Art Library - State Museums in Berlin

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Art Library - State Museums in Berlin
Berlin Kulturforum Art Library and Kupferstichkabinett.jpg

The art library at the Kulturforum

founding 1867
Duration approx. 1,000,000
Library type Special library
place Berlin
ISIL DE-B11 (Berlin State Museums, Prussian Cultural Heritage, Art Library)
operator Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
management Moritz Wullen
Website www.ifskb.de

The art library at the Kulturforum is part of the Association of National Museums in Berlin , the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation .

It is an interdisciplinary museum facility and research center for art and media history. Their library, which represents the entire spectrum of research and collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, contains around 1 million volumes. In addition, the art library has extensive museum collections on the history of architecture, photography, graphic design and fashion as well as book and media art.

The network of the art library extends over three locations: the museum collections and the art history library at the Kulturforum (Matthäikirchplatz), the archaeological library in the archaeological center (Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse) and the museum for photography (Jebensstrasse) for the photography collection of the art library.

In 2019, the art library had 33,000 visitors.

history

The art library was originally part of the German Trade Museum , founded in 1867 , which was renamed in 1879 as the " Museum of Applied Arts in Berlin". The founding idea of ​​the museum - to convey historical and contemporary styles and production techniques in order to bring art, science, craft and industry closer together - is still reflected today in the profile of the library: From the beginning, in addition to scientific and artistic literature, drawings, photographs and Graphics for the collection.

In 1894 the library became a separate department within the Kunstgewerbemuseum and its teaching institution under the name “Library of the Kunstgewerbemuseum” and was given its first director in Peter Jessen (1858–1925). The library remained in the new building of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, which was opened in 1881, today known as the Martin-Gropius-Bau , until it moved into a new building specially built for it in Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 7a in 1905 . The collections acquired by Jessen expanded and sharpened the profile of the library, including: the bookplate collection of the architect Rudolf Springer (1894), the Lipperheide costume library of the publisher Franz von Lipperheide (1899), the book art collection of the architect Hans Grisebach (1905), the graphic estate of the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich (1912), the photography collections of Fritz Matthies-Masuren (loan since 1914, purchase in 1924) and Ernst Juhl (1915) as well as the collection of posters and commercial graphics by Walter von Zur Westen (1919) . The library was renamed under Jessen in 1924: As the "State Art Library" it was now an independent institution within the State Museums in Berlin.

The director, Curt Glaser , appointed in autumn 1924 , established the art library during his tenure as a forum for current topics and debates in art. In April – May 1929 the State Art Library showed two exhibitions: “The Chair” and “New Typography ”, the latter together with the “ Ring New Advertising Design ”. The typography exhibition showed u. a. the famous book cover by John Heartfield for the book The Swamp by Upton Sinclair in the full cover version, which shows a huge, smoking factory complex as a continuous photo on the front and back. With this exhibition, the "Ring", founded in March 1928, went public in Berlin for the first time.

However, Glaser had to leave his post in early May 1933 as one of the first Jewish employees of the State Museums. Under Glazer's successor Hermann Schmitz (1933–1941), the library lost its premises at Prinz Albrecht-Strasse 7a to the Secret State Police in July 1934 . The book and graphic collections were returned to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the seat of the Museum of Ethnology , where they were placed in a makeshift manner in the atrium and its corridors.

After 1945, the initial goal was to close the war-related gaps in the library and to make the library as a whole accessible to the public again - which was achieved in 1954 at a new location in Jebensstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg, now the Museum of Photography. It was not until the 1960s that the library's holdings could be systematically expanded again.

The director Bernd Evers , who was in office from 1985, pushed through decisive organizational decisions : in 1992 the art library moved into the new building at the Kulturforum planned by Rolf Gutbrod and redesigned by Hilmer & Sattler ; The Museum of Photography, opened in 2004 in a public-private partnership with the Helmut Newton Foundation, has been the exhibition venue for the Photography Collection ever since.

Under Moritz Wullen , Bernd Evers 'successor appointed in 2007, the planned amalgamation of the museums' specialist libraries into a single library system was implemented under the management of the art library. In addition, the Art Library opened a second branch in October 2012 with the Archaeological Library in the Archaeological Center opposite Museum Island.

Directors of the Art Library
Memorial plaque on the house, Matthäikirchplatz 8, in Berlin-Tiergarten

Library holdings of the art library

The art library is divided into three location libraries:

  1. the art history library at the Kulturforum,
  2. the archaeological library in the archaeological center across from Museum Island
  3. the library for non-European art and cultural history in the future Humboldt Forum (in planning).

The art history library comprises around 350,000 volumes, 62,000 auction catalogs, 50,000 microforms, around 1,500 periodicals and more than 24,000 volumes of historical literature. It is supplemented by the Lipperheidesche Costume Library with its archives and book holdings on the history of fashion and vestimentary practices from the early modern period to the present in a volume of around 40,000 volumes. Thanks to funding from the German Research Foundation from 1972 to 2010, the library now also focuses on the architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries as well as the art of the Iberian, Ibero-American, Anglo-American and Scandinavian cultural areas.

