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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
She was the face of Picasso's Weeping Woman. But there was more to Dora Maar than a woman crushed
A notable surrealist photographer and painter in her own right, Dora Maar is best remembered for her eight-year relationship with Pablo Picasso. Often regarded as a muse to Picasso's genius, Maar modelled for many of the artist's anguished 'weeping women' portraits, painted while he created his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica. Yet, Paris-born Maar also painted Picasso, transforming him into her subject and similarly distorting his features. 'What most people also don't realise is that Maar was a radical, subversive and respected artist before she met Picasso,' says David Greenhalgh, the National Gallery of Australia's expert on international art. 'Her photography, her politics and her Surrealist provocations challenged Picasso.' Maar's artistic legacy is highlighted alongside Picasso's in the National Gallery of Australia's blockbuster Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/ Neue Nationalgalerie which runs until September. The exhibition draws from the extraordinary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who, after World War II, established a small gallery on Paris's Left Bank and collected avant-garde works. The exhibition will feature some 100 major works by six modern masters – Picasso, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. These will be shown with 75 works from the National Gallery's collection to demonstrate the revolutionaries' influence on Australia's leading artists. The exhibition notably features works by Maar, with whom Berggruen felt a particular affinity, perhaps due to his empathy for her tragic life and tumultuous, ultimately destructive relationship with Picasso. 'She never quite recovered from her separation with Picasso, and turned away from her great talent as a photographer and a painter,' Berggruen's son Nicolas says. Long-overdue credit finally came to Maar with a 2019 retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, part of an international curatorial effort to reframe collections with greater biographical honesty. This move followed the highlighting of Cézanne's muse, Hortense Fiquet, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Madame Cézanne exhibition five years earlier. Cézanne to Giacometti offers another important opportunity, says co-curator Deirdre Cannon, to examine who these women painted by the modernists were and their true role in the creation of the art. Maar's most striking photograph, Portrait of Ubu – an extreme close-up of an armadillo fetus – will hang alongside four other works by her. Her 1936 pastel of Picasso similarly depicts her lover in a fractured, Cubist-inspired style, emphasising his wide cat's eyes, moustache, distinctive nose, and wide mouth in cool green shades, all composed like an inverted comma. 'We acknowledge now that artists do not work in a vacuum, and the idea of the sole, primarily male genius making art from god-given talent or through an act of divine intervention has been repudiated for a long time now,' Cannon says. 'This has included a reappraisal of the subjectivity of the muse. These individuals, often artists in their own right, influenced other aspects of artists' practice and personal lives.' The concept of the muse dates back to Greek mythology, where nine sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, served as patrons of the arts. Homer himself invoked these ethereal women of divine inspiration to narrate the tales of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad. Later, masters from Raphael to Rembrandt embraced the muse as an object of beauty, personifying their creative expression. In the 19th century, model Elizabeth Siddal embodied the ideal of virginal beauty and rectitude in John Everett Millais's Ophelia, leading the BBC to describe her as art's greatest supermodel. 'Often, those identified as muses are depicted in a very idealised manner and described in literature as having striking physical attributes or a distinctive presence,' Cannon says. 'Or, in the case of an artist like Picasso, their likenesses are rearranged and experimented with in pursuit of breaking new artistic ground. Traditional understandings of the muse involve feminine subservience to the creative will of men. 'The term itself has specific connotations that prompt reflection on the role of inspiration in visual art.' Among European modernists, Cézanne's radical yet doubt-laden experiments in colour and composition were the first to challenge accepted artistic ideas of the figurative form, emboldening generations of subsequent artists. 'Every artist in Cézanne to Giacometti is linked in a huge genealogy or family tree of influence, as they found inspiration in each other's example,' says Greenhalgh. 