The story
Edvard Munch painted Walther Rathenau in Berlin in 1907, a full-length portrait of the industrialist and art collector 15 years before he became Germany's foreign minister. The canvas belongs to the Stadtmuseum Berlin, the city's own history museum, yet since October 2022 it has hung at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin's museum of modern art, because the museum's main house is closed.
That house is the Märkisches Museum near the Spree, a brick complex by the city architect Ludwig Hoffmann, completed in 1908 and shut in 2023 for a renovation expected to run until about 2029. To keep its best modern paintings in view, the foundation lent 12 of them to the Berlinische Galerie, among them Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Nollendorfplatz of 1912, a busy Berlin square, and Max Liebermann's Boys Bathing from 1900.
The foundation was formed in 1995 by joining several separate city museums. Its other sites include the Nikolaikirche, one of Berlin's oldest churches, the Rococo Ephraim-Palais, the Biedermeier rooms of the Knoblauchhaus, and a reconstructed medieval village at Düppel. In 2026 the group adopted a shorter name for all of them, Berlin Museum.
