Dahlem Museums

Dutch and Flemish paintings of particular importance in the Dahlem Museum Picture Gallery are the Rembrandts, including "The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and his Wife" 1641, "Susanna and the Two Old People" 1647, "Hendrickje Stoffels" and the "Man with a Golden Helmet" (attributed to Rembrandt or a member of his circle). There are also well-known works by Gerard ter Borch, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Brueghel the Elder, Van Cleve, Van Dyck, Van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Frans Hals, Lucas van Leyden, Hans Memling, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean Fouquet, Rogier van der Weyden and others.

The English paintings department in the Dahlem Museum's Picture Gallery is being fitted out. Artists include Thomas Gainsborough ("Portrait of an Old Lady"), Joshua Reynolds ("George Clive and Family"), Thomas Lawrence, John Hopper and Raeburn.

French paintings of particular importance in the Dahlem Museum Picture Gallery are three works by Poussin, a landscape by Claude Lorrain and pictures by George de la Tour and the Le Nain brothers (17th century). There are also works by 18th century artists including Antoine Pesne, Jean Restout and Antoine Watteau.

German paintings in the Dahlem Museum Picture Gallery feature eight works by Dürer, including the "Virgin with the Song-Bird," the "Young Woman from Vienna" and the famous portraits of Hieronymus Bosch and Jacob Muffel. There are also works by Albrecht Altdorfer, Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein the Younger.

Notable among works by Italian masters in the Dahlem Museum Picture Gallery are paintings by Bellini, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Carracci, Giotto, Filippo Lippi, Passerotti, Pollaiuolo, Raphael, Tiepolo and Titian.

Opened in 1970, the collection of the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin's Dahlem Museums complex covers the art of China, Korea and Japan from 3000 B.C. to the present day, including bronzes, ceramics, painting, woodcuts, sculpture, lacquer work, jade, grave furnishings and small sculptures (including 63 Chinese bronze mirrors, sixth-ninth C.; the throne of a Chinese emperor, 17th C.). The emphasis is on Chinese and Japanese mother-of-pearl inlay, colored lacquer work and East Asian wood carving. The museum of East Asian Art in Dahlem is complemented by a similar one in the Pergamon Museum.

The Museum of Ethnography in Berlin's Dahlem Museums complex takes a leading place among the ethnographic museums of Europe. Owing to shortage of space it can exhibit only a proportion of its stock, though what is on show is excellently presented.

The museum possesses almost 400,000 items of ethnographica and 60,000 sound-recordings of ethnological music from all parts of the world, covering ancient America (ground floor), the South Seas (ground and upper floors), Africa (upper floor), Asia (upper and top floors) and Australia.

Worthy of special mention are the terra-cotta sculptures from Ife in Western Nigeria (10th-13th C.), the Benin bronzes, which came to Europe after the town was taken by the British in 1897, the "Gold Chest" with items from Colombia, Costa Rica and Peru (including sacrificial shawls belonging to the Incas of Old Peru), the Boat Hall, South Asiatic masks, marionettes and shadow games and the hall displaying native huts from Polynesia, Micronesia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and New Zealand (including a royal cloak from Hawaii and ceremonial mourning from Tahiti).

During the nineties the Dahlem Ethnographic Museum in Berlin will again provide a home for some 45,000 exhibits from the remains of the old Berlin Ethnographic Museum (founded in 1873) which until the end of the Second World War was situated in Stresemannstrasse. Part of the collections have been in the Leipzig Ethnograhic Museum since 1978. Items to be transferred to the Dahlem museum will include totem poles from the West Coast of America, 26 bronze panels from present-day Benin and two Indian masks.

The Museum of Indian Art in Berlin's Dahlem Museums complex displays a unique range of material and should not be omitted in a visit to the Dahlem Museums. It is devoted to the art of India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Central Asia and includes, bronzes, woodcarving, painting, sculpture in stone, applied arts, frescoes and early Sanskrit manuscripts, a Turfan collection with wall-paintings, small sculptures and finds from Buddhist caves and open-air temples in Chinese Turkmenistan, dating from the fifth-10th C.

The Museum of Islamic Art, housed on the upper floor of the Dahlem Museums complex in Berlin, was founded in 1904 by Wilhelm von Bode and soon became the leading museum of its kind outside the Muslim world. The nucleus of the collection, which was split up during the Second World War, is now to be found in the Pergamon Museum on Museum Island.

The Dahlem Museum contains sculpture and applied art from the beginning of the Islamic period (eighth C.), to the 18th C., covering not only the Muslim countries of the East but also India and Spain. The exhibits include metalwork, pottery, glass, knotted carpets, miniatures, fabrics, small items of furniture and books. These include a Holbein and Lotto carpet, 16th C., an embellished copy of the Koran and prayer niches, 16th C., Iranian stoneware, 14th C. and a Persian ceiling-painting, 1846.

The Picture Gallery in Berlin's Dahlem Museums complex, with a collection of European painting of all schools from the Middle Ages (13th C. panel-painting) to the Neo-Classical period, is housed on the ground and upper floors. The nucleus of the gallery was provided by the royal collections, considerably enlarged in the 20th C. In spite of heavy losses during the Second World War it still offers an excellent survey of European painting up to the end of the 19th C.

The important collection of the Print and Engraving Cabinet of the Dahlem Museums complex in Berlin includes wood-cuts, etchings, engravings and lithographs of all European schools of the 15th-18th C., drawings (mainly 15th and 16th C. German masters), illustrated books and prints of the 15th-20th C. (including those by Dürer, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kirchner, Beckmann, Picasso, Giacometti and Kelly), incunabula, miniatures, individual pages and heraldic records. The principal items are Old German and Dutch drawings and prints (by Dürer, Grünewald, Holbein, Altdorfer, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Rubens and others).

Items not on display can be seen in the study rooms. The Print and Engraving Cabinet also has an extensive photographic archive, including photos of items in other galleries and collections.

The collection of the Sculpture Gallery in Berlin's Dahlem Museums complex is displayed on the ground and upper floors and contains masterpieces of Western art from the Early Christian and Byzantine periods to the early 19th C. It includes icons, glass, textiles and goldsmith's work, bronzes, ivories and wood-carving of the third-seventh C., Italian and Spanish sculpture (Bernini, Donatello, von Leyden, Luca della Robbia, Rossellino, Sansovino, etc.) and works by Multscher, Riemenschneider, Münstermann, Bouchardon and other German and French sculptors.

More sculptures are on display in the Bode Museum.

Spanish paintings of particular importance in the Dahlem Museum Picture Gallery are El Greco's "Mater Dolorosa" as well as pictures by Goya, Velázquez ("Portrait of a Lady"), Murillo ("Baptism of Christ") and Zurbarán ("Portrait of Alonso Verdugo").