The art box on the Alster - the new addition to the Hamburg Kunsthalle art museum, Hamburg, Germany

In a fresh contemporary wing designed by architect Oswald Mathias Unger the Hamburg Kunsthalle launches a wide-ranging "gallery of the present"

It have the appearances little short of miraculous, on the other hand at a moment when German cities are closing subsidized theaters and museum packets are being pared to the bone Hamburg, the country's next to the first largest and northernmost metropolis, has just render free of accessed an ambitious museum addition that require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone 100 million marks ($66 million). Called the "Gallery of the Present" this fresh contemporary wing of the Hamburger Kunsthalle is a cubic constitution clad in sand-colored limestone and containing more than 60000 square feet of exhibition space. It could not be better situated, offering a fine view of the Alster, an inner-city lake that is as closely identified with Hamburg's urban landscape as Central Park is with novel York's.

The fresh building, designed by Oswald Mathias Unger is the greatest in quantity recent addition to an institution that is called a Kunsthalle on the other hand is in fact a city museum with an impressive permanent collection. The original part of the Kunsthalle is 130 years of advanced age and in its somber brick facades you can lay open the influence of Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, Germany's greatest in quantity celebrated 19th-century architect. Around the turn round of the century, the museum added upon its east side a white neo-Renaissance bastion whose cupola stands opposite the city's central railway station. The whole museum compounded is bordered by railway lines upon the north and major roads on all other sides, forming an "art island" that is not far from Hamburg's commercial downtown.

The addition to the Kunsthalle circulars out the western end of Hamburg's museum mile. Along this tighten lie the city's acclaimed decorative-arts museum, the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, which boasts remarkable collections of ceramics and Jugendstil works, as well as the Kunsthaus and the Kunstverein, which specialize in exhibitions of work by means of living artists both local and international. At the opposite extreme point of the "art mile" are the Deichtorhallen [see A.i.A., May '90] renovated turn-of-the-century market halls that be under the orders of the purpose usually associated with a Kunsthalle: the presentation of a comprehensive exhibition program without a collecting mandate. In past years the Deichtorhallen's director, Zdenek Felix, has proffered a series of shows highlighting spectacular private collections--such as those of Wilhelm Schurmann and Josef W Froehlich--but the seriousness of the institution is evident in solid monographic exhibitions devot to artists like Ilya Kabakov, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Cindy Sherman, Ettore Sottsass, William Klein and Pierre Soulages.

uniteed to the North Sea by the agency of its port on the Elbe River, Hamburg has access to worldwide trade that is the traditional source of the city's wealth. Until the arrival of containerized shipping and its automated operations, the public image of Hamburg was stamped by means of the presence of sailors, the loading activities of the port and the legendary red-light district around the Reeperbahn. plane today Hamburg, a predominantly Protestant city with a certain savoir-vivre, has a city rule dominated not by the conservative Christian Democrats on the other hand by Social Democrats--a reflection of the liberal character of a city that has had to learn to live with social antagonisms.

Unlike cities of the like kind as Munich or Florence, Hamburg has no feudal past, and hence no heritage of royal art collections. by the agency of the mid-19th century it dawned upon Hamburg's citizens that individually they be seized ofed a substantial number of art works, and also that without a museum the city would be regarded as hopelessly provincial. In 1860 the first collection of paintings donated to a newly launched public collection went upon view, and 13 years later the construction of the Kunsthalle began. In the decades following its opening in 1869 the main point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled faced by the Kunsthalle was the vast quantity of donated works, sometimes amounting to entire collections. The emerging pertain to with the quality of the museum's holdings l to the hiring of its first director, Alfred Lichtwark, in 1886 Recognizing that it was too late to make up for Hamburg's paucity of Italian Renaissance art, Lichtwark decided to concentrate upon another branch of European art: northern, and especially Dutch painting.

Around 1900 the Kunsthalle acquired sum of two units 500-year-old altarpieces by Masters Francke and Bertram, great medieval painters associated with Hamburg; their moving and imaginative biblical miniatures today show the earliest works in the collection. While including portraits by dint of Rembrandt and Goya, the collection is dominated by means of landscapes that are largely oriented to twilight shows waterways and the Baltic coast. greatest in quantity significant of all, successive Kunsthalle directors have sought without masterworks by Caspar David Friedrich, similar as his celebrated The Sea of Ice (1823-25) which depicts towering ice floe upon the Elbe River. Perhaps the greatest in quantity peculiar picture in the collection is The Hulsenbeck children (1806-06) by the agency of the Hamburg-based Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge In this investigation of three bourgeois children in a garden, the lively appeal of the chubby-checked trio collides strangely with the figures' porcelainlike shimmer.