Discoveries and rediscoveries

Roughly 250 works await discovery – paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, architectural designs and archive documents, some of them never or rarely shown before. Apart from a selection drawn from the first hundred artworks to arrive at the Berlinische Galerie, we have included artists who have been unjustly forgotten and showcased some new acquisitions.

Historische Stadtfotografie – Marie Panckow

In 1979 the Berlinische Galerie acquired a set of historical photographs depicting the urban fabric and its architecture. These 170 albumen prints originated from an “Atelier M. Panckow”. The street directory revealed that “M. Panckow” stood for Marie Panckow (1836–1903), who managed the photography studio from 1870 after inheriting it from her first husband Adolph Panckow. This made her one of the few urban and architectural photographers who were recording public, imperial and private buildings in Berlin und Potsdam around 1871, many of them since destroyed. These were the seeds of the Photography Collection, which has become a valuable resource for historians of both architecture and photography.

Historical photograph of a woman in dark clothing standing in front of the Belvedere on Klausberg in Potsdam. The neoclassical building features a round structure with columns, a balustrade adorned with statues, and a grand external staircase. — Marie Panckow, Belvedere auf dem Klausberg, Potsdam, 1870-1875
© Copyright to the artwork expired

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Painting of a woman reclining on a sofa. She wears a flowing blue dress and a yellow shawl draped over her shoulders. The background is turquoise, with patterned pillows and carpets surrounding her. — Jeanne Mammen, Die Schwester im Atelier, um 1913
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

An androgynous figure with parted brown hair plays a flute. The right shoulder is draped with a patterned cloth, the left is bare. A pointed ear suggests a faun or satyr. The background features dense green tones with yellow highlights. — © Urheberrechte am Werk erloschen

Rediscovered: Julie Wolfthorn and Jeanne Mammen

Ever since its foundation the Berlinische Galerie has been committed to making the work of persecuted and forgotten artists available to a broader public again. Julie Wolfthorn (1864–1944) was one of the most successful women artists of her day and one of the few women among the founding members of the Berlin Secession. She belonged to a number of associations, where she advocated for her female colleagues. Many of her portraits feature confident women from the artistic milieu, and the painting “Dancer” is an example. Wolfthorn was one of many Berlin artists who suffered persecution under the Nazi regime because of their Jewish roots. In 1942 she was deported to the concentration camp at Terezín, where she died in 1944.

Jeanne Mammen (1890–1976) ranks today as one of the best-known artists of the 1920s. She had been almost forgotten when the Berlinische Galerie began to acquire her works soon after its foundation. Since then the museum has made her the subject of several exhibitions and publications. The early portrait “My Sister in the Studio” shows Mammen’s sister Maria Louise (1888–1956), who was also an artist. The two trained together in Paris, Brussels and Rome and shared a studio for many years. The painting was found after Mammen’s death when the attic over her Berlin studio was cleared out. No other painting of hers has survived from the 1910s, before Mammen came to Berlin and developed her distinctive style.

Hannah Höch: Homage

To mark its 50th anniversary, the Berlinische Galerie has devoted a room of her own to this exceptional artist, creating a special ambience where visitors can enjoy her key works from the 1910s and 1920s. Hannah Höch (1889–1978) plays a significant role in the museum’s collection thanks to founding director Eberhard Roters (1929–1994). He contacted Höch early on in 1967, when she was leading a secluded life in Heiligensee on the fringes of Berlin. Roters managed not only to purchase a number of artworks, but also to secure her documentary estate for the collection. It is a unique trove of material about the history of Dada and the 20th-century avant-garde. The museum’s holdings on Hannah Höch are now the biggest in the world.

A crouching, hunched figure in the foreground, surrounded by architectural fragments reminiscent of a church's exterior. The composition blends painterly elements with collage-like structures, reflecting the artist's political satire. — Hannah Höch, Roma, 1925
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

A bride with an oversized childlike head and questioning gaze wears a white dress. Beside her stands a stiff, motionless groom. They are surrounded by symbolic objects such as a winged box, a teardrop-shaped eye, a baby, and a heart chained to a block. It seems to be a surreal scene. — Hannah Höch, Die Braut (Pandora), 1924/1927
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

Photo: Adults and a child during a guided tour. They are standing around a sculpture.

