Hamburger Bahnhof - Berlin's Museum for Contemporary Art

On Day 2 of our visit to Berlin we will be visiting the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart or Berlin's Museum for Contemporary Art - on Invalidenstrasse in the Moabit district.

Image courtsey of Top 10 Berlin.

The museum opened as an art gallery in 1996 and has a comprehensive collection of contemporary art with a variety of exhibitions. The museum’s name refers to the building’s original function as one of the first terminal stations of the rail system in Germany. It opened as the terminus of the railway line between Hamburg and Berlin in December 1846. The building’s late Neoclassical style was conceived by the architect and railway pioneer, Friedrich Neuhaus. It set an architectural precedent for the subsequent designs of Berlin’s train stations through the second half of the 19th century. For forty years it served as the terminal between Hamburg and Berlin until it was closed in 1884.

After modernisation in 1906 the old railway station opened as the Museum of Transport and Construction. In 1943 however, during the Second World War, the building sustained severe damage and in the subsequent division of Germany, it remained unused for decades, located as it was in the no-man’s land between East and West Berlin.

Historische Aufnahme des Hamburger Bahnhofs, um 1860 © bpk. Image courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Years later, after lengthy reconstruction and modernisation by architect Josef Paul Kleihues, the Hamburger Bahnhof reopened on 2 November 1996 as a museum of contemporary art. The museum expanded significantly to accommodate the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, presented to the museum in 2004 as a long-term loan. The former dispatch warehouses located behind the main building were renovated by the architectural firm Kuehn Malvezzi and connected to the historical building via a passage. The resulting structures, which became known as Rieckhallen, nearly doubled the available exhibition space. Today the Nationalgalerie’s Hamburger Bahnhof division is one of the largest public collections of contemporary art in the world.

Like other contemporary art galleries in other major cities, the Hamberger Bahnhof is a destination in itself, with a rich history and stunning architechtural features such as the addition of lighting installations by American artist Dan Flavin, which highlight the architectural elements of the building, bringing a touch of 20th century edginess without marring its 19th century beauty.

Josef Paul Kleihues's redesign of the building could be compared to Gae Eulenti's transformation of the 1900 Beaux Arts Gare d’Orsay train station, a spectacular landmark originally designed by Victor Laloux, into the Musée d’Orsay, a museum of mainly French art from 1848 to 1915.

As part of the redesign she created a grand central aisle in a cavernous space that once contained train tracks under a dramatic barrel-vaulted glass ceiling. Original support beams were highlighted, and new industrial materials like wire mesh were used. Walls were redone in rough stone.

The renovated building was opened in December 1986, and critical reaction was mixed. Holland Cotter of The New York Times called it “fabulously eccentric.” But Libération, a French newspaper favored by art specialists and critics, said the museum had been “likened to a funeral hall, to a tomb, to a mausoleum, to an Egyptian burial monument, to a necropolis.”

The work on show at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum comes predominantly from three collections, which are permanently on loan to the museum; it houses the private collection of Erich Marx, which includes works by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys; an extensive collection from Friedrich Christian Flick, not without its controversies from his grandfather, Friedrich Flick, the arms manufacturer and steel magnate who used to supply the Nazi regime; and Egidio Marzona, which primarily consists of works of American and European Conceptual art, Minimal Art, and Arte Povera.

Key artworks in this museum include:

Andy Warhol, Chairman Mao, 1975

Starting in the early 1970s, the Pop artist made hundreds of images of Mao, using a portrait of the leader from the Little Red Book, a propaganda collection of Mao’s speeches and quotations from the Cultural Revolution, as his template. Warhol’s Maos are endlessly varied—ferocious, parodic, and beautiful—gestures of paint smeared onto the reproduced outline of the Chinese leader’s head and shoulders.

A print of Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof art museum in Berlin. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Anslem Kiefer, Volkszählung, 1991

Volkszählung is a huge sculpture of steel and lead that depicts a freestanding library, some fifteen feet tall, whose huge books, made of lead, are pocked with hundreds of dried peas in reference to the bean counters (“Erbsenzähler”) responsible for the project of counting human beings that reduces them to numbers. It was created in the aftermath of a controversial census in what was then West Germany.  Kiefer intentionally used lead to contrast heavy and light, fixity and movement (Brockmeier, J., 2015).

Image courtesy of the New Media Observatory

Joseph Beuys, End of the Twentieth Century, 1983

Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (The End of the 20th Century) consists of nine large basalt blocks which are strewn like dead bodies through the gallery space. The work looks unfinished: one block is still lying on a trolley as if it is still being moved in, though in reality it has been deliberately left in a state of incompletion by the artist thirty one years ago. Each basalt block has a cavity drilled in it, each cavity is lined with felt and mud, and has a cone shaped piece of stone driven into it. You can feel the concrete floor of the gallery about to collapse under the weight of these blocks, they have a presence that can be felt like the deep rumbling of a passing train. The industrial trolley testifies to the labour exerted in their arrangement.

Image courtesy of Visit Berlin.

Robert Rauschenberg, Pink Door, 1954

Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. He is well known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance.

Image courtesy of Black Mountain.