The Bröhan Museum is an unusually rich collection of Art Nouveau furniture, glass and other objects, almost all collected by a man whose collecting interest starting in the 1960s has given Berlin two important museums.
At the entrance, a first taste of the style within in the lettering
Not bad for the man whose words on the Bröhan’s walls state a unique view:
The collection is heavy in furniture, an important part of the style’s popularity in Berlin; after all, you could redecorate in the latest style without having to build a new home. The collection is actually much larger than what’s on display; pieces rotate from time to time, and some of the not-on-display is even visible in a series of open-storage rooms.
Bröhan owned an (apparently successful) dental wholesale business that by the early 1960s allowed him to start collecting 18th-century porcelain from Berlin’s Royal Porcelain Manufactory; eventually his collection became the core of the porcelain collection at Charlottenburg Palace Park.
Buffets by Peter Behrens, 1902; Campbell & Pullich, 1908
and Hector Guimard, 1899
By the mid-1960s, he shifted his focus to the then-largely-forgotten Art Nouveau that had been all the rage in Berlin early in the century. In his words, “I realized that in the era around 1900 lay a hardly-known treasure only waiting to be discovered.” He quickly set about changing that.
China display cabinets by Bruno Paul, 1910; Eugene Galliard, 1900;
and Louis Majorelle, 1898, with an inlay of a flock of geese
By 1973, he had bought a house in the Dahlem district to house a museum of his finds. On his 60th birthday, in 1981, he gave his collection to the city, which moved the museum to its current location, a former barracks for guards of the Charlottenburg Palace.
Brohan himself served as museum director until his death in 2000, and his wife, an art historian, took over until her death in 2003.
An unusual clock, a 1906 Josef Hoffmann cradle, a grand mirror
by Roger Galliard and ‘dolphin’ etagere by Emile Gallé
Officially speaking, the museum’s remit includes Art Deco, Functionalism and the Berlin Secession art movement as well, but the heart and focus is Art Nouveau.
Chairs occupy a prominent place in the displays, including some that illustrate a tension point in Art Nouveau: On the one hand, it was intended to evoke hand craftsmanship and some of the spirit of William Morris; on the other hand it was of an era of new materials and production for the many. The chair above, by Richard Riemerschmid, was a product of the “machine furniture program” of the Dresden Workshops for Craftsmanship (Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst).
It’s clear from the chairs alone how much variation can be found within the style we loosely call Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil; all have moved away from the heavy forms of what we often call Victorian furniture, but while some embody the curves and angles that mark other aspects of Art Nouveau, others are relatively rectilinear, and few carry the myth-and-nature decor that’s common on buildings and artwork.
That aspect of Art Nouveau shows more clearly in the glass and decorative work in the collection, some of it showing the influence of ‘Japanism,’ a fascination at the time with art and culture newly introduced to Europe.
A special section is devoted to work by the French master of Art Nouveau, Hector Guimard, including pieces of a railing from his iconic designs for the entrances of the Paris Metro.
Art Deco and other movements have their space at the museum, but it is a much smaller collection, and with much less interpretation; nevertheless, I wish now I had taken more time with it. Some fabulous pieces are on display.
