Altes Museum presents the special exhibition for the anniversary “200 years of Museum Island” from July 9, 2025. The history of the world-famous Museum Island began on July 9, 1825, when the foundation stone was laid for the museum designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Berlin’s Lustgarten. Just five years later, on August 3, 1830, the Altes Museum was opened as the first public museum in Berlin and Prussia. The building with its monumental columned hall quickly developed into a crowd-puller and an important institution for basic archaeological research to this day.
The special exhibition on the upper floor of the building provides exciting insights into the beginnings of the museum and shows a selection of antiquities that were already on display when it opened in 1830.
Image above: View of the exhibition rooms of the Altes Museum, ca. 1906/07; Berlin State Museums, Central Archive.
At the center of the exhibition is a large-scale model of the museum, which illustrates Schinkel’s architecture, now one of the major works of German classicism. The exhibition sheds light not only on Schinkel’s architectural challenges and innovative solutions, but also on the social climate in which the museum was created. Visitors will get to know exhibition rooms that looked very different when they opened in 1830 and were almost completely destroyed during the Second World War. Only a few pictorial representations from the museum’s founding period and historical photographs from the later 19th century give an idea of this.
The Altes Museum marks a turning point in the architectural history of public buildings for art: for the first time ever, a building was designed specifically as a pure art museum. Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s building became the model for museums par excellence. While the ground floor housed small antique works of art – in particular vases, bronzes, terracottas, gems, cameos and coins – the main floor with the rotunda was dedicated to antique – primarily Roman – sculptures and the upper floor to the royal picture gallery. For reasons of content and conservation, the latter can only play a minor role in our exhibition, but will be prominently featured in a major anniversary exhibition planned for 2030 in the James-Simon-Galerie.
Schinkel faced major technical and financial challenges when building the museum. Around 3,000 pine piles had to be driven into the ground for the foundation. The Prussian King Frederick William III demanded extreme economy, so that innovative and at the same time cost-effective solutions had to be developed.
The museum was opened at a time when the bourgeoisie was on the rise and new educational ideals were being propagated. The public demanded freely accessible opportunities to view art, and Frederick William III promoted this idea for the education of his subjects. The museum quickly became a popular destination for educated middle-class society far beyond Prussia. But how open to the public was it really? Which groups of visitors flocked to the museum and which works of art particularly fascinated them?
With sculptures, vases, bronzes and terracottas, the special exhibition shows a cross-section of the works of art that were already on display in the first presentation of the Altes Museum and which continue to inspire today. At the same time, the exhibition is not conceived purely as a retrospective, but also takes a look into the future and thus into the time in which a general renovation of the Altes Museum urgently needs to be undertaken. The public is asked: How must the museum continue to develop in order to inspire future generations with the art of antiquity?
The exhibition is being curated by Angelika Walther, current scientific museum assistant, in collaboration with the Director of the Collection of Classical Antiquities, Andreas Scholl, and Moritz Taschner, research assistant at the Collection of Classical Antiquities. In addition to other colleagues involved, the project benefits from the profound expertise of Elsa van Wezel, who has researched and published extensively on the early history of the Altes und Neues Museum.
WHEN?
Opening: Wednesday, July 9, 2025, 7:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Wednesday, July 9, 2025 until Sunday, May 3, 2026
Opening hours: Wed – Sun 10 am – 5 pm
WHERE?
Museum Island Berlin, Altes Museum
Am Lustgarten
10178 Berlin
COST?
Altes Museum
Regular: 14 EUR
Reduced: 7 EUR
Museum Island + Panorama
Regular: 24 EUR
Reduced: 12 EUR
