Collection

The Berlinische Galerie is one of the youngest exhibition venues in the city and is an interdisciplinary museum. Our holdings include painting, sculpture, installation and media art, graphic art, photography, architecture and the documentary estates of artists.

Fine Arts

The Berlinische Galerie collects art created in Berlin between the late 19th century and today. Our Fine Arts collection alone contains around 5,000 items, including many works by well-known artists from Max Beckmann via Hannah Höch and Naum Gabo to Georg Baselitz and John Bock. Many groups and movements feature in the list too for the role they played in art history. Examples are the Berlin Secession, Dada Berlin, the East European avant-garde between the two World Wars, the Neue Wilden and the art scene that was reborn when the Wall fell in 1989. The Golden Twenties are a particular highlight in the collection. Berlin was on its way to becoming one of the most modern cities in the world and challenging Paris as a new world hub of modernist art. The Berlinische Galerie has never confined its focus to the big names. In a spirit of discovery we often unearth artists who have been unjustly buried under the rubble of turbulent times. Explore now

Prints and Drawings

The graphic medium has a reputation for hushed tones. But that certainly does not apply to all the paper-based works in our collection. The radical absurdity in the photomontage by Hannah Höch, for example, probes the murky abyss of the Weimar Republic. And these days artists often opt for huge formats. Our biggest work on paper is by Nanne Meyer: it is over 10 metres long. About 15,000 folios – prints and above all drawings – make up our collection in this field. They illustrate the splendid diversity of this genre in Berlin from the late 19th century up until the present. Major highlights are Dada Berlin, the East European avant-garde in the 1920s and New Objectivity. Other substantial subsets relate to Late Expressionism from 1914 onwards, the new dawn in art after 1945, New Figuration in the 1960s, art in East Berlin after the Wall was put up and then torn down, and – last, but not least – contemporary drawing. Explore now

Photography

With some 73,000 photographs, the Berlinische Galerie boasts one of Germany’s leading photography collections. Portraits, architectural views and urban photography are the principal themes, but commercial and fashion photography, photojournalism, photomontage, photograms and conceptual photography are all part of the picture. Our collection reflects the evolution of photography as an art form – and the history of the medium in Berlin. In its early days, photography served above all to document rapid urban growth, but in the 1920s Berlin became a hotspot for the avant-garde camera. Exceptional contributions continued after 1945: from the 1970s, for instance, exponents of auteur photography turned a radically subjective gaze upon the city and its people. One distinctive hallmark of our collection is its fine art photography from the GDR, where a vibrant, creative scene emerged despite the imposition of political criteria and reprisals against those who broke the rules. We observe the development of contemporary photographers in Berlin and support them by means of extensive purchases. Explore now

Architecture

Some 300,000 drawings, 80,000 photographs, 4,000 designs for stained glass and mosaics, 3,000 models and about 800 running metres of files from posthumous papers, competitions and archives – that is the handsome tally of objects in our Architecture collection. These copious holdings are a chronicle of Berlin not only as it has been built, but also as it was never built – ideas and visions for how the city might have been. The projects and records relating to architecture and urban design in Berlin date from the years between 1900 and the present. Over this period the city has been constantly reinvented: Historicism under the Kaiser, Neues Bauen in the Weimar Republic, structural megalomania under the Nazis, reconstruction in a divided city during the Cold War and the “New Berlin” that followed German unification. Berlin is an eternal building site... Explore now

Artists’ Archives

The Artists’ Archives at the Berlinische Galerie are a storehouse of knowledge and a versatile memory in written form: from copious correspondence and rare printed matter via diaries and manuscripts to scattered jottings. Here documents are collected, preserved and trawled for content. They originate from individual artists, groups of artists, gallery managers and art scholars who set their stamp on the history of art and culture in Berlin. There are fonds from – among others – the Jugendstil artist Fidus, Herwarth Walden’s avant-garde gallery and journal “Der Sturm”, the Novembergruppe, Ferdinand Möller’s gallery and the sculptors Naum Gabo, Hans Uhlmann and George Rickey, and they reach down to the recent past. Our prolific holdings from the DADA movement in Berlin are unmatched anywhere in the world. They consist of the posthumous papers of Hannah Höch, the collage artist and the only woman among the Berlin Dadaists, and of Raoul Hausmann, documenting his activities as a “Dadasopher”, dancer, photo-mechanic, sound poet, photographer and experimental engineer. Especially important is the material from artists who were threatened and persecuted by the Nazis and forced into exile, like Lotte Laserstein and Issai Kulvianski. Explore now