Das Verborgene Museum

Das Verborgene Museum was the only museum in the world created with a dedicated mission to search out the life’s work of women artists who had, for whatever reason, fallen into oblivion, to follow up these discoveries with academic research and to place the findings on public display. From its foundation in 1986, it investigated more than 150 women artists who had produced significant work in different genres and restored them to visibility. The exhibition rooms in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin became a regular calling-point for a broad national and international audience.

In 2022 the Berlinische Galerie took over this remit from Das Verborgene Museum and will continue in the same spirit to conduct research into women artists and make them visible. The two museums had already cooperated successfully in the past on a number of occasions. New exhibition projects will continue to help women artists, who are still under-represented, to attract lasting recognition. Moreover, the documentary archive left behind by Das Verborgene Museum is being transferred and made available for a wide range of research.

The foundation of Das Verborgene Museum was prompted by a groundbreaking exhibition of the same title – “Das verborgene Museum / The Hidden Museum” – staged during the festivities for the 750th anniversary of Berlin in 1987. The original objective had been to identify works by women artists held in museum collections around the city and to subject their purchasing and exhibition policies to critical scrutiny. It turned out that female art production was significantly under-represented. At the Berlinische Galerie, which specifically states in its articles of association that it will seek to collect and exhibit art by women, work by female artists already accounted for 20% of the holdings, considerably more than in other Berlin museums.

That was when Das Verborgene Museum and the Berlinische Galerie began their many years of successful collaboration. In 2008 they teamed up to stage the first retrospective devoted to the photographer Frieda Riess, one of the leading and most sought-after portraitists of the 1920s. This was followed in 2011 by “Eva Besnyö – Photographer 1910–2003”, a retrospective of her work in Germany that was shown in 2012 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. In October 2021, the Berlinische Galerie hosted the first museum overview of work by the sculptor Louise Stomps.

Das Verborgene Museum helped to establish a new visibility for many women artists thanks to these shows, while also making suggestions for purchases and exhibitions to the Berlinische Galerie.

Find out more on the website (archive) of Das Verborgene Museum