Beneath the Pine Trees

I was in Berlin last week and visited the Brücke-Museum for the last days of their landscape-focused exhibition, 'Art... Beneath Pine Trees'. It was partly curated by landscape architects Atelier Le Balto who have been working for the last five years to revitalise the forest that surrounds the museum. The Grunewald and its lakes are looking lovely at the moment. In my photograph of one of the museum's windows you can see how the building is surrounded by autumn colours. The Brücke-Museum was set up in 1967 by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who had survived the Nazi era when his art was deemed degenerate to become an esteemed professor of painting in West Berlin. It is next to the Kunsthaus Dahlem which also has exhibitions of contemporary art but still, for me, has a sinister feel to it. The building was constructed for Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, who was working on designs for Hitler's planned capital Germania (despite this Breker managed to keep working and receiving commissions after the war). After a morning walk I welcomed a sit down in the Dahlem's cafe, but it was hard not to think there about all the associations between forests and Nazism (brilliantly described in Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory). 

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Birch Trunks, 1905

The Brücke-Museum is focused on the present, with a short sculpture trail and work by two contemporary artists responding to the collection. The birch trunks and river view I've included here were part of a group of landscapes chosen by Atelier Le Balto from the museums extensive holdings, which they arranged on the walls 'like planters', with colours and sizes varying 'like real plants'. The four artists who founded Die Brücke in Dresden in 1905 were all represented - Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in addition to Schmidt-Rottluff. Bleyl and Hecker were also long-lived, but Kirchner, who was severely affected by his experiences in the First World War and suffered ill health in the late thirties while growing increasingly depressed by the state of Germany, took his own life in 1938. Kirchner's famous painting Potsdamer Platz is currently starring in the Neue Nationalgalerie's excellent exhibition Ruin and Rush: Berlin 1910–1930 - a reminder that these artists were also very much concerned with the modern city and its population. What I found really inspiring about their landscapes in the Brücke-Museum was the way they explored so many different media, working rapidly or with great care, to produce pencil drawings, pen-and-ink sketches, woodcuts, lithographs, oil and watercolour paintings.      

Fritz Bleyl, Landscape Study of the Mark Brandenburg XI - on the Havel, 1917