'In a sense, the 'muse' we investigate is how artists inspire each other.' Cézanne's model across two decades of often plodding experimentation was Hortense Fiquet, the mother of his only son, Paul, whom he first met in 1869 when she was a 19-year-old model. Among the works on display in Cézanne to Giacometti are one of 29 paintings and four of the approximately 50 drawings he made of Fiquet, including Portrait of Madame Cézanne (c. 1885). Her inscrutable expression has led historians to suggest emotional distance between the pair or to interpret it as evidence of Fiquet's dour character. British critic Roger Fry even described her as 'that sour bitch,' and her husband's friends nicknamed her 'La Boule' (French for 'the ball'). However, Greenhalgh argues that characterising muses like Fiquet as 'crones' or Maar as 'unstable' is simply an example of misogyny. 'But we must remember that history is a discourse, and that we can always see things from new perspectives.' Context is everything. Cézanne and Fiquet lived an unconventional life; she resided in cosmopolitan Paris while the artist painted the Provence countryside. Their relationship was characterised by social and financial inequality, common in many marriages of the period. They only married to secure his family's inheritance. 'Cézanne was incredibly slow when he painted, and it is thought that this was because he doubted everything he created,' Greenhalgh says. 'It drove his sitters crazy, as they had to pose motionless for a dozen hours each day, sometimes for hundreds of sittings, only for him to abandon the painting. 'There are letters that demonstrate Fiquet's supportive business dealings to try and sell Cézanne's work, but the most direct and simple evidence we have of her importance to his practice is that she sat for Cézanne's paintings time and time again, and that to me is a demonstration of their love for one another.' European art history is full of stories where the female perspective is hidden or missing, says artist Natasha Walsh. At best, the women subjects are frequently depicted either as passive vehicles for the artist's talent or in an exploitative and violent manner. 'When artists are painting, they are painting their own perception,' Walsh says. 'It's only problematic when the muse exists solely in the context of the artist, when we look at it as a child does, only within the frame.' Walsh is one of several contemporary artists who are reimagining the portrayal of the female sitter. Instead of a passive subject, these artists seek to show the creative insight originating from the female subject herself, or through a collaborative, reciprocal exchange between the artist and their subject. As a teenage art student, Walsh often faced requests to sit for male painters, which she declined. She recalls one artist advising her to agree soon, 'as if my worth were reduced to solely my physical appearance and my value was temporary and fleeting'. In her series Hysteria, Walsh challenged the male gaze by reinterpreting Gustav Klimt's 1907 painting Danaë, which romanticised an ancient Greek myth of rape. Reimagining herself as the mother of Perseus, she painted her eyes actively gazing back at the viewer – Klimt painted them closed – and vanished Zeus's impregnating shower of 'golden rain' that glossed over rape in the original painting. Walsh has since painted fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters. It was a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize. Walsh has continued to reinterpret art history, painting fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of the 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters (a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize). She also depicted musician Montaigne as Medusa, and posed artist Atong Atem as Matisse's Yellow Odalisque, shifting the focus to Atem's African heritage. Walsh collaborated with writer Bri Lee on a collage of Picasso nudes, created in the Brett Whiteley studio. Their aim was to reimagine a nude free from Picasso's gaze, depicting the figure in an act of self-pleasure. Lee later posed for Walsh's Hysteria exhibition the following year, with Walsh stating, 'We wanted to create a nude that existed for herself.' Walsh is particularly scathing of Picasso's depiction of Dora Maar as an archetypal figure of suffering. It was a portrayal that Maar herself rejected. 'All these portraits of me are lies. They are all Picasso; none is Dora Maar,' she says. 'Picasso does an immense disservice to Maar's practice and rich individual identity present in her work to reduce her to mad crying women.' According to independent curator and writer Julie Ewington, the reevaluation of women's roles has significantly increased over the last 50 years, running 'absolutely hand in glove with social movements' like women's equality and #MeToo. 'By 1975, when the UN recognised International Women's Day, it was already well established that women were not just the subject of other people's pictures, they were the makers of their own,' Ewington says. 'Younger women are very clear where they stand on all this. That doesn't mean there isn't still a lively trade in pictures of beautiful and desirable women.' Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, a pioneer of self-expression, famously declared, 'I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.' She depicted her disability, physical pain, and emotions, even as her relationship with Diego Rivera influenced both their lives and art. Julie Ewington also points to earlier female artists who challenged norms: Suzanne Valadon defied 19th-century conventions by painting nudes of herself and other women, and German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman artist to depict herself pregnant and nude. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose fame was initially overshadowed by her partner, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is now celebrated as a feminist icon, her legacy casting a far greater shadow today. Progress, says Walsh, is when 'everyone becomes a muse to someone'. It doesn't have to be a beautiful, young woman serving the artist in some way. If we embrace all kinds of perspectives, then all kinds of muses can come into being. Artist Deborah Kelly, whose animation Beastliness was included in Art Gallery of NSW show Her Hair, a collection of 'sexy and salty' collage and animation works, now considers an artist's muse to be 'the curator who believes in your work, encourages your wildest dreams, and helps you realise them.' Her Hair examined how female hair has functioned as a powerful symbol in art, with braided hair representing profane love and long, unruly hair signifying penitence, virginity, or youth. Loading 'For me, it's mainly been other women who are keen to enable the more preposterous of my aspirations – I mean, right now, I'm founding a religion of climate change and queer identity and giving it meaning and expression in art and performance – and I see this as a significant historical shift from the era when women were supposed to view each other primarily as rivals for male attention,' Kelly says. 'So that makes me think that the idea of the muse is obsolete – but that actual human beings make and hold space for artists and their support is priceless.' As new generations of artists find fresh inspiration, so Dora Maar is being recognised as a more fully rounded artist. Only Maar was allowed to photograph the painting of Guernica. Her radical leftwing politics stood behind Picasso's rage at the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, which gave rise to his masterpiece, painted in a monochromatic style, almost photographic in its detail, and said to have borrowed from her work.
The Age
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
She was the face of Picasso's Weeping Woman. But there was more to Dora Maar than a woman crushed
A notable surrealist photographer and painter in her own right, Dora Maar is best remembered for her eight-year relationship with Pablo Picasso. Often regarded as a muse to Picasso's genius, Maar modelled for many of the artist's anguished 'weeping women' portraits, painted while he created his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica. Yet, Paris-born Maar also painted Picasso, transforming him into her subject and similarly distorting his features. 'What most people also don't realise is that Maar was a radical, subversive and respected artist before she met Picasso,' says David Greenhalgh, the National Gallery of Australia's expert on international art. 'Her photography, her politics and her Surrealist provocations challenged Picasso.' Maar's artistic legacy is highlighted alongside Picasso's in the National Gallery of Australia's blockbuster Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/ Neue Nationalgalerie which runs until September. The exhibition draws from the extraordinary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who, after World War II, established a small gallery on Paris's Left Bank and collected avant-garde works. The exhibition will feature some 100 major works by six modern masters – Picasso, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. These will be shown with 75 works from the National Gallery's collection to demonstrate the revolutionaries' influence on Australia's leading artists. The exhibition notably features works by Maar, with whom Berggruen felt a particular affinity, perhaps due to his empathy for her tragic life and tumultuous, ultimately destructive relationship with Picasso. 'She never quite recovered from her separation with Picasso, and turned away from her great talent as a photographer and a painter,' Berggruen's son Nicolas says. Long-overdue credit finally came to Maar with a 2019 retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, part of an international curatorial effort to reframe collections with greater biographical honesty. This move followed the highlighting of Cézanne's muse, Hortense Fiquet, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Madame Cézanne exhibition five years earlier. Cézanne to Giacometti offers another important opportunity, says co-curator Deirdre Cannon, to examine who these women painted by the modernists were and their true role in the creation of the art. Maar's most striking photograph, Portrait of Ubu – an extreme close-up of an armadillo fetus – will hang alongside four other works by her. Her 1936 pastel of Picasso similarly depicts her lover in a fractured, Cubist-inspired style, emphasising his wide cat's eyes, moustache, distinctive nose, and wide mouth in cool green shades, all composed like an inverted comma. 