A cold, rainy day on the Museumsinsel in Berlin, ideal for visiting the Old National Gallery, home to the world’s best collection of German Romanticists, secessionists, and other ‘art princes’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interesting, in moving from Schinkel to Friedrich to Boecklin and Beckmann, to watch the transition into a modern, industrial state, and how the art of the period both captured and provided an escape from these enormous social and economic changes.
