Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

The New National Gallery displays 20th century visual art from the collection of the National Gallery, which has five other locations: Alte Nationalgalerie, Friedrichswerder Church, Museum Berggruen, Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection and Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin.

After nearly 50 years of use since its opening in 1968, the Neue Nationalgalerie underwent extensive renovation and modernization between 2015 and 2020.

The Neue Nationalgalerie was the last work of the internationally famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. With the museum's glass Upper Hall, he completed his longtime preoccupation with flowing, open space. The architect died shortly after the building was inaugurated. Thus, the New National Gallery, with its steel roof and reduced formal language, is not only an icon of modernism, but also the legacy of a visionary 20th-century master builder.

In terms of urban development, the museum was originally located on the edge of what was then West Berlin. Here it was built as an essential component of the Kulturforum planned by Hans Scharoun. The reunification of Germany and the new buildings at Potsdamer Platz gave the Neue Nationalgalerie its current eventful setting in the center of the city.

The history of the Neue Nationalgalerie is consequently closely linked to the division of Germany and the city of Berlin after the Second World War. The collection of the National Gallery, formerly founded on Berlin's Museum Island and in the 1920s also on display in the Kronprinzen-Palais on the boulevard Unter den Linden, was initially administered by the Magistrate of Greater Berlin after 1945. Due to the foundation of two German states with different political systems, the path of the collection was divided from 1949 on.

While the National Gallery building on Museum Island continued to be used in East Berlin, there was initially a lack of space in the West. From the end of the 1940s, the magistrate in West Berlin worked to rebuild the collection under the title "Gallery of the 20th Century". At the same time, parts of the National Gallery's original collection had remained in West Germany after the end of World War II and became the property of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, founded in 1957.