'We acknowledge now that artists do not work in a vacuum, and the idea of the sole, primarily male genius making art from god-given talent or through an act of divine intervention has been repudiated for a long time now,' Cannon says. 'This has included a reappraisal of the subjectivity of the muse. These individuals, often artists in their own right, influenced other aspects of artists' practice and personal lives.' The concept of the muse dates back to Greek mythology, where nine sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, served as patrons of the arts. Homer himself invoked these ethereal women of divine inspiration to narrate the tales of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad. Later, masters from Raphael to Rembrandt embraced the muse as an object of beauty, personifying their creative expression. In the 19th century, model Elizabeth Siddal embodied the ideal of virginal beauty and rectitude in John Everett Millais's Ophelia, leading the BBC to describe her as art's greatest supermodel. 'Often, those identified as muses are depicted in a very idealised manner and described in literature as having striking physical attributes or a distinctive presence,' Cannon says. 'Or, in the case of an artist like Picasso, their likenesses are rearranged and experimented with in pursuit of breaking new artistic ground. Traditional understandings of the muse involve feminine subservience to the creative will of men. 'The term itself has specific connotations that prompt reflection on the role of inspiration in visual art.' Among European modernists, Cézanne's radical yet doubt-laden experiments in colour and composition were the first to challenge accepted artistic ideas of the figurative form, emboldening generations of subsequent artists. 'Every artist in Cézanne to Giacometti is linked in a huge genealogy or family tree of influence, as they found inspiration in each other's example,' says Greenhalgh. 'In a sense, the 'muse' we investigate is how artists inspire each other.' Cézanne's model across two decades of often plodding experimentation was Hortense Fiquet, the mother of his only son, Paul, whom he first met in 1869 when she was a 19-year-old model. Among the works on display in Cézanne to Giacometti are one of 29 paintings and four of the approximately 50 drawings he made of Fiquet, including Portrait of Madame Cézanne (c. 1885). Her inscrutable expression has led historians to suggest emotional distance between the pair or to interpret it as evidence of Fiquet's dour character. British critic Roger Fry even described her as 'that sour bitch,' and her husband's friends nicknamed her 'La Boule' (French for 'the ball'). However, Greenhalgh argues that characterising muses like Fiquet as 'crones' or Maar as 'unstable' is simply an example of misogyny. 'But we must remember that history is a discourse, and that we can always see things from new perspectives.' Context is everything. Cézanne and Fiquet lived an unconventional life; she resided in cosmopolitan Paris while the artist painted the Provence countryside. Their relationship was characterised by social and financial inequality, common in many marriages of the period. They only married to secure his family's inheritance. 'Cézanne was incredibly slow when he painted, and it is thought that this was because he doubted everything he created,' Greenhalgh says. 'It drove his sitters crazy, as they had to pose motionless for a dozen hours each day, sometimes for hundreds of sittings, only for him to abandon the painting. 'There are letters that demonstrate Fiquet's supportive business dealings to try and sell Cézanne's work, but the most direct and simple evidence we have of her importance to his practice is that she sat for Cézanne's paintings time and time again, and that to me is a demonstration of their love for one another.' European art history is full of stories where the female perspective is hidden or missing, says artist Natasha Walsh. At best, the women subjects are frequently depicted either as passive vehicles for the artist's talent or in an exploitative and violent manner. 'When artists are painting, they are painting their own perception,' Walsh says. 