The story
One of the strangest objects in the Neue Galerie in Kassel only works in the dark. It is a large transparency by Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter, painted on both sides of thin paper in the early 1830s. With light falling on the front, three figures in a boat glide toward a misty morning sun. Lit from behind, the mist clears and a moonlit night appears, with a town between mountain ridges. Transparencies like this had spread across Europe from England around 1780, and this one has been in Kassel since 1957.
The building around it was made for older art. It went up between 1871 and 1877 as the picture gallery for the Old Masters gathered by Landgrave William the Eighth of Hesse-Kassel, an 18th-century ruler of the city, Rembrandt among them. Firebombing in 1943 gutted the interior. When it reopened in 1976 as the Neue Galerie, the Old Masters had moved to Wilhelmshöhe Palace, and the rooms were given to art from 1750 onward.
That range starts with the Tischbein family of painters, runs through German Impressionists such as Lovis Corinth, and reaches documenta, the exhibition of contemporary art held in Kassel every five years. Among the later works is The Pack by Joseph Beuys, a Volkswagen bus with a line of sledges spilling out of the back, each carrying felt, fat and a torch.
