Prints and Drawings

The graphic medium has a reputation for hushed tones. But that certainly does not apply to all the paper-based works in our collection. The radical absurdity in the photomontage by Hannah Höch, for example, probes the murky abyss of the Weimar Republic. And these days artists often opt for huge formats. Our biggest work on paper is by Nanne Meyer: it is over 10 metres long.

About 15,000 folios – prints and above all drawings – make up our collection in this field. They illustrate the splendid diversity of this genre in Berlin from the late 19th century up until the present. Major highlights are Dada Berlin, the East European avant-garde in the 1920s and New Objectivity. Other substantial subsets relate to Late Expressionism from 1914 onwards, the new dawn in art after 1945, New Figuration in the 1960s, art in East Berlin after the Wall was put up and then torn down, and – last, but not least – contemporary drawing.