Institute of Art Studies and Historical Urban Studies
© Universitätsarchiv
On the History of the Art Sciences Departments at the Technical University of Berlin

Already in the first half of the 19th century, art history was taught at the TU's predecessor institutions (Bauakademie and Gewerbeakademie). This is the origin of our still valid profile of an application- and object-related orientation of science. Since the founding of the Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg in 1879, the subject has been represented by a chair with the right to award doctorates and is thus considered the oldest humanities subject at the TU. In this first phase, which lasted until 1968, art studies had predominantly a service function. The university's faculty included several well-known art scholars specializing in the history of architecture, the decorative arts, and the visual arts, specializing in the art history of Germany and Italy. After the reestablishment of the university as a technical university in 1949, art history was to play the role of a humanistically and historically influenced "accompaniment" to the technical and natural sciences within the framework of a Studium generale at the new Faculty of Humanities. In the second phase, beginning in 1968, the department, now located in the Institute of History and Art History, established itself for the first time with an independent master's degree program. The horizon opened up to many facets of European art, including that of France, England and Eastern Europe, as well as to the developments of modernism, including the unwelcome legacy of National Socialism.

TU Art History has gained an excellent reputation, especially in the last twenty-five years since reunification in 1990, in the course of the reorganization of Berlin's higher education and research landscape, due to its renowned university teachers, clear profiling, institutional, interdisciplinary and international networking, as well as committed research and statements on art and monument policy issues, which is also reflected in the constantly increasing numbers of students, master's and bachelor's degrees, doctorates and habilitations. In the course of the university reforms 2005-2007, which painfully cut into the structure of the faculty, the subject areas of art history, which have since been active at the newly founded Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies, were reprofiled in the most recent phase of development in a manner complementary to the focal points of the Berlin sister universities: This includes the leading role in the interdisciplinary Bachelor's program "Culture and Technology" and the independent Master's program "Art History" with the two focal points "Art Science and Art Technology" and "Art Science and Museum". Research and teaching encompass a broad spectrum of questions on materiality and on the technical-scientific and humanistic or cultural-historical foundations of the fine arts and the decorative arts from the Middle Ages to modern times, on architecture, urban architecture and garden art, namely on the current challenges of recent architectural heritage, as well as on the increasing importance of conservation, exhibition and museum studies, which are carried out in close cooperation with the monument authorities, archives and the National Museums in Berlin.

July 2016
Adrian von Buttlar
(using preliminary work by Christoph Brachmann)

From the founding of the Technical University to the introduction of an independent course of study in art history 1879-1968

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The Department of Art History is not only the oldest humanities subject at our university, but in 1879, in the course of the foundation of the Royal Technical University of Charlottenburg, it was one of the early art history chairs throughout Germany (Bonn 1860, Berlin 1873). As in the case of Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University (later Humboldt University), however, there had already been precursors of art history teaching at the TH's two predecessor institutions, the Bauakademie and the Prussian Trade Academy, since the beginning of the 19th century. This corresponded to the application-oriented orientation of knowledge in the comprehensive educational concept of their founding fathers Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) and Peter Wilhelm Friedrich Beuth (1781-1853), whose busts today adorn our Senate meeting room in the TU main building.

The teaching of art history was thus traditionally initially strongly oriented towards questions of the history of building and architecture as well as the decorative arts, i.e. towards the design of the living world in history and the present. One example is the versatile architecture and art historian Wilhelm Lübke (1826-1896), who taught at the Berlin Bauakademie until his appointment to the ETH Zurich in 1861 and is known for his comprehensive art and architecture manuals. Julius Lessing's (1843-1908) appointment to the Gewerbeakademie was connected with international competition for the reform of the decorative arts - in England, for example, through the Arts and Crafts movement and the founding of the Victoria and Albert Museum (1852), and in the Danube Monarchy through that of the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna (today the Museum of Applied Arts MAK) in 1863. Berlin followed with the establishment of the Museum of Decorative Arts in 1872, of which Lessing was the initiator and first director. It was also under his aegis that the so-called Gropius Building was erected in 1877-1881 and the pioneering textile collection built up. Lessing taught at the TH until 1894 and reached a broad lay public beyond the narrow specialist community through his publications, for example on ancient oriental carpet patterns, on the Paris World's Fair of 1878 and above all through dozens of "Vorlagehefte" based on the exhibits of the Museum of Decorative Arts. Lessing's close contact with the engineering sciences was also remarkable, for example with his colleague, the mechanical engineering theorist Franz Reuleaux (1829-1905), who was rector of the TH in 1890/91. Lessing thus became the representative of an object- and technology-oriented, practical-museum and application-oriented history of art, to which our present orientation ties in again.

