Two hundred works from New York's Museum of Modern Art are back in Europe - where they came from, writes Derek Scally
New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has always been different, a gallery equivalent to a greatest hits compilation: no fillers, just works well known even to the casual art lover. For the next seven months, 200 of the gallery's greatest hits can be seen in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery).
It is more than an art show, says Prof Peter-Klaus Schuster, the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie: it's a homecoming.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. It's a return to the source, the triumphant return of lost modernism," he says. "This exhibition shows what Berlin might have become without Adolf Hitler, without the banning of so-called degenerate art, without the East German ghetto." Visits to 1920s Berlin, then a hotbed of modern art, helped inspire MoMA founding director Alfred H. Barr to open the New York MoMA. Soon his gallery provided a home for artists that were forced into exile from Europe by the Nazis for producing what the fascists decided was degenerate art. No better example in the show is Max Beckmann's triptych Departure, completed in Berlin in 1933 as a commentary on the rise of fascism, before he was forced from his home.
The show is an embarrassment of art riches, with some of the most recognisable works by Monet, Cezanne, Picasso, Chagall, Hopper, Klee, Lichtenstein, Matisse, Pollock, and de Kooning.
"Many of these works may be familiar, but seen in Berlin they become radical, charged with a new energy," says Glenn D. Lowry, director of the MoMA. "This is a dialogue between art history and architecture." The architecture is that of German architect Mies van der Rohe who designed the Neue Nationalgalerie specifically with the needs of modern art in mind. He even used miniature versions of MoMA works in his scale models of the museum to demonstrate his concept. Now the MoMA has found a temporary home in his museum while its permanent New York home gets a facelift.
The exhibition is likely to be one of the biggest art shows in Europe this year, or so the organisers hope. The Neue Nationalgalerie has spent about €8.5 million on securing and promoting the exhibition, an unheard of sum for the near-bankrupt German capital. The exhibition will have to attract 100,000 people a month between now and September to turn a profit, thus a high-profile advertising campaign with the slogan "The MoMA is the Star".
The whole business has got up the noses of German art critics.
"These works merely radiate fame, they no longer trigger any wonder or dispute," says Hanno Rauterberg, art critic of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. "The exhibition has come as a kind of ready-made art product. The museum just has to unpack it." Others have called the exhibition an important step towards reconciliation between the US and Germany after the differences over the Iraq war.
US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, one of the exhibition's patrons called it "further proof of the close ties between the United States and Germany in the arts as in so many other areas". Running parallel to the exhibition is an American season of the Berliner Festspiele, drawing together nearly every Berlin museum, theatre and concert venue.
Museum director Schuster shrugs off the worries and the naysayers: "We are privileged to be able to show the masterpieces of MoMA. It's not just an exhibition. It is the MoMA in Berlin."
Das MoMA in Berlin runs until September 19th in the Neue Nationalgalerie, Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz. www.momainberlin.de