'It's only problematic when the muse exists solely in the context of the artist, when we look at it as a child does, only within the frame.' Walsh is one of several contemporary artists who are reimagining the portrayal of the female sitter. Instead of a passive subject, these artists seek to show the creative insight originating from the female subject herself, or through a collaborative, reciprocal exchange between the artist and their subject. As a teenage art student, Walsh often faced requests to sit for male painters, which she declined. She recalls one artist advising her to agree soon, 'as if my worth were reduced to solely my physical appearance and my value was temporary and fleeting'. In her series Hysteria, Walsh challenged the male gaze by reinterpreting Gustav Klimt's 1907 painting Danaë, which romanticised an ancient Greek myth of rape. Reimagining herself as the mother of Perseus, she painted her eyes actively gazing back at the viewer – Klimt painted them closed – and vanished Zeus's impregnating shower of 'golden rain' that glossed over rape in the original painting. Walsh has since painted fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters. It was a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize. Walsh has continued to reinterpret art history, painting fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of the 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters (a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize). She also depicted musician Montaigne as Medusa, and posed artist Atong Atem as Matisse's Yellow Odalisque, shifting the focus to Atem's African heritage. Walsh collaborated with writer Bri Lee on a collage of Picasso nudes, created in the Brett Whiteley studio. Their aim was to reimagine a nude free from Picasso's gaze, depicting the figure in an act of self-pleasure. Lee later posed for Walsh's Hysteria exhibition the following year, with Walsh stating, 'We wanted to create a nude that existed for herself.' Walsh is particularly scathing of Picasso's depiction of Dora Maar as an archetypal figure of suffering. It was a portrayal that Maar herself rejected. 'All these portraits of me are lies. They are all Picasso; none is Dora Maar,' she says. 'Picasso does an immense disservice to Maar's practice and rich individual identity present in her work to reduce her to mad crying women.' According to independent curator and writer Julie Ewington, the reevaluation of women's roles has significantly increased over the last 50 years, running 'absolutely hand in glove with social movements' like women's equality and #MeToo. 'By 1975, when the UN recognised International Women's Day, it was already well established that women were not just the subject of other people's pictures, they were the makers of their own,' Ewington says. 'Younger women are very clear where they stand on all this. That doesn't mean there isn't still a lively trade in pictures of beautiful and desirable women.' Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, a pioneer of self-expression, famously declared, 'I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.' She depicted her disability, physical pain, and emotions, even as her relationship with Diego Rivera influenced both their lives and art. Julie Ewington also points to earlier female artists who challenged norms: Suzanne Valadon defied 19th-century conventions by painting nudes of herself and other women, and German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman artist to depict herself pregnant and nude. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose fame was initially overshadowed by her partner, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is now celebrated as a feminist icon, her legacy casting a far greater shadow today. Progress, says Walsh, is when 'everyone becomes a muse to someone'. It doesn't have to be a beautiful, young woman serving the artist in some way. If we embrace all kinds of perspectives, then all kinds of muses can come into being. Artist Deborah Kelly, whose animation Beastliness was included in Art Gallery of NSW show Her Hair, a collection of 'sexy and salty' collage and animation works, now considers an artist's muse to be 'the curator who believes in your work, encourages your wildest dreams, and helps you realise them.' Her Hair examined how female hair has functioned as a powerful symbol in art, with braided hair representing profane love and long, unruly hair signifying penitence, virginity, or youth. Loading 'For me, it's mainly been other women who are keen to enable the more preposterous of my aspirations – I mean, right now, I'm founding a religion of climate change and queer identity and giving it meaning and expression in art and performance – and I see this as a significant historical shift from the era when women were supposed to view each other primarily as rivals for male attention,' Kelly says. 'So that makes me think that the idea of the muse is obsolete – but that actual human beings make and hold space for artists and their support is priceless.' As new generations of artists find fresh inspiration, so Dora Maar is being recognised as a more fully rounded artist. Only Maar was allowed to photograph the painting of Guernica. Her radical leftwing politics stood behind Picasso's rage at the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, which gave rise to his masterpiece, painted in a monochromatic style, almost photographic in its detail, and said to have borrowed from her work.
