Berlin museum to sideline old masters

The cultural ministers of Berlin's Gemäldegalerie have generated a storm of criticism from art historians and the public as a result of their decision to place in storage one of Europe's great museum collections of traditional paintings, replacing them with a donated collection of fauvism and surrealism.


The 3,000 heritage works include Giotto, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Canaletto, Lucas Cranach, Rogier van der Weyden and Rembrandt. The plan calls for relocating the old masters into a smaller, temporary space, where only a fraction of the works will be accessible to scholars and the public, and where no funding is yet in place to build a new exhibit space.

The Gemäldegalerie's 72-room museum space will be cleared to make room for an offered gift of twentieth century works. The donor, Heiner Pietzsch, who made his fortune in wholesale synthetics, placed the condition that all the works in his bequest must always be on public view.

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Article on the subject by Christian Schlierkam in Epoch Times

Photo from "What to See in Berlin"
Article in the Guardian "Berlin plan for Old Masters to give way to modern art angers historians"
Gemäldegalerie on Wikipedia 
Thanks, Christian!