Berlin

But this was precisely the problem for a group of younger artists who had moved to the capital in the early years of the century. Finding the Secession played out and sterile, they embarked on a new artistic path known as expressionism, the first modernist school to be predominantly German. Die Brücke, an expressionist group founded in Dresden in 1905 shifted to Berlin five years later. Its chief spokesman, Herwarth Walden, launched a magazine and art gallery called Der Sturm

, which became the focal point of the German avant-garde on the eve of the war. Unlike the major Secessionists, these artists turned their attention to the big cities, above all to Berlin. The most important figure here was Ludwig Meidner. The critic Karl Scheffler had argued that it was impossible to love a place as ugly as Berlin, but Meidner insisted that he

loved it, and urged his fellow artists to love it as well: “We must finally begin to paint our homeland [Heimat], the metropolis, for which we have an infinite love.” What Meidner found to love in Berlin was precisely the “unnatural” and “ugly” environment of sprawling tenements, bustling streets, and barely contained chaos. As he wrote in his Directions for Painting the Big City

: “Let’s paint what is close to us, our city world! The wild streets, the elegance of iron suspension bridges, gas tanks which hang in white-cloud mountains, the roaring colors of buses and express locomotives, the rushing telephone wires (aren’t they like music?), the harlequinade of advertising pillars, and the night . . . big city night!” Meidner was so fond of metropolitan chaos that many modern critics have interpreted his prewar Berlin studies as an anticipation of the cataclysmic destruction to come.

Another expressionist artist who has been classed retrospectively as a prophet of the apocalypse is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His interpretations of Berlin before the war, which feature contorted figures seemingly desperate to escape the confines of the canvas, are said to be “immediately recognizable as pictures of an unnatural, thoroughly dehumanized world.” But Kirchner himself saw his Berlin work as a celebration of the raw energy he found in the city’s streets and taverns. He said that the “so-called distortions” in his paintings were “generated instinctively by the ecstasy of what is seen.” Static representation was impossible, he added, when the subject was in perpetual motion, a blur of light and action. The city required of its artists a new way of seeing, and Kirchner was determined to capture the frantic movement of metropolitan life by abandoning traditional naturalistic, or even impressionistic, techniques.

While at the turn of the century Berlin was just beginning to gain an international reputation for its creative contributions to the visual arts, the Prussian capital had long been known as a solid museum town. In 1830 Karl Friedrich Schinkel had completed the Altes Museum on the small wedge of land flanked by the Spree that came to be known as the Museumsinsel (Museums Island). The Neues Museum, designed by Schinkel’s pupil Friedrich August Stüler, was added in 1855, followed by the new National Gallery in 1876. According to Georg Brandes, at the time of national unification the city’s museums “played for edification-seeking Berliners a role similar to cathedrals in Gothic countries.” In the Wilhelmian era Berlin’s museums profited greatly from the efforts of one of Europe’s most brilliant collectors, Wilhelm von Bode, who became director of the new Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum when it opened on the Museums Island in 1904. (Two years later Bode was named director-general of all the royal museums, a position he held until 1920, when the museums were no longer royal.) Adept at tracking down hidden treasures around the world, Bode brought to Berlin an amazing collection of Old Masters, including Rembrandt’s Man in a Golden Helmet and Dürer’s Hieronymus Holzschuher. For once the kaiser did not interfere; on the contrary, he fully shared Bode’s ambition to make Berlin a major repository for the certified classics of European art. To help the curator raise funds, Wilhelm offered titles to wealthy burghers who made sizable contributions to the royal collections. Bode helped his own cause by making allies with anyone who was influential, including Max Liebermann, who painted his portrait.