Reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace: Stadtschloss Berlin, wherefore art thou?

Museum Island – the island of grand architecture, remarkable artworks and astonishing exhibits––stands incomplete before us today. It is impossible to miss it: the hole in the center of Berlin, surrounded by the city’s greatest and widely known museums; the place where the Berlin City Palace (Stadtschloss Berlin) once stood. 580 years after its cornerstone

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Weekly museum visits

Each semester, ECLA of Bard offers the course Berlin: Experiment in Modernity. Just like the ECLA BA students have a mandatory core course each semester, this Berlin–themed class is the core component for the exchange students enrolled in the Bard in Berlin program. However, all ECLA students have the possibility to take it. Furthermore, students

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Revealing What’s Hidden

It was quickly decided by public decree that Leonardo would be given some beautiful work to paint, and Leonardo was thus commissioned to do the hall.” – Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists All over the world, art historians’ minds are divided concerning a recent discovery in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. The main hall, covered in

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The Immeasurable Weight of the Void

On Friday 21 October at the Brücke Museum in Berlin, ECLA faculty member Aya Soika presented, in collaboration with the executors of his estate, her catalogue of and commentary upon the work of Max Pechstein. The results were no light production. Weighing in at 8.4 kilograms, with 1188 pages and 1340 illustrations, the labour-intensive project

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Annual Conference: Whose Is That Wall?

The very first event of the Annual Conference 2009 materialized with the support of ECLA art history faculty Aya Soika and addressed one of the many features of Berlin that I find particularly fascinating –the ubiquitous street art. I became a discoverer of street art when I saw that familiar cities ‘back home’ were no longer

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