CNA
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNA
Exploring Berlin, Germany: Where to eat, what to see, where to stay
Berlin is home to bureaucrats and hedonists, lobbyists and artists, lovers of techno and devotees of classical music. The city's turbulent 20th-century history is visible in the bullet holes on facades, the graffitied remains of the Berlin Wall and the monotonous residential blocks erected during the post-World War II reconstruction. But Berlin's younger generations are forward-looking, and its restaurants, bars and clubs are focused on the newest trends. A sprawling city, Berlin is decentralised, with dozens of kieze, or neighbourhoods, each with its own character and heart: From Prenzlauer Berg, with pretty prewar apartment blocks and tchotchke-filled antique shops, to Kreuzberg, with leather-clad denizens and brightly lit spatis, convenience stores that stay open late and sometimes offer outdoor seating. The best time to visit Berlin begins in spring, when the city's outdoor spaces are bustling with activity into the wee hours. This year, the Museum Island's 200th anniversary shines a light on some of Berlin's oldest cultural institutions, while new restaurants and bars offer plenty of fresh opportunities to explore. FRIDAY 4pm | Learn about modern art At the Neue Nationalgalerie, or New National Gallery, the main exhibition, on view indefinitely, showcases art from 1945 to 2000. Short essays provide context on cultural, economic and political shifts during those periods. Lucio Fontana's slashed canvas hangs next to a text about the 1950s economic boom and a throwaway society, and a video of Marina Abramovic's 1975 performance Freeing the Body plays alongside an essay on oppression, objectification and liberation. The Gerhard Richter exhibition, on view until September 2026, includes one of the artist's most famous works, Birkenau, a meditation on the Holocaust. The museum leans into interactive activities. In the main exhibition, a machine with a hand crank pops out postcards with assignments — for example, to find a human-shaped sculpture and sketch its point of view. Grab a pencil and get going! Entry to all exhibitions, 20 euros (US$22; S$29) 6.30pm | Decompress with drinks and music Take a mental bath at Unkompress, a listening bar in a quiet residential section of the trendy Kreuzberg neighbourhood. In this minimalist space, the focus is on music. An entire wall is dominated by a unit featuring an audiophile's dream setup: Two turntables, massive Cornwall speakers and a collection of 300-plus records. Settle back and let jazz, funk, disco, '90s downtempo or other soothing tunes wash over you as you sip natural wine, craft beer or mezcal (7.50 euro for a glass of house wine). A handy chart on the menu plots drinks according to fruitiness, minerality, fanciness and eccentricity. As in many newer bars in Berlin, there are plenty of non-alcoholic wines and beers. Check the bar's Instagram for its event schedule, which includes DJ gigs, artsy workshops and bring-your-own-vinyl evenings. 8.30pm | Dine on elevated German cuisine Given its dark wood panelling, stately bar and red candles, Marktlokal appears to be an upscale, tradition-bound restaurant. But this is Kreuzberg, and the friendly waitstaff with pink-dyed hair and chokers immediately dispel any fears of snobbishness. The food, too, rides the wave between old and new, with beloved German ingredients refreshed through the chef's imagination. White asparagus, a popular seasonal vegetable, is enlivened by hazelnut and fermented wild garlic, while beef tartare is deepened with smoked oyster mushroom mayo and Sichuan pepper. The wine list offers mostly natural options. Don't miss dessert, which rotates like the rest of the menu and recently included caramelised bananas with vanilla ice cream, walnuts and caramel sauce (dinner for two, around 120 euros). 