Galerie Neue Meister

Dresden's gallery of newer masters fills the upper floors of the Albertinum, a former arsenal by the Elbe, and it carries German painting from Romanticism to the present. Its heart is Caspar David Friedrich, the Dresden Romantic who made landscape into a kind of religion.

His Two Men Contemplating the Moon hangs here, two figures in old German coats with their backs to us, staring at a moon over a dead oak, a picture that has fixed how people imagine German Romanticism ever since. Nearby the mood turns dark with Otto Dix's War, a huge folded altarpiece of the Western Front's corpses and mud that Dix painted in Dresden in the late 1920s, having survived the trenches himself.

In 2002 the Elbe flooded and water reached the Albertinum's stores. The city rebuilt the museum with its depots lifted high above the river, floating in a new steel structure over the old courtyard, so the next flood would find the paintings out of reach.