Leseprobe

27 director 1872–1908) assumed its directorship in 1872. In the face of the successful development of the newly founded institution, the Prussian government declared on April 30, 1872 that it intended to finance the construction of a building in Berlin for the Deutsches Gewerbe-Museum. 1873–1881 FORMER BUILDINGS OF THE ROYAL PORCELAIN MANUFACTORY – GROWTH IN THE PROVISIONAL DOMICILE In 1872, the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Commerce initially allocated two buildings erected around 1770 as production halls for the Royal Porcelain Manufactory (KPM) on a temporary basis to the Deutsches Gewerbe-Museum. While they were located on the property at Leipziger Straße 4, the entrance was situated on Königgrätzer Straße 120 (the present-day Stresemannstraße) (fig. 2). The site on which the new museum structure would indeed be built after 1877 was located nearby. The dilapidated KPM build­ ings had to be extensively renovated for their provisional use before the museum could move into them in May and June 1873. The teaching institute as well as the storage spaces occupied one of the halls entirely, the second on the ground floor. The exhibition spaces comprised 17 rooms with an area of 1,752 square metres on the upper floor of the eastern building. Large parts of the rapidly growing collection, however, had to be put into storage. The assumption of a major share of the financial burden by the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Commerce as of January 1, 1873 led to a reconstitution of the property situation of the Deutsches Gewerbe-Museum. The state attained priority over the private shareholders on the corporation’s board. The assembly of a scientific technical collection planned in 1867 was now given up for good. In the words of Julius Lessing: “The primary purpose of the museum’s collection is to provide exemplary models for the domestic artisan trade. To this end, it is necessary to acquire the most eminent examples produced in this field at any time and in any country” (Festschrift 1881, 33). This conceptual reorientation of the museum’s function is evident in the transfer of responsibilities for it from the Ministry of Trade and Commerce to the Ministry of Educa­ tion and Cultural Affairs on April 1, 1879 and above all in the subsequent programmatic renaming of the institution, which now became known as the “Kunstgewerbe-Museum zu Berlin” (Museum of Decorative Arts). This was confirmed by royal decree on June 27, 1879. As a consequence of the state influence over the museum since 1873, the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs ceded to the collection that same year 4,000 works from the applied arts collection of Alexander von Minutoli (1806–1887), the trade department head in the town of Liegnitz (the present-day Legnica, Poland), which it had acquired in 1869. The state purchased the Lüneburg Coun­ cil Silver in 1874 and passed on this most important exist­ ent treasury of a German city council to the museum. Finally, approximately 6,500 works from the dissolved Kunstkammer of the Royal Museums were transferred to the Gewerbe-Museum on 29 November 1875. Rich holdings of textiles came to Berlin in 1875 from St. Mary’s Church, Danzig (Gdańsk) as well as shortly thereafter from the Cologne collection of Canon Alexander Schnütgen (1843– 1918). Over 1,140 examples of East Asian handicraft were acquired in 1879 from Max von Brandt (1835–1920), the imperial envoy in Japan. As opposed to the small assem­ blage of mostly contemporary patterns exhibited in the diorama, the museum attained a new, overwhelmingly art historically oriented dimension during the eight years it spent in its provisional domicile in the former KPM buildings. 1881–1921 THE MARTIN GROPIUS BUILDING – BECOMING A MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL RENOWN The plans for a new museum building existing since 1872 were single-mindedly pursued. After an initial project at the corner of Königgrätzer Straße and Prinz-Albrecht-Straße (the present-day Niederkirchnerstraße) could not be realized because of problems in preparing the building site, the cornerstone laying ceremony for the new museum building designed by Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden (1835– 1913) took place on April 23, 1877 at the site on Prinz- Albrecht-Straße 7, directly opposite the provisional domicile in the KPM buildings. Architecturally, the Gropius Building recalls Italian Renaissance palaces and seems to have deliberately taken Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s (1781–1841) Building Academy in Berlin as its starting point.