The first full professor of art history at the TH, the St. Petersburg-born historian Eduard Dobbert (1839-1899), who also held a professorship at the Royal Academy of Arts and served as rector of the TH in 1885/86, also sought to focus the subject on architecture and architectural history, which he did in his speech "Die Kunstgeschichte als Wissenschaft und Lehrgegenstand" (Art History as Science and Subject) on the occasion of the birthday of Emperor Wilhelm I in 1886. 1886: The "nature of the subject [points] the art historian to the TH for his education in the clearest way [...] Whoever devotes himself to the history of architecture will have to start from a technical study of this subject". But he was far from an overly one-sided view. Dobbert published not least on Italian art of the Trecento and, as a Byzantinist, was among the first to teach Christian iconography. Among the best-known TH art historians of this early phase was Cornelius Gurlitt (1850-1938), grandfather of the Munich art collector of the same name, who was still trained as an architect at the Bauakademie. Gurlitt, who habilitated at the TH in 1890, taught there until his appointment to Dresden in 1893 and is considered (along with the Viennese Alois Riegl and the Swiss-born Heinrich Wölfflin) to be the most important discoverer of the long-discredited architecture of the Baroque period, as well as one of the founding fathers of Saxon monument preservation. At the same time, he already represented the modern view of the primacy of conservation over restoration and reconstruction in the discourse on monument preservation at the time. His book "German Art of the 19th Century. Their Aims and Deeds" (1899) is considered a standard work. Alfred Gotthold Meyer (1864-1904) was at the time professor of the history of decorative arts at the TH. His posthumously published 1907 monograph "Eisenbauten. Their History and Aesthetics", published posthumously in 1907, was the first to examine the effects of the use of iron as a building material on the formation of style. It appeared again in 2005 as a paperback edition in French translation under the title "Construiere en fer - Histoire et esthétique"(!).

The art critic Albert Dresdner (1866-1934), who habilitated at the TH in 1915, was one of the prominent Berlin art historians in the interwar period.

He taught first as a private lecturer and from 1925 until his dismissal by the National Socialists in 1933 as an associate professor at the TH. His main work, "Die Entstehung der Kunstkritik im Zusammenhang der Geschichte des europäischen Kunstlebens" (Munich 1915), which was reprinted twice in recent decades, is one of the fundamental contributions to the history of the discipline. His colleague Max Georg Zimmermann (1861-1919), who also wrote in a timely manner about Karl Friedrich Schinkel's "War Monuments from Prussia's Great Period" (1916), published several works on Sicily, Giotto, and Upper Italian sculpture of the Middle Ages. Paul Schubring (1869-1935) also expanded this focus on Italy, preferring to work on Renaissance sculpture in Italy. He worked at the TH after his habilitation from 1904-1920 as a private lecturer and full professor. His "Auxiliary Book for Art History. Heiligenlegenden, Mythologie, Technik, Zeittafeln" from 1909 was - get this - reissued in 2013 under the heading "forgottenbooks".