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Nazi mega-projects in Berlin

Under Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) architecture came to symbolise power and oppression. From 1936 he and Albert Speer (1905–1981) planned the Nazi regime’s biggest urban project of all: transforming Berlin into “Germania, capital of the Reich”. Speer designed a gigantic crossing between two major axes near the Brandenburg Gate. The centrepiece was a pompous domed hall (315 metres long, 290 metres high). All the existing buildings, apart from the Reichstag and the Victory Column, were to be pulled down to make way. In 1938 demolition began around the central bow in the river and what is now the Kulturforum. Many people, among them Jewish residents, were driven from their homes and their property was forcibly confiscated.

Black-and-white photograph of a model showing a roundabout at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, surrounded by multi-storey buildings with uniform façade design. — [Translate to English:] Martin Wagners Vorschlag für den Alexanderplatz. Modell aus der Vogelperspektive, 1929
© Berlinische Galerie

Dorothe Krause, Bauvorhaben Ernst-Thälman-Park
© Berlinische Galerie

Comrades and team players: Women who built Berlin, capital of the GDR

The biggest, most significant collection of architectural material about the city of Berlin is held by the Berlinische Galerie. These ever-expanding archives serve as a basis for exhibitions and teaching, international research and publications. One valuable section consists of records about architectures in East Berlin in the years from 1949 to 1989. Researchers cataloguing this material have turned up information about women who helped significantly as architects to rebuild East Berlin as the capital of the GDR. Most of these women belonged to collectives led by men. What precise role they played is hard for an outsider 3 to define. Public visibility for individual achievements was not encouraged. Any finished work – so the intended message – was the result of a shared process. This continues to hamper research and we have no full view of how women contributed to the city’s former eastern sector as architects and urban planners. The documents and film footage on display here, some for the first time, offer insights into our current state of knowledge. They show that individual East German women had a hand in construction’s royal discipline: design.

Portrait of a girl painted in an expressive, distorted style. The head is surrounded by bold, vivid colors and thick brushstrokes — Cornelia Schleime, Mädchenkopf, 1985
© Cornelia Schleime

In the shadow of the Wall: Cornelia Schleime and Gülden Artun

When the Berlinische Galerie was founded in 1975, the city was still divided into west and east. Purchases of recent art, one pillar in the collection’s stated mission, were confined to West Berlin. Only once the Wall fell in 1989 was it easier to fill at least some gaps in the holdings with works reflecting the art scene in East Berlin. When the East Berlin artist Cornelia Schleime (*1953) managed to move to West Berlin in 1984 after several failed applications, the Berlinische Galerie immediately stepped in to support her. She had been obliged to leave behind all the work she had so far produced. Eberhard Roters chose the direct route to acquire several paintings made in her new studio, including “Girl’s Head” from 1985.

Gülden Artun (*1953) had already been active in West Berlin’s international art scene before the Wall fell. She initially studied German in Ankara, the city of her birth. In 1976 she moved to West Berlin and soon enrolled in the painting class given by artist Marwan (1934–2016) at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (now University of the Arts). “When I came to West Berlin in 1976, the city seemed like a paradise to me,” Artun wrote. “I think that feeling of being free is the first condition for making art.” Her painting “King”, which negotiates power relations, was bought by the Berlinische Galerie in 1984 after a visit to the artist’s studio.

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Helga Paris und Michael Schmidt

From 1967 Helga Paris (1938–2024) photographed the world about her in East Berlin but also motifs elsewhere in the GDR and in other socialist countries. Her series “Pubs in Berlin” (1974 onwards) reflects happy socialising as well as resignation and solitude, all captured in a documentary style. The faces in “Young Berliners” (1981/1982) reveal both nervousness and self-assurance. These photographs formed part of a large corpus of work built up by Ulrich Domröse for the Association of Fine Artists in the GDR (VBK). In 1992, in the wake of German unification, the Berlinische Galerie acquired this “collection of the photographic history of the GDR”. Domröse went on to head the Photography Collection between 2002 and 2020.

Helga Paris, Berliner Jugendliche, 1982
© Estate Helga Paris

Michael-Schmidt, Berlin-Wedding, 1976-77
© Stiftung für Fotografie und Medienkunst mit Archiv Michael Schmidt

In his series “Berlin-Wedding” (1976/77) Michael Schmidt (1945–2014) focused his camera on the district of that name in West Berlin, deliberately producing his prints in nuanced shades of grey. His reputation also stems from the Workshop for Photography (1976–1986), a school and discussion forum which he created together with colleagues at the adult education college in Kreuzberg. The Berlinische Galerie has been collecting specimens of his globally acclaimed œuvre since 1979 and now owns more than 450 works, including from major series such as “Ceasefire” (1985–87) and “U-NI-TY” (1991–94).

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