The city’s honeyed art history comes alive again with the recent public opening of the Collection Scharf-Gerstenberg, revamped to the tune of a cool 10 million Euros and on loan to Berlin for the next ten years.
Started by Otto Gerstenberg in Berlin circa 1910, the collection, housed in the former coach house of the Charlottenburg castle (later the temporary home of the Egyptian museum), consists of over 250 works of Surrealist and fantastical art. After Gerstenberg, director of German insurance company Victoria-Versicherung and passionate art enthusiast, died in 1935, grandsons Walter and Dieter Scharf further expanded the collection.
I must admit, I’m not a fan of Surrealism. I’ve long harbored a love-hate relationship with the works produced by artists traditionally labeled as Surrealists. But this exhibition starts with a bang: graphic cycles by Francisco de Goya and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, two artists not often categorized as Surrealists (mostly because they were working 115 and 175 years, respectively, before the Surrealists). Their works depict struggle and pain—both physical and emotional—and more generally, the physical reaction to emotional exhaustion. These themes point to the sur-real, or what can only be understood as the phenomenon of the real.
The first half of the collection, housed in the museum’s Marstall wing, also includes works with typical Surrealist and Symbolist vocabulary. Odilon Redon’s floating heads and Pegasus begin to hint at what the collection and the history of Surrealist art (the exhibition is essentially in chronological order) have in store. Don’t miss Rodolphe Bresdin’s print titled Mother and Time (1857), an amazing but disturbing piece illustrating the fate of time; a young mother with child at breast juxtaposed against a skeletal figure sharing the shade of a tree strikes an ephemeral chord.
The exhibition and collection create a fascinating lens through which to understand the Surreal, even for a skeptic like myself. Gerstenberg nursed a clear affinity for collecting cycles; perhaps for the collector, the Surreal was a process of becoming—of storytelling and of spiritual evolution.
In the following room are two rare cycles: Edouard Manet’s illustrations (which are playful yet heavy-handed, in typical Manet fashion, but stylistically quite different than his more well-known work) of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven (1875) and Max Klinger’s eerie and fanciful etchings, Fantasies upon the Finding of a Glove (1878). Continuing upstairs, the themes of pain, death, and the space between body and soul are quite apparent in James Ensor’s haunting Triumph of Death (1896).
At this point, one begins to feel the inevitable museum-fatigue, sitting down at every available bench and wondering, perhaps hopefully, if the coming room is the last. Perhaps that’s why the curators smartly placed a wonderful pick-me-up: two rooms of unbelievable Hans Bellmer drawings, prints, and handmade books. While some pieces were stronger than others, the latter rooms could have been freestanding exhibitions by themselves alone.
It is here that I found myself so pleased with the exhibition and the curators’ choice of ending that I was ready to head to the museum café for the milchkaffee I had promised myself earlier. But wait! There’s a whole other wing full of the classics! Ah well. My head already swirly-hazy with content, the unexplored wing just meant another trek back to the Surrealist mecca was warranted.
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