The Archaeological Library, which opened in 2012, combines the former specialist libraries of the Egyptian Museum , the Collection of Classical Antiquities , the Museum of Prehistory and Early History and the Museum of the Near East . For the repositioning on more than 1,000 m², the inventory of 150,000 media was systematized according to international library standards and is now accessible to the public. The focus of the collection includes Egyptology, Classical and Near Eastern archeology, Sudan archeology and ancient Near Eastern philology as well as literature on the prehistoric cultures of Europe and the Middle Ages, as well as epigraphy , papyrology and restoration issues.

A library of non-European art in the Humboldt Forum is planned as a further location. In the future, the historically grown literature of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art will be combined there on 1,800 m² and bring together very different disciplines: ethnology, ethnomusicology, East Asian and Indian art and cultural history, as well as ancient American archeology, ethnohistory and religious studies. Another focus is the discovery and travel literature on colonial and mission history.

Museum collections of the art library

The collections include more than 1,000,000 objects on the history of architecture, book and media art, design, photography and clothing. They can be viewed in the study room of the art library at the Kulturforum. In addition, the art library presents its collections and research in its exhibition room, in the exhibition halls at the Kulturforum and in the Museum of Photography.

Architecture and ornament engraving collection

The Architecture Collection contains around 50,000 objects from the late Middle Ages to the present day, including drawings by Gian Lorenzo Bernini , Francesco Borromini and Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the bequests of well-known architects of the 20th century such as Erich Mendelsohn , Joseph Maria Olbrich and Heinrich Tessenow . There is also the ornament engraving collection with approx. 12,000 graphic prints on the history of spatial art from five centuries.

Collection of book and media art

The book and media art collection contains over 13,000 artist books and magazines, records and films, print media and posters from the 20th and 21st centuries. Another focus is on archive collections on the avant-garde of the 20th century: the holdings of concrete and visual poetry by Jasia Reichhardt, the Fluxus archive by Hans Sohm, the book objects from the Rolf Dittmar collection or the archive by Egidio Marzona .

Collection photography

The holdings of the Photography Collection range from the early days of photography through Pictorialism around 1900 and the New Vision of the 1920s to contemporary artistic positions. They can be divided into five areas: the image archive, the collection of artistic photography, the bequests and archives, the inventory of measuring images and the historical postcards from the 19th and 20th centuries. The photographs have been kept in the new depots in the Museum of Photography since 2018 and are shown in temporary exhibitions in the museum's imperial hall.

Collection of graphic design

The graphic design collection comprises around 100,000 international posters from 1860 to the present day and more than 150,000 sheets of commercial art. These include examples of typography and lettering, book ornamentation and book illustrations, colored paper, ex libris , playing cards, calendars, book covers and a rich collection of commercial prints .

Modebild Collection - Lipperheidesche Costume Library

The Modebild collection, with around 40,000 books and magazine volumes from the 16th century to the present day, around 100,000 individual graphic sheets and around 700 paintings and miniatures, is the world's largest special collection on the international cultural history of clothing and fashion. The focus is on costume and fashion designs from the Renaissance to the present, caricatures, fashion illustrations and photographs.

research

The art library realizes research projects on the history of architecture, fashion and fine arts, the history of the art trade, the development of international art movements, the history of art photography around 1900 ( pictorialism ) and the common history of Western and non-European art. The cooperation partners of the art library include the Berlin universities, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Heidelberg University Library and the Art History Institute in Florence . The projects are funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the German Research Foundation, the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation.

literature

  • Bernd Evers (Hrsg.): Art in the library. On the history of the art library and its collections . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-05-002649-9 .
  • Adelheid Rasche (ed.): The culture of clothes. For the 100th anniversary of the Lipperheide Costume Library . Art Library, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-88609-372-7 .
  • Joachim Brand: On the history of the libraries of the State Museums in Berlin - Prussian cultural heritage. In: Bibliothek und Wissenschaft 37, 2004, pp. 69–173.
  • Joachim Brand: Synchronized and relocated. The art library 1933–1945 . In: Jörn Grabowski , Petra Winter (Ed.): Between Politics and Art. The National Museums in Berlin during the National Socialist era (= writings on the history of the Berlin museums 2). Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2013, ISBN 3-412-21047-1 , pp. 233-251.

Web links

Commons : Art Library - National Museums in Berlin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

notes

  1. ↑ Berlin State Museums counted more than 4 million visitors in 2019. January 31, 2020, accessed July 19, 2020 .
  2. ↑ The joint poster can be found in the archive under: Art library, collection context: Collection of poster and advertising art, inventory no. 14050793, keyword: 5; also online