Phil Beard: berlin

Showing posts with label berlin. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 February 2026

Kino International Berlin

Opened in what was then East Berlin in1963 and part of the final phase of the westward extension of Karl-Marx-Allee concluding at Alexanderplatz, in which the Soviet wedding cake style was supplanted by something more contemporary. The cinema is a concrete framed construction designed by Josef Kaiser with a first floor box that projects forward to give the appearance of floating. The mostly glazed façade is only broken by a full height poster for the current film which by tradition is always hand-painted. On the other three sides of the box are stylised relief carvings moulded in concrete and designed to celebrate world peace and healthy outdoor pursuits. When complete, the capacity was an audience of 600. Eight rows of seats with the best sightlines and extra legroom were reserved for the use of weary party apparatchiks who could relax and stretch out their legs after a hard day’s labour ordering arrests and enforcing party discipline. It was a prestige project for the DDR and has remained in business since reunification. A two year closure for refurbishment began in May 2024 and reopening could be as early as the end of this month if all goes to plan.

Monday, 28 April 2025

Berlin - Die Weltstadt Im Licht

A beautifully printed and presented volume of recently rediscovered photographs of Weimar Berlin - the illuminated city by night. Taken between 1925 and 1932 by Martin Höhlig (1882 - 1948). Höhlig was a versatile Berlin based commercial photographer who built a career as an accomplished portrait photographer in the 1920s. An interest in architecture led him into architectural and urban photography and a key event in his development was the Berlin Im Licht week in October 1928 - a citywide festival of architectural illumination dominated by powerful commercial messages sponsored by AEG, Osram, Siemens, Bewag and Telefunken designed to tell the world how German industry was being transformed by electrical energy. Höhlig was engaged to record the event and published a series of albums that were issued as promotional items by all the sponsors which are the source of this selection of photos. The tonal balance and the framing of the images is perfect. In the Third Reich, Höhlig’s career went into decline - as an affiliate photographer to the Association for the History of Berlin his membership was terminated in 1937 when Jewish members were expelled. Whether by resignation or expulsion is not known. After the war Höhlig found it impossible to rebuild his practice and he took his own life in 1948. His reputation as an outstanding recorder of interwar Berlin is now secure alongside others such as Sasha Stone, Marco von Bucovich, Willy Römer and Max Missmann.

For the traumatised war veterans desperate for work and the war weary public enduring rampant inflation and economic instability, the dazzle and glitter of decadent hedonism in Weimar Berlin was at best a remote and undignified spectacle and at worst a crude insult to public propriety. It would inspire the sense of popular resentment that opened the doors to the Nazis. When this blaze of luminescence was finally extinguished in 1939, the Nazified nation was propelled into 6 years of brutal conflict and genocide. Which adds another layer to the experience of viewing these photos. There’s the aesthetic pleasure from the inventive exuberance of the visual dynamics on show but there’s also the foreshadowing of the dark days ahead and the part that this version of Berlin played in the process.

ISBN: 9783 942115 865

Published by Bussert & Stadeler, 2019

Wednesday, 18 October 2023

Rundfahrten

The tour bus never goes away - every major city has fleets of these vehicles, usually open-topped, finished in garish colour combinations and accompanied by teams of outriders roaming the streets to sign up new customers. It’s sightseeing at its most basic, sit back and let the sights come to you. Seconds later your photos can be glowing on Instagram. In the interwar years the tradition was for a jobbing photographer to capture the tour bus and its passengers before its departure. Darkroom technicians would swiftly do their magic and sparkling prints would be sold to passengers on their return. The results were often surprisingly good considering the time pressure and as you might expect, these examples from German cities achieved a remarkable degree of definition.

We begin with the Berlin tour guide posed in front of the bus on the Unter Den Linden - like everyone else she squints into the glare of low autumnal sun. Hats, overcoats and furs offer protection from the cold, the date is October 6th. 1922. Most passengers make the effort to smile for the camera and have the air of belonging in upper income groups. A potential subversive loiters second from the right, his prominent facial hair indicative of a non-conformist nature. Moving on to Cologne in 1910 we meet a horse drawn charabanc outside the west doors of the cathedral. Uniformed staff in top hats are in charge and the group are perched high on upholstered benches. Not so many smiles in 1910 and some notably grumpy veiled faces. Three further examples from Cologne, all posed outside the cathedral and examples from Munich and Nuremberg complete the selection.

Monday, 9 October 2023

Art of Society 1900-1945, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

Z VIII, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy (1924)

Of all the paintings in this exhibition, this was the one that held my attention the longest. Its connection with the exhibition theme was not immediately obvious but it was a singular point of calm in a line-up of loud and assertive paintings demanding serious scrutiny. Looking at an abstract arrangement of related geometric forms in muted colours makes it own demands - principally that the viewer is prepared to accept its legitimacy as a work of art and not worry about the absence of figuration. While there’s not much of a case to be made for overlapping and intersecting semi-transparent shapes as windows into the human condition they can be a rich source of visual pleasure when choreographed with sensitivity and precision. All his career Moholy-Nagy was a restless experimenter and this is one of a series of related compositions painted in his second year of teaching at the Bauhaus where he replaced Johannes Itten who together with Paul Klee represented the spiritual tendency of the early years Bauhaus. Moholy-Nagy had no such tendencies and took full advantage of the opportunity to button himself into his boiler suit and get to work in his studio. This painting comes at the high point of his interest in Constructivism-inspired composition - he would continue to explore his favoured themes (transparency, asymmetry, dynamism, spatial ambiguity, transformation) in photography, collage, assemblage, typography and graphic design. Constructivists sought to integrate their practice into state-led programmes to advance social progress and eliminate inequality which finally connects us back to the exhibition theme.

Stadt, Otto Moller (1921)

Elsewhere in the exhibition, which was drawn from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, artists could be seen engaging with major themes - Weimar-era decadence, Prussian militarism, socialist utopianism, horrors of modern warfare, dehumanising labour. This is a personal selection of paintings that caught my eye - Expressionist paintings are given short shrift, ships, trams and trains keep turning up and there’s a bias towards unfamiliar (on my part) material. It was interesting to see so many disturbing visions of the not so distant past, a period whose first hand witnesses are almost all deceased. And a comfort in the sense that the visions of the artists who shared in the collective experience of the chain of catastrophes that stains the period under review, still have a part to play in the avoidance of a reprise.