After 12 Years in Charge of Berlin’s Top Art Museums, Power Director Udo Kittelmann Is Stepping Down

After 12 years at the helm of Berlin’s top museum group, Udo
Kittelmann has announced that he is stepping down next year. One of
the most influential museum leaders in Europe, Kittelmann is
credited with making the state museum galleries into bigger players
on the international stage. Unusual for a director overseeing five
institutions, he has continued to curate high-profile exhibitions
in Berlin and beyond.

“Udo Kittelmann has made the Nationalgalerie a global player
both nationally and internationally,” said the president of the
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hermann Parzinger, in a
statement. “His extraordinary curatorial skills, his passion for
art, and his unmistakable sense for interesting positions will
certainly continue to amaze us in other places,” Parzinger
predicted. Kittelmann’s work “will last beyond the day of his
farewell,” he added.

Kittelmann has not revealed why he has decided to leave when his
current contract expires at the end of October, 2020. After
Kittleman steps down, Joachim Jäger will take over the interim
management of Berlin’s state art museums until a successor is
found.

As the director of the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin, Kittelmann is in charge of the most prestigious state art
museums in the German capital: the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old
National Gallery), Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), the
Hamburger
Bahnhof, the Museum für Gegenwart –
Berlin, which is a museum for contemporary art housed in a
former railway station, plus the Berggruen Museum, the Sammlung
Scharf-Gerstenberg (Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection), as well as the
Friedrichswerdersche Church.

Born in Dusseldorf in 1958, Kittelmann got his start as a
curator in the late 1980s, after a brief stint as an optician. From
1994 to 2001, he was the director of the Kunstverein in Cologne. He
was the curator of the German Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale
when the artist Gregor Schneider’s “Totes Haus Ur” (Dead House) won
the Golden Lion prize. Before moving to Berlin in 2008,
Kittelmann was the director of the prestigious Museum für Moderne
Kunst in Frankfurt am Main.

Since 2015, he has also been overseeing the estimated €101
million ($112 million) renovation of the Mies van der Rohe-designed
Neue Nationalgalerie by the British architect David Chipperfield.
The project is due to be completed in 2020. It is unclear whether
this will be before or after Kittelmann’s departure.

Kittelmann’s time at the Nationalgalerie has also been marked by
unconventional exhibitions. His list of accomplishments includes
the group show “Hello World. Revising a Collection,” which signaled
a departure from the Nationalgalerie’s predominantly Western focus.
Last year, he organized a Mary Heilmann and David Reed exhibition
at the Hamburger Bahnhof, featuring the artists’ paintings paired
directly side-by-side. “He makes art out of other people’s art
because his curatorial moves are really things that we wouldn’t
have thought of,” Mary Heilmann said of Kittelmann, according to
Art Review.

This year, Kittelmann organized a Rudolf Stingel survey as a
guest curator at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, which runs
through to October 10.

The Hamburger Bahnof’s current exhibition “Emil Nolde. A German
Legend. The Artist during the Nazi Regime” has been a popular and
critical success. The revisionist take on the German painter, whose
work was condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazis, acknowledges how
after World War II Nolde successfully played down his early support
of National Socialism.

The post After 12 Years in Charge of Berlin’s Top Art
Museums, Power Director Udo Kittelmann Is Stepping Down
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