Sunday at the museums

When everyone was very busy watching the street parades at the Festival of Cultures, I decided (again) to be against the mainstream and see some exhibitions that I had on my list since a long time. Even though a small Turkish gathering with a lot of good food and colourful scarfs reminded that even in Charlottenburg there is time for celebration, I was not impressed and switched the U-Bahn for going to Kreuzberg. I continued my schedule and spent some pleasant hours at the museums around the Charlottenburg Schlosss.

Discovering the genius of Picasso

Out of the three museums I visited, the collection hosted by the Berggruen Museum was completely new for me. The collection was created by Heinz Berggruen, a friend of Picasso who dedicated at least one work to him. He had left Germany during the dictatorship and got back to Berlin only in the 1990s after a brilliant career in the world of arts from Paris and London. After his death, his family is continuing his legacy, taking care of an impressive collection of modern art, mostly comprised by the works of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Cezanne, as well as Klee (with paintings of a higher quality compared to what I saw recently at Martin-Gropius-Bau) as well as beautiful sculptures by Giacometti. I do not appreciate all Picasso's works, but I cannot ignore his genius explained by many of the early drawings and paintings included in the collection. Someone with such a genuine talent and inspiration cannot do anything but paint all the time, trying different styles and ending up by decomposing the human figure into small little pieces, because the classical techniques are not enough. A highly spiritual experience that can be continued in the garden at the shadow of some grotesque creatures.

A drop of history in the cup of tea

The orange cup, by Marguerite Friedlander-Wildenhain

The garden is shared with a museum that I've visited before, Brohan Museum. This time, I was interested in the temporary exhibition that ended up today dedicated to the Avantgarde of Jewish Women in Ceramics (1919-1933) featuring interesting and very interesting personalities of their time: Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, Margarete Heymann-Marks and Eva Stricker-Zeisel. All of them had the chance to escape Germany in time after formative years spent in the ceramic factories or around the Bauhaus movement. Stricker-Zeisel had an astonishing life, with 16 months spent in the Soviet prisons and a lot of historical adventures in a crazy century

 I was lucky to see the exhibition, because there were many attractive and colourful models that brought a lot of pleasure to my eyes.

La plus belle, by Max Ernst

Back to Surrealism

My last cultural stop of the day was at the Collection Scharf-Gerstenberg, reuniting several surrealist works, by more or less famous artists, such as Odilon Redon, Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, Francis Picabia, Miro, Yves Tanguy, Goya and Alfred Kubin, among others. The first room, was a bit disappointing, but later on I felt brought back into the usual surrealist ambiance of artists that I love. The creator of the collection, Otto Gerstenberg was the president of Victoria Versicherung and a passionate admirer of arts. During the war, his collection was hidden in the bunkers and partially seized by the Red Army in 1945, many works being brought to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Since 1995, the works were returned and are on public display at the museum.