Neue Nationalgalerie – Design & Culture by Ed

Anthony Vaccarello took Saint Laurent to Berlin, the city of Lydia Tár and Helmut Newton. The first signs as to where the designer was going with his spring-summer 2024 men’s show – a miracle of impressive tailoring broad in the shoulders and attenuated in the legs, interspersed with yet more shoulders, nakedly fragile this time, framed by gossamer silk or chiffon sleeveless shirting – was to be found on Instagram. A brief clip of the 1950 French short film, Un Chant d’Amour, a grainy black and white ode to sensuality as much to criminality, and directed by the writer Jean Genet, delivered the first vibes. Vaccarello also mentioned the name of the collection: Each Man Kills the Things He Loves. The title was, by way of Oscar Wilde, the song sung by Jeanne Moreau in a movie adaptation of one of the French writer’s great novels, Querelle de Brest. It was later filmed in 1982 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder simply as Querelle. Et voila, there you have it: Moreau, an icon of the French nouvelle vague, as Parisian as, well, Yves Saint Laurent, and Fassbinder, one of Berlin’s most legendary directors, a man who knew a thing or two about dissonant sexuality and the power between men and women as much as, well, again, Saint Laurent.

Still, what Vaccarello showed this Monday was far, far more than a clue-laden trail of reference A to B. He himself might have Berlin as part of his own personal landscape of the past – as a student in Brussels back in the day, he would hit the city’s still-going-at-noon-the-next-day nightclubs – but in many respects, this impressive and assured outing wasn’t only about the city. While there might be deft and nimble references to each locale, with each carrying a certain resonance in the YSL universe, this was, once again, Vaccarello in superbly rigorous mode, an approach echoed by his choice of venue, the structural precision of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie (my favourite museum in Berlin!). “When you leave the show, I want you to have the silhouette clearly in your head,” he said backstage. In other words, it’s a design approach that’s thoughtful, concise, and intent on stripping away the fuss to the perfect distillation of 50 looks, exploring – and what could be more YSL than this? – the exquisite tension between tailleur, aka suiting, and flou, all that light-as-air, fluid, sensual soft dressing, of which there was plenty in this men’s show. The exchange between his women’s and his men’s played out in delicate slipper satin tanks with deep décolletés under swaggering jackets, the matching pants cut high and narrow at the waist (ooof: breathe in!) and sliced at the ankles to show off high chunky-heeled boots. In leopard spots or polka dots (two recurring leitmotifs here) as sensually wrapped shirts or as one-shouldered tops, their bow-tie necklines trailing southwards like veils. And in prosaic black sweatshirting transformed into couture-y evening looks, draped to slide off the shoulders, with a new laidback version of smoking pants. An honorable mention too to the myriad sublime tuxedos that opened and closed this show. They also followed the impressively shouldered and roomy line of his jackets and the narrowness of the trousers. With their bow ties and high-collared shirts, and distinctly androgyne chic, they gave a bit of a Tár vibe.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is dedicated to 20th century art – and the place itself is an artwork. The museum is the last major project completed by the internationally famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. His long-term preoccupation with creating fluid, open spaces culminated in the design of the glazed upper pavilion of the gallery. With its steel roof and gracefully austere architectural language, the Neue Nationalgalerie not only stands as an icon of modernism, but as testament to a visionary architect. The history of the Neue Nationalgalerie is inextricably linked to the political division of Germany and the city of Berlin that was a consequence of the Second World War. The Nationalgalerie’s collection, originally on display on the Museumsinsel (Berlin’s Museum Island) and later, in the 1920s, also in the Kronprinzen Palais on the boulevard Unter den Linden, was initially managed by the Municipality of Greater Berlin in the immediate post-war years. The founding in 1949 of two German states, with opposed political systems and differing ideologies concerning art and its role in society, marked the end of a unified collection. While the East Berlin Nationalgalerie could stay in its original building (following repairs), in West Berlin there was initially no dedicated space for the collection. Beginning in the late 1940s, the West Berlin authorities took strides to rebuild the collection by setting up a “Gallery of the 20th Century.” Further to this, part of the National Gallery’s original collection of nineteenth-century artwork, found in West Germany after the war, was absorbed the newly established Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation). As these two art collections were to be united, in 1962 Mies van der Rohe was commissioned to design a new museum building to house them both. In September 1965, the architect came to Berlin for the laying of the foundation stone. Two years later he also personally attended the most spectacular construction stage: the hydraulic raising into place of the gigantic steel roof. The building was opened on 15 September 1968 and bore the name Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery). Its name signalled the idea of departing from the old and beginning a new chapter – the cultural rebirth of West Berlin.

The building’s architectural structure has remained virtually unchanged ever since. But the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie is on-goingly re-visited. It brings together an array of key artworks from the twentieth century by various artists from Europe and North America, including Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Rebecca Horn, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Lotte Laserstein, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol. Among the Neue Nationalgalerie’s most famous and iconic works are “Potsdamer Platz” by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “The Skat Players” by Otto Dix, and “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV” by Barnett Newman. If you’re in Berlin, make sure to visit this amazing place. Plus, the site-specific text installation by Barbara Kruger in the iconic, upper-level hall is on until the end of August!

Potsdamer Straße 50 / Berlin