Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
My recent fortnight in Berlin was replete with its usual share of artwalk splendors—the permanent display of room after room of paintings by the incomparable Adolph Menzel at the Alte Nationalgalerie (though actually not so incomparable as all that, Michael Fried in his book on the artist has suggested that Menzel was one of the three great masters of nineteenth century realism, being to Prussia what Courbet was to France and Eakins to the United States, which seems about right to me), and then opening night of the rapturous and rollicking retrospective of the Brazilian midcentury modernist Lygia Clark at the Neue Nationalgalerie—but for my money, the most surprising and splendid revelation and my own nominee for this month’s International Best in Show, was a little one-room jewelbox of an exhibit tucked into a side alcove at the Bode Museum at the very tip of the city’s Museuminsel. Focusing on Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History, it was presented as the museum’s contribution to the citywide commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War this past May, and under the exquisite curation of Neville Rowley, launched out from an evocation of the eminent Berlin flaneur/philosopher/historian/critic/theorist/rhapsode’s curious fascination with a tiny painting by his friend Paul Klee, which he himself owned, carrying it with him wherever he went into exile after 1933, though hiding it in the vaults of Paris’s Bibliotheque National alongside some final manuscripts, just as he was leaving there in 1940, with instructions that, should he himself not make it out alive, which as we know, tragically, he did not, the pieces should be passed along to his friend since childhood, the great Palestine-based historian of Kaballah, Gershom Scholem. (Scholem himself eventually contributed the Klee to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, from which it is on rare loan to this show.)
more here.
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