Berlin
Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank AG (), sometimes referred to simply as Deutsche, is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Sto ...
building on the
Unter den Linden
Unter den Linden (, "under the Tilia, linden trees") is a boulevard in the central Mitte (locality), Mitte district of Berlin, the capital of Germany. Running from the City Palace, Berlin, City Palace to Brandenburg Gate, it is named after the l ...
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1937 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and his long-time art advisor, artist Hilla von Rebay. The foundation is a leading institution for the collection, preserv ...
and the Deutsche Bank, which owns the largest corporate art collection in the world.Walsh, John "The priceless Peggy Guggenheim" ''The Independent'', October 21, 2009, accessed March 12, 2012 The exhibition space was designed by
Richard Gluckman
Gluckman Tang Architects, (previously Gluckman Mayner Architects), is a New York City based architecture firm providing services in architecture, planning, and interior design. Established by Richard Gluckman in 1977, the firm is known for mini ...
, an American architect.
History and building
In 1993, one year before the withdrawal of American troops from the city, the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1937 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and his long-time art advisor, artist Hilla von Rebay. The foundation is a leading institution for the collection, preserv ...
's then-director,
Thomas Krens
Thomas Krens (born December 26, 1946) is the former director and Senior Advisor for International Affairs of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City.''The New York Times'' staff.Guggenheim Foundation staff From the beginning of his w ...
, was approached with the idea of a Berlin branch of the museum by Richard C. Holbrooke, then the American ambassador to Germany. The museum opened in November 1997, only one month after the opening of the
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The museum was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spa ...
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', November 7, 1997, accessed February 2, 2011
The modest Berlin gallery occupied a corner of the ground floor of the Deutsche Bank building, a sandstone building constructed in 1920. The exhibition space consisted of a single gallery that was 50 meters long, 8 meters wide, and 6 meters high. Gluckman designed the gallery in a minimalist style.
After 15 years of operation, Deutsche Guggenheim closed in February 2013. Two months later, Deutsche Bank re-opened the site as the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, to show collaborative contemporary art projects with independent curators, international partner museums and cultural institutions, as well as exhibitions of works from the Deutsche Bank's art collection. Under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Culture, in 2016 Deutsche Bank received from
pptArt
The Corporate Art Awards are the international awards for the best art projects developed by the business world. They were launched in Rome (Italy) in 2016 by pptArt under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Culture and with the support of th ...
the Corporate Art Award for the best "Corporate Collection". The Deutsche Bank KunstHalle closed in 2018, and the art collection was moved to the "PalaisPopulaire" in the
Prinzessinnenpalais
The Prinzessinnenpalais (English: ''Princesses' Palace'') is a former Royal Prussian residence on Unter den Linden boulevard in the historic centre of Berlin. It was built in 1733 according to plans by Friedrich Wilhelm Diterichs in Rococo style ...
.
Exhibitions
Funded entirely by the Deutsche Bank, the gallery had four exhibitions each year, complemented by educational programming."Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin" , Berlin.de, accessed March 13, 2012 Its first exhibition, in 1997, was titled ''
Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstra ...
: Visions of Paris''. Its primary purpose, however, was to commission important new works by contemporary artists that would then enter the Guggenheim collection. At least once a year, one artist was commissioned to create a new work specifically for the exhibition space. The commissions included paintings by
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist (November 29, 1933 – March 31, 2017) was an American artist and one of the proponents of the pop art movement. Drawing from his background working in sign painting, Rosenquist's pieces often explored the role of advertising a ...
and
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey Lynn Koons (; born January 21, 1955) is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-Surface fi ...
, photos by
Hiroshi Sugimoto
is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory.
Early life and education
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. He reportedly took his earliest photographs ...
,
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020) was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Initially a painter, ...
and
Jeff Wall
Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essa ...
, sculptures by
Rachel Whiteread
Dame Rachel Whiteread (born 20 April 1963) is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993.
Whiteread was one of the Young British ...
and large-scale installations by
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German ...
,
Hanne Darboven
Hanne Darboven (29 April 1941 – 9 March 2009) was a German conceptual artist, best known for her large-scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.
Early life and career
Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich. She g ...
,
Lawrence Weiner
Lawrence Charles Weiner (February 10, 1942December 2, 2021) was an American conceptual artist. He was one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s. His work often took the form of typographic texts, a form of word ...
Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco (born April 27, 1962) is a Mexican artist. He gained his reputation in the early 1990s with his exploration of drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. In 1998, Francesco Bonami called Orozco "one of the most influentia ...
and
Anish Kapoor
Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor (born 12 March 1954) is a British-Indian sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art. Born in Mumbai, Kapoor attended the elite all-boys Indian boarding school The Doon School, before moving to the UK ...
.
Based on a recommendation by Deutsche Bank's Global Art Advisory Council, from 2010 to 2012, the bank each year honored a young artist who was featured in a large solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim. The museum's last exhibition, from November 2012 to February 2013 included still lives by
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is ...
and
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically d ...
, landscapes by
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inc ...
and
Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During ...
, abstract paintings by
Franz Marc
Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc (8 February 1880 – 4 March 1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of '' Der Blaue Reiter'' (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later b ...
and
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his ...
and
Constantin Brâncuși
Constantin Brâncuși (; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century and a pioneer of modernism, ...
. Titled "Visions of Modernity" and also featuring the work of Delaunay, the exhibition was intended to provide a "bookend to the Deutsche Guggenheim's very first exhibition".
See also
*
List of Guggenheim Museums
The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Museums in this group include:
Locations
Americas
* The Solomon R. Guggenh ...