Unter den Linden 41

The Van Diemen Gallery was located at approximately the same place on Unter den Linden now occupied by the ticket office of Berlin’s Komische Oper. Founded just after the First World War, the gallery belonged to the Margraf Group and specialized primarily in the Old Masters. It also had branches in The Hague, Amsterdam, and New York.

After the First Russian Art Exhibition was held, Friedrich A. Lutz, director of the Modern Department, continued to show new art until 1926. The parent company and its subsidiaries were seized by the Nazis in 1935.

In 1922 the First Russian Art Exhibition was presented in the gallery’s space not far from the Russian embassy on Unter den Linden. The show provided an overview of Russian art from 1905 onwards.

Sculptor Naum Gabo was in charge of the three rooms where Russian avant-garde art was presented, including several of his own sculptures. It was these rooms that made the exhibition famous.

Today Gabo’s sculpture Constructed Torso (visible on the base on the left side of the photo) is one of the major works in the permanent exhibition of the Berlinische Galerie.

Naum Gabo

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) moved to Berlin in 1922 to help organize the First Russian Art Exhibition on behalf of the People’s Commissariat for Education.

The exhibition also showed works by other Jewish artists, though none with a Jewish theme. These works reflected the idea that abstract art was universal in nature and embodied the principles of a new society.

During his Berlin years, Gabo developed a new conception of sculpture and eventually created his “Torsions”—the rounded, curved, wire-connected forms for which he was later famous. His most important project was the competition design for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, which was never built.

Gabo emigrated to Paris in 1932 after his studio was raided by a gang of Nazi henchmen.