Mantegna, Moholy and the Minutes
Press release from 01/30/2019
The programme of the five institutions of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 2019: Humboldt's 250th birthday, Bauhaus anniversary and 25 years of twinning with Buenos Aires - Exhibition programme with Mantegna and Bellini, Emil Nolde and African fashion - Plus: Shepard sounds at the State Institute for Music Research and Governing with Frederick William I digitally in the Secret State Archives
The five institutions of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation - the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut and the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung - are starting 2019 with a varied programme. At the annual reception in the "Pergamonmuseum. The Panorama" on Tuesday evening, highlights from all the museums were presented.
The 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt's birth will be celebrated by the State Library, the Secret State Archives and the Ibero-American Institute in equal measure. Humboldt's autographs and diaries will be on public display at the Berlin State Library for three days around his birthday (12-14 September 2019). At the end of March, Humboldt expert Andrea Wulf will present her new book, for which she worked closely with the Staatsbibliothek. New York artist Lillian Melcher designed the illustrations based on the original diaries.
The GStA PK holds several hundred of Humboldt's letters, including those to Friedrich Wilhelm III and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, as well as the numerous letters to ministers and officials of the Prussian Ministry of Culture in which Humboldt asked for support for other scientists and scholars.
The Ibero-American Institute (IAI) is a partner in the international conference "Alexander von Humboldt: The Whole World, the Whole Man" (5-7 June 2019) of the academy project "Alexander v. Humboldt on Journeys - Science on the Move" of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In a year-round series of events, it will also shed light on Humboldt's significance from a Latin American perspective. The IAI is also celebrating another anniversary this year: 25 years of twinning between Berlin and Buenos Aires will be celebrated with a hymn to the symbol of this connection par excellence: the bandoneon. The instrument originally comes from Germany, where it was first built in 1846 and was part of the basic instrumentarium of dance and entertainment bands until the 1930s. It probably arrived in Argentina via immigrants around 1870 and is still very popular today as a defining element of the tango.
A second focus will be the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus. While the Museum of Photography will be launching an exhibition on "New Vision" in contemporary art in April, comparing works by Erich Consemüller and Thomas Ruff, for example, the Art Library will be devoting itself to the relatively unknown Berlin years of Bauhaus master Lászlo Moholy-Nagy from the end of August. In 1929, he presented an exhibition on the development of typography at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, from which 78 display panels have been preserved and are now on public display again for the first time in 90 years. In the State Library on Potsdamer Strasse, Berlin photographer Jean Molitor will be showing his exhibition of photographs of Bauhaus-inspired buildings. And on 5 September, there will be a "Notturno extra" concert by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum, with two works that played an important role in the musical life of the Bauhaus: Arnold Schönberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" Op. 21 and Igor Stravinsky's "The Soldier's Tale".
In the exhibition programme of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the major juxtaposition of the Renaissance painters Mantegna and Bellini in the Gemäldegalerie is one of the highlights of the year. Also at the Kulturforum, African fashion designers will present themselves in the exhibition "Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion - Hair - Design", African fashion designers will also be exploring the Kunstgewerbemuseum's European fashion collection. From April, the Hamburger Bahnhof will be showing "Emil Nolde under National Socialism" and from October, the Alte Nationalgalerie will be dedicating an exhibition entitled "The Struggle for Visibility" to the role of female artists at the Nationalgalerie up to 1918 - already one of the ten exhibitions that Bloomberg has found to be a must-see worldwide.
The growing international role of the SPK can be seen not only in the fact that cooperation with African countries, for example, has been significantly intensified in relation to the Humboldt Forum. Syria is another example of this. At the Pergamon Museum on 27 February, Minister of State Müntefering will open the exhibition "Cultural Landscape Syria. Preserving and Archiving in Times of War" at the Pergamon Museum on 27 February. The exhibition takes stock of the Syrian Heritage Archive Project, which is based at the Museum of Islamic Art. After five years of work, the museum submitted an initial data package to UNESCO to help with the reconstruction of the famous Umayyad Mosque. To this end, the immense damage was recorded in detail and the buildings reconstructed with the help of historical images, plans and texts. Since 2013, a database of more than 200,000 photos, plans, maps and reports has been created together with Syrian experts as part of the "Syrian Heritage Archive Project".
Two more exciting projects from the Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage and the State Institute for Music Research: How Frederick William I ruled, namely from the cabinet and without any other advisors, can be found in the so-called "Cabinet Minutes", which will be successively put online from 2019. The acoustic illusion of Shepard sounds, often used in film music, is examined in the SIM. It is a sequence of tones that seem to rise higher and higher, rising endlessly without ever reaching a destination. These and other phenomena of perceptual illusion are also presented in public workshops at the State Institute for Music Research.
And, of course, there will also be news from the SPK's construction sites in 2019: the topping-out ceremony for Building A of the Pergamonmuseum will take place on 3 May. The James-Simon-Galerie will then open in the middle of the year. Haus Bastian, the new centre for cultural education of the National Museums in Berlin, will follow at the end of August. At the Kulturforum, the ground-breaking ceremony for the Nationalgalerie's Museum of the 20th Century will take place in autumn, followed by the opening of the Humboldt Forum at the end of the year. The basic refurbishment of the Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden will be completed this year. The fundamental refurbishment of the Neue Nationalgalerie is expected to reopen next year.