Masterworks in Berlin: A City's Paintings Reunited fulfills two key functions - it is a glorious presentation of the best pictures in the Berlin museums and an unusually effective survey of European art from medieval times to the First World War. Presented chronologically, this book features a series of portfolios whose text and pictures deal with the schools or artists for which Berlin's museums are so celebrated. Each of these monographic gatherings is a revelation of the city's masterpieces, some neglected or forgotten. Many of the over seven hundred reproductions have never before been shown in color.
This is the most comprehensive publication ever devoted to the capital's paintings, and the first to discuss the reorganized, rebuilt, or new institutions that house them. Foremost among these is the new Gemaldegalerie for Old Masters, which houses the bulk of Berlin's magisterial collections of earlier pictures. Works from the city's museums at Potsdam and Charlottenburg are included in this book, along with those from Jagdschloss Grunewald and the old and new Nationalgaleries, works long kept at the Kaiser Friedrich (Bode) Museum, and more recent art from the Markisches and Brucke museums.
Major Italian panels include masterpieces by Giotto, Fra Angelico, the Lorenzetti, and Masaccio, with later works by Botticelli and Raphael. Berlin has the world's leading collection of early Netherlandish painting, with outstanding works by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, among many others. Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century artists are equally well represented, distinguished by a huge gathering of paintings by Rubens and van Dyck, Hals, Rembrandt, and the Ruisdaels.
Venetian verdutisti - Canaletto and Guardi - are seen in all their glory with other painters from the same region, such as Tiepolo. German nineteenth-century masters, especially Friedrich, Menzel, and Bocklin, are shown at their best. The collections include fine examples of Impressionism and Expressionism - brilliant canvases by Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Munch, and Nolde, among many others; paintings by little-known artists of unusual subjects; and pictures by, or of, women that have never before been shown in color.