11pm | Bop the night away Berlin's club scene is world-renowned, but it can be intimidating. If you've got the dancing bug, check the Resident Advisor website for DJ lineups at clubs around the city. Buy tickets if possible — this will help if there's a long line. Test your luck at Berghain, a world-famous club inside a former power station, notorious for its exclusivity. To increase your chances of entry, come alone or in a small group, speak quietly while in line, and wear an all-black outfit that looks fit for a dance floor. Friday nights at Berghain's Panorama Bar are chiller, with a friendlier vibe at the door. Cash-only inside. For an easier entry, head to Sameheads, where the bar upstairs is decorated in raunchy neons and the downstairs dance area is in a graffiti-covered room. The music ranges widely and might include Italo disco, trance, house and dark techno. For a grungy experience, consider Renate, inside an abandoned building. The club, a Berlin institution since 2007, will close at the end of 2025 because of rising costs. WHERE TO STAY Hotel de Rome, a 145-room, five-star hotel that was a bank in the 1880s, has one of the best locations in Berlin: Its windows look directly onto the pink-hued Berlin State Opera. An open-air roof bar also provides city views, and an Italian restaurant, Chiaro, offers inventive Italian dishes and a leafy garden terrace. The basement — formerly used as the vault — is home to a spa with saunas and a pool. Rooms start at 450 euros, or US$512. Ginn City & Lounge Yorck-Berlin sits at the intersection of two neighbourhoods worth exploring: Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, full of trendy restaurants, bars and boutiques, and Tempelhof-SchOneberg, home to several popular parks, including Tempelhofer Feld and Natur Park Schoneberger Sudgelande. From the hotel, attractions like the New National Gallery and the Museum Island are a short ride on public transit. A bar offers standard cocktails and there's a rooftop terrace. Rooms start at 114 euros. The newly opened Bellman Hotel is a short walk from the many cafes, bars and restaurants of the Neukolln neighborhood. The rooms are stylish and comfortable and there's a satisfying breakfast buffet offering cheeses, fruits, and vegan and non-vegan sweet treats. The hotel has a gym as well as a restaurant. Rooms start at 75 euros. Collapse Start the day with a flaky, chewy chocolate croissant and a coffee at Symple, a cafe with spacious outdoor seating shaded by a large tree in the charming Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood. Afterward, stroll around the Kollwitzplatz Weekly Market, where toddlers zoom by on scooters and friends in black leather gather for a quick bite. The goods on sale blend tradition — organic honey, oversize wool blankets, woven basket bags — with unexpected finds like vulva-shaped soaps and genderless jewellery. The surrounding area is known for its antique shops and boutiques. For a quirky souvenir, visit kunst-a-bunt, where you'll find prints, colourful egg cups and treasures like a 1924 silver tea strainer. Pop over to abricot coco, a clothing shop, for sustainable basics in comfortable, airy cuts produced in Latvia and Portugal. 10.30am | Pay a visit to East Germany Dive into the history of East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, at the state-funded Museum in der Kulturbrauerei, where entry is free. There are 800 objects in the Everyday Life in the GDR exhibition, with a large section dedicated to the connections among factory work, personal life and the state. A rhyming public service announcement warns about the risks of drinking on the job and a small alcove is filled with remnants from a nursery inside an enormous factory complex. The exhibition also reveals how people spent their money, where they went on vacation, which newspapers and magazines they read, and the kinds of clothes they wore. Furniture and decorations interspersed throughout the space — doilies, laminated wood cabinets and plastic chairs — evoke the sensation of traveling back in time. 12pm | Pit stop for kebab As you leave the Kulturbrauerei, you might see a line on the block and hear reggaeton and rap. Follow the music to its source, Ruyam Gemuse Kebab 2, one of the fast-food shop's two locations, to taste a famous Berlin dish: Vegetable kebab. Graffiti is scrawled on the walls and the friendly staff — who shout their thanks every time a visitor leaves a tip — give the entire operation the feeling of a party. The sandwiches are filling and tasty: Fluffy bread is stuffed to the brim with sliced chicken — a vegetarian option skips the meat — along with fried potatoes, onions, carrots, lettuce, fresh herbs, lemon juice and garlic sauce (6.90 euros, cash only). 