Dürer for Berlin

The exhibition leads from the beginnings of the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) in 1831 and the founding of the German Reich in 1871, through the Gründerzeit (Wilhelminian period) and the years of National Socialism, to the division of the collection due to the war and its reunification in the Kulturforum in 1994.

Even contemporary rulers used his art and his personal fame for imperial appearances and representative works. Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519), for example, commissioned Dürer with the famous giant woodcut of the Gate of Honor, which is still the most ambitious and largest woodcut ever made. Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612) acquired large parts of Dürer's artistic estate and brought it to Prague. Later it was brought to Vienna.

And even after the end of the Holy Roman Empire, Dürer remained a central guiding figure for an entire generation of Romantic artists. Since 1828, the 300th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer's death, he has been continuously honored in commemorative events, not least in Berlin, where important artists such as Johann Gottfried Schadow, Karl Friedrich Schinkel or the young Adolph Menzel took part in the master honors.

The newly founded imperial union of many individual states needed national identification figures. People were needed who could create, promote and legitimize a common identity across the borders of the individual constituent states. Dürer was particularly suited for this purpose. As the most important artist in the German-speaking world, he fulfilled all integrative aspects of the new imperial idea from the Prussian point of view as well. Moreover, as the son of a goldsmith who had immigrated from Hungary, he was an artist with migration experience. Thus, precisely because of these complex interconnections, he evaded a clumsy chauvinistic appropriation by individual groups within the empire. His memory belonged to all.

Dürer's connection with national interests was thus by no means new. But now his name was to be linked with the young capital of the German Empire - Berlin. Here, it was believed that a comprehensive and high-quality collection of Dürer drawings was already in possession of the city. It came primarily from the collection of the Prussian postmaster general Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler, which had been acquired in 1835 as an expanded founding collection for the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett.

None other than Rudolf Count Stillfried-Alcantara, Master of Ceremonies of the Prussian King and German Emperor Wilhelm I, who was enthroned in January 1871, took this group of works as an opportunity to publish a magnificent publication on the Dürer drawings in the Berlin collection under Wilhelm's patronage. With it, he referred to the coincidence of Dürer's 400th birthday and the founding year of the empire. But the publication caused a "Dürer dispute," an early scholarly controversy in the founding days of the discipline of art history. It ended in the realization that the Berlin Dürer collection at that time was by no means up to international comparison and that a remedy was urgently needed.

But it was not until the next generation around Richard Schöne (1840-1922), Wilhelm Bode (1845-1929), and especially the director of the Kupferstichkabinett, Friedrich Lippmann (1838-1903), that the loss of importance could be compensated. Lippmann was able to make spectacular acquisitions in the field of Dürer drawings and prints, aided by imperial support and the changing times.

These works, acquired in the last quarter of the 19th century, catapulted the Kupferstichkabinett to the rank of a leading Dürer collection, which it still holds today. The extremely revealing migrations and provenances of the prints between the metropolises of Vienna, Paris and Berlin are paradigmatic of Dürer collecting in this era. In addition, knowledge of Albrecht Dürer's works was disseminated to the world through excellently illustrated publications. In cooperation with the Berlin institutes and picture publishers as well as the Reichsdruckerei, founded in 1879, a comprehensive and annotated facsimile edition of all Dürer drawings initiated by Friedrich Lippmann also anchored the study of Dürer's work in Berlin as the first illustrated catalog of his works.

By the time of his death in 1903, Friedrich Lippmann had made the Berlin Dürer Collection world famous. His successors in office continued Lippmann's collection policy throughout the 1920s and 30s. Even during the National Socialist era, acquisitions from private collections long associated with the Kabinett continued. In addition, Dürer drawings and prints from other Berlin collections were transferred to the Kupferstichkabinett, but duplicates were also sold or exchanged.

The division of Berlin and the resulting split into the Kupferstichkabinett East and West resulted in a new situation. Both houses had only a part of the former collection at their disposal. However, since Dürer was still firmly anchored in the art historical canon as the national artist of the Germans, both museums made successful efforts to close particularly gaping inventory gaps.

Thus, the Kupferstichkabinett on Museum Island integrated the rich Dürer collection of Beuth into its holdings and acquired an important key work in the form of the master engraving "Melencolia I," while the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin-Dahlem was able to acquire, in addition to several drawings, a complete "Ehrenpforte" (Gate of Honor) on Dürer's 500th birthday in 1971, the counterpart of which was on Museum Island.

Thus, even against the backdrop of numerous Dürer exhibitions in recent years, this complex is a virtually born subject for the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, which not only enables the didactic development of collection-historical contexts on site and in the catalog, but also makes it possible to experience numerous masterpieces in the original.

"Dürer for Berlin. A Search for Traces in the Museum of Prints and Drawings" is curated by Michael Roth, head curator of the Collection of German Art up to 1800 at the Museum of Prints and Drawings.