You could see what’s going on in the museums. Last year, the New National Gallery in Berlin reopened after renovation work. Cracked windows were replaced, underfloor heating was installed, a socket for LAN was connected.
Markus Brock is the museum guide in the “Museum Check”. He goes through the revolving door into the foyer. “And we’re already in the 1960s,” he says, because the New National Gallery opened in 1968. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built it, based on designs he had drawn many years earlier for the headquarters of the rum manufacturer Bacardi in Santiago de Cuba.
Painting shows with Meret Becker
The Berliners would have called the foyer “Bahnhofshalle” back then. Now you can see the work of Alexander Calder in it: monumental mobiles and installations. Meret Becker wanted to visit the exhibition “The Art of Society”, a show that generously looks at the years 1900 to 1945. Becker’s favorite painting is Lotte Laserstein’s “Evening over Potsdam”, a picture from 1930: people on a roof terrace. “It has such a melancholy, something resigned, they are not together,” says Becker. They walk through the hall, people with masks hide behind showcases.
Becker says she’s fascinated by the 1920s because women cut their hair and smoked and drank. You see the footage of a woman with short hair smoking a cigarette. Meret Becker goes to a picture by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, it shows cocottes. Becker says that there are many terms for one thing in the German language: “Hure, Kokotte, those are such subtle differences.”
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Now come the pictures of war invalids and the bigwig caricatures by Otto Dix and George Grosz. A boy looks seriously at the viewer. “Is he malicious?” Becker asks. Then she stands in front of “Sonja” by Christian Schad, 1928. Becker feels reminded of her mother – the black clothes, the smoking. “Could also be a guy so androgynous.”
When applying color to another portrait, she says: “I want to lick this off! Sometimes I feel like eating colors.” The mobiles in the foyer are pushed four times a day by mobiles. Sunlight falls through the huge windows. It could have been Bacardi’s headquarters.