2.30pm | Discover thousands of years of art history Museum Island, a UNESCO-protected site celebrating its 200th birthday with five years of events starting at the end of May, is home to six buildings showcasing art and artifacts. In an area that's less than half a square mile, discover a 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti attributed to Thutmose, paintings by Monet and Renoir, and a collection of Etruscan objects. The Panorama, a temporary exhibition in place while the Pergamon Museum, one of the six buildings on the island, undergoes renovation, immerses visitors in an enormous artwork that depicts the ancient city of Pergamon in 129 AD. At the Altes Museum, the first museum built on the island, find funerary sculptures, bronze cauldrons, mummy portraits and other remains of classical antiquity. The Garden of Delights exhibition has a Berlin flavour with ancient depictions of people engaging in erotic Not Safe for Work activities (ticket for the island and the Panorama, 24 euros). 5pm | Have dinner before the opera Set on a bustling block, JOMO Restaurant offers spacious outdoor seating, ideal for people-watching on a weekend evening. Inside, the space is airy and chic, with rustic wooden floors, a smattering of plants and red rugs, and a glass-enclosed kitchen in the centre. The menu runs the gamut with dishes like carbonara udon with French ham, smoked trout tartare with cauliflower, and Sicilian-style tuna and salmon crudo. The sweet-cheese croquettes with dulce de leche mousse and berry sauce are reminiscent of a beloved Slavic dish called syrniki and are a nod to two of the owners' Ukrainian roots. The milk punch, made with clarified coconut milk, pineapple juice and rum, tastes like a tropical vacation. On the non-alcoholic front, the 'condensed lime' drink is tart and refreshing (dinner for two, 80 euros). 7pm | Catch a classical performance Since opening nearly 300 years ago, the Berlin State Opera has hosted some of history's best-known conductors, including Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwangler. The opera has been rebuilt several times; its most recent renovation was completed in 2017. With a neo-Classical exterior, three-tiered auditorium and red velvet seats, the opera is — to put it simply — grand. The current season includes Sacre, a ballet with music by three composers, Cassandra, a contemporary opera about the climate crisis by Bernard Foccroulle, and Verdi's 1853 opera La Traviata (tickets start at 12 euros). SUNDAY 10am | Load up on a nutritious brunch The sisters Xenia and Sophie von Oswald mix and match Persian, German and Australian influences at rocket + basil, an easygoing, no-reservations eatery near the busy Potsdamer Platz, with exposed brick walls painted mint green inside. This is the place to load up on fibre, with a weekend menu that includes an omelette filled with butternut squash and leeks, then topped with a kale and sesame salad, or a thick sourdough toast piled high with cannellini beans, roasted radicchio and hazelnuts, with dill sprinkled on top. For a sweet option, try the mascarpone pancakes, served with caramelized bananas, maple syrup, pistachio butter and barberries. If you have space left, grab a baked good at the counter; the moist pistachio-rosewater cake and the tahini-halva brownie are equally delightful (brunch for two, 40 euros). 12pm | Catch your breath by a lake The secret to enjoying the warmer months of the year in Berlin is to head for the city's lakes. The cool waters and lush greenery encircling the city — about one-fifth of Berlin is forested — are nearby and free. With 3,000 lakes in Berlin and its adjacent state, Brandenburg, choosing one can be difficult. Fortunately, the city's tourism agency provides a useful map showing 32 options and how to reach them. Wannsee, Schlachtensee and Krumme Lanke, in the city's southwest, are 40 minutes to 60 minutes away from the centre and offer plenty of opportunities for swimming, sunbathing (clothed or nude), taking nature walks, playing volleyball and table tennis, and renting paddle boards and boats. If you're in the mood for art, the Haus am Waldsee, a museum in an English countryside-style villa, is a 15-minute walk from Schlachtensee and showcases contemporary works (entry, 9 euros). By
