Review: Altes National Gallery (Berlin)
Oh man I love this museum. I was totally shocked at the amount of artwork they have there (including lots of Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gough and other famous painters). I was also shocked at how interesting the German paintings were and the quality of them. It saddened me that I hadn’t heard of most of them, they are all as good and in some cases far superior to the famous painters I mentioned above. In art lessons back home you just don’t hear of these painters.
I did a few drawings while on the first floor of some of the sculptures and paintings.
On the first floor they have a lot of documentive / reconstruction paintings by Arnold Menzel at the moment. He was commissioned to document the times of Fredrich the Great, which he did with extreme detail and imagination. A lot of his sketches are in the museum as well as the finished paintings which was really good to see.
German Fantasy Artists
Arnold Böcklin was one of the German painters featured on the second floor. Unlike the art galleries in Italy, these galleries weren’t all about the Bible which was nice. Böcklin and others created something a little like fantasy art and in some cases look like game / film concept art (bear in mind most of these paintings are from 1750 – 1850). A Böcklin piece that stood out to me in the gallery was ‘Die Toteninsel’ (The Isle of the Dead).
Other interesting German artists were; Johann Martin von Rohden (here is his ‘Waterfalls near Tivoli’), Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme and Carl Blechen.
I would recommend this museum over all on Museuminsel if you’re into this sort of thing. We spent so long on the first floor that we need to go back to spend more time on the other two floors! Another good thing is it is only €4 for students or €6.50 for normal tickets…. a lot cheaper than some of the other museums.
