed antisemitism in their diaries, and the ways in which it influenced their immigration policies.2 Surprisingly, less has been written about the AFSC Refugee Section, especially its work on behalf of saving children from Central Europe before and during World War II.3 The unpublished archival material from the Friends’ library about my mother’s situation not only adds more information about the life of her to-be-acclaimed photojournalist brother, Henry Ries, but also about the role Quakers actively played in saving her life as well as others. They are the central protagonists in this story: my uncle, born Heinz Ries, later known as the New York Times photojournalist Henry Ries...

Eski Uygurlarda Mani Yazısının Gelişimi

Manichaeism and Manichean texts are important fields of study for the researchers of both Ancient Iranian and Turkic languages. During the first half of the 20th century, numerous extremely valuable manuscripts and archaeological items from the Old Uyghur Kingdom period were found in the Turfan oasis located in east of Uyghur Autonomous Region in China especially in expeditions by German archaeological teams. Most of these works were brought to the museums and research centers in Europe. Today, the largest archives of Manichean texts are located in the Turfan Studies department of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. In these large archives of various works, there are many manuscripts containing both religious and non-religious texts belonging to the Manichaean Iranian and Turkic corpus. In our article, the origin of Manichean script, the appearance of Manichean letters, numbers and the other signs in the texts are explained in general. Furthermore, how the tradition of writing had developed and changed was comparatively explained with examples taken from both Middle Iranian and Old Uyghur texts. The texts studied in this study are mainly from the collection of Turfan Studies department of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In this paper the following texts were analyzed: M17, M172, M47, Shapuragan text, M473, M475, M477, M482, M472, M470 (in Middle Persian); M5, M6, M47 (in Parthian); M178, M172 (in Sogdian); U74, London and Berlin fragments of Xwastwanift (in Old Uyghur).

Anna Beselin. Knots, Art & History: The Berlin Carpet Collection

Among the celebrated carpet collections in European museums, the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin possesses one of the oldest and finest collections of this kind. Although several attempts have been made to publicise the Berlin carpet collection in the past, Knots, Art & History marks the first publication of the united carpet collection of the Museum in English. This book is divided into the following two main sections: art-historical notes (pp. 14-39) and a catalogue of select examples (46 o...

From passion to bereavement

Abstract The Finnish diplomat Harri Holma and his wife Alli, along with their son, art historian Klaus, created a private collection of 554 items. They acquired antique pieces and works of art in Berlin, Paris and Rome from the 1920s to the 1950s. The collection consists of Western and Southern European paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles and tableware, dating from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Initially the objects were acquired by the Holmas to decorate diplomatic residences, but eventually they came to form a deliberately assembled collection. Following Klaus’s death, Harri and Alli Holma donated the collection to the Lahti City Museum in the 1950s and the 1960s. Here the creation of the collection is first traced then followed on its journey to Finland, with a focus on the developing relationship between objects, family history and museum institution. The shifts in the collection’s narrative from hobby to an expression of grief, and finally to a formal museum assemblage and a subject of academic research generate epistemological tensions.

Ein astronomisch-astrologisches Gedicht des persischen Dichters Ḥusain Ḥakīm Ṯanāʾī Mašhadī auf der Berliner Indischen Weltkarte

Abstract One does not encounter short astronomical-astrological poems in Persian very frequently. One such poem, by the Persian-Indian poet Ṯanāʾī (d. 1587/8) is inscribed on the Indian world map in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. This map probably originated in the sphere of the court of the ruler of Rajastan, Sawai Jai Singh II. (1700‒1743). The poem does not bear a relationship to the other inscriptions and paintings found on the map, and is known only from this map. It presupposes a significant degree of knowledge of astronomy and astrology on the reader’s part, especially since Ṯanāʾī had developed a style in India by means of which he was able to “pack longwinded ideas and multiple meanings into a succinct expression”. The poem reflects a world view that is based on the cosmology of Aristotle and the planetary theories of Ptolemy. In particular, it addresses the heavenly spheres, with the earth at their center, the system of astronomical coordinates, the course and the characteristics of the planets, including Sun and Moon, and a short characterization of the four elements and the twelve signs of the zodiac. This article provides a philological reading, translation, and line-by-line commentary of the poem.