AnalysisFrom the archive
The demolition of the Berlin Wall had immediate effects on German life. But how did it affect artists?
By far the most comprehensive artistic testimony were paintings in what immediately became known as the East Side Gallery
AnalysisFrom the archive
Throughout the Cold War Berlin’s museums quietly kept in touch—when the Wall came down, they embraced
This archive article, taken from our feature looking back at the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years later, shows how German culture remained linked when politics broke down
ReviewBooks
How Rheims Cathedral's destruction in the First World War had a happy ending
New book explores how the burnt cathedral created a 'profound intellectual rift' between Germany and France, then reconciliation
ReviewBooks
A monumental study of the heyday of Historicist painting
This comprehensive volume looks at a genre popular in 19th-century Europe but long scorned in the art world
ReviewBooks
Many pictures but no big picture: book struggles to capture the extraordinary life of Harald Szeemann
Volume on pioneering curator takes an admiring, rather than a critically analytical, approach
News
How Uffizi 'super-director' Eike Schmidt transformed Florence's tourist magnet
The museum's first foreign leader is halfway through his tenure and heading to Vienna in 2019
NewsBooks
The very first Monuments Man
Alexandre Lenoir, the founder of the Musée des Monuments Français
NewsReview
Forgotten history: Bernhard Schulz on contemporary art museum in Berlin after the war
NewsReview
Short, sharp—and funny: Bernhard Schulz on Adolph Menzel
To mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, a book celebrates Adolph Menzel as the “painter of modern life”
NewsObituaries
Hilla Becher, a photographer who stripped personal style from images of Industrial Age machine structures
Is it possible to imagine a blast furnace or a gas holder any other way than as the Bechers saw it—set against a blank and cloudless light-grey sky?
ArchiveBooks
Lost libraries and broken Buddhas: war, iconoclasm and social media
The history of cultural destruction as a propaganda tool
ArchiveKazimir Malevich
It's complicated: Tate on Kazimir Malevich and the West
As a touring show opens at Tate Modern, is a rounded picture finally emerging?
ArchiveExhibitions
National Portrait Gallery joins a season of shows marking the centenary of the Great War
Our pick of the exhibitions commemorating the First World War
ArchiveJoseph Beuys
The scholarly battle over Beuys
Let’s admit it: without the artist to explain and animate his work, much of it is incomprehensible
ArchiveBooks
Books: The saviour of the Warburg Institute
Alongside Warburg, there was no room for Fritz Saxl to be anything other than his most faithful assistant
ArchiveBooks
Books: How Warburg helped to invent the exhibition—and the curator
The art historian’s collected writings include an illuminating essay drawn from his dazzling, lengthy lectures
ArchiveMuseums
Berlin’s museums are still suffering from the effects of World War II and forty years of Communism
British architect David Chipperfield has pacified both conservatives and progressives with his masterplan for the Museum Island which links the museums by underground tunnels