We know very little of the art history lecturers active during National Socialism, most of whom conformed to the system: at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, building research and architectural history had been prominently represented since 1922 by Honorary Professor Dr.-Ing. e.h., Dr. phil h.c. Daniel Krencker (1874-1941), who is still known today for his Near Eastern excavation campaigns, notably in Syria, and who was also in charge of the Museum of Architecture. The architect and then Provincial Conservator of Brandenburg, Erich Blunck (1872-1950), taught monument conservation until 1937 and then again from 1947-1950. The associate professor Franz Bock (1876-1940?) - not to be confused with the well-known Rhineland medievalist from the 19th century - had come from the University of Marburg as predecessor of Richard Hamann in 1913 to the Kgl. Akademie Posen and from there to the TU. As Dresdner's successor from 1934 to 1940, he read the compulsory course on the history of art and style of the early modern period, the history of architecture in four parts, as well as on selected works of German art and the history of art of Nordic antiquity and the Middle Ages, and offered exercises on major works from the Berlin museums. Oskar Karpa (1899-1963), who had received his doctorate in 1929 with Paul Clemen on Gothic reliquary busts and served as head of the "Brandenburg Cultural Department" at the ministry from 1936 to 1945, took over the only two art history courses beginning in the winter semester of 1942. He was appointed state conservator of Lower Saxony in 1952 (his "Art Monuments of the State of Lower Saxony" was published in 1958/1965). The revocation of the TU doctorate of the well-known architect and art historian Paul Zucker (1888-1971), who emigrated to the USA in 1934, in 1939 was probably not at the instigation of the TU, but of the Gestapo.

In 1949, on the initiative of the British occupying power responsible for the Charlottenburg district, the Technische Hochschule was reestablished as the Technische Universität. This reestablishment was a consequence of the painful experience of where the detachment of purely technological efficiency from any humanistic responsibility had led during the Third Reich. The Department of Art History was now incorporated into the newly established Faculty I (Humanities), which, among other things, was to accompany the technical and natural sciences in the form of a "Studium generale". From 1949 to 1967, however, the chair was held by Fritz Baumgart (1902-1983), of all people, whose National Socialist past apparently played no role in the appointment: after earning his doctorate under Adolph Goldschmidt, Baumgart had worked on Italian topics as an assistant and fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome from 1927-1932. In 1933 he immediately joined the NSDAP and the SA and after 1942 worked as an orderly officer for the German military commander General von Stülpnagelim occupied Paris. In the 1950s and 1960s he succeeded (without attracting attention through independent research) in popularizing various subject areas of "occidental" art history through his widely distributed survey works. For the development of the subject at the TU, Baumgart's long aegis meant rather a standstill, especially since the new humanities faculty otherwise began to develop into a tone-setting institution in Berlin's academic landscape with regard to the study of the modernist era and in its methodological orientation in the fields of linguistics and literary studies, musicology, philosophy, history of science and technology, as well as anti-Semitism and early gender studies.

July 2016
Adrian von Buttlar
(using preliminary work by Christoph Brachmann)

The development of an independent art science at the TU since 1968

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In 1969 Detlef Heikamp (born 1927, emeritus 1990) was appointed to the TU chair - an internationally renowned specialist for the Italian, namely the Florentine Renaissance. After receiving his doctorate under Hans Kauffmann, he had conducted research as a fellow at the Florentine Institute and worked at the Nuremberg National Museum and at Harvard University, then at the Villa I Tatti and, until his appointment to the TU, as a private lecturer in Würzburg. In addition to his compulsory university work, he was primarily involved with Federico Zuccari, Benvenuto Cellini, Bartolomeo Ammanati, Baccio Bandinelli and the Medici's promotion of art (after his retirement also in the form of the large Florentine exhibition of 1997). At the same time, Claus Zoege von Manteuffel (1926-2009), a specialist in Gottfried Semper and South German Baroque sculpture who was habilitated at the TU in 1968, taught at an extraordinary professorship until 1978. After 1968, the endowment of assistantships and tutorships finally made it possible to establish an independent master's degree program in "Art Studies". This marked the beginning of a new era in art history education in Berlin as an alternative to the Free University or the socialist-oriented Humboldt University in the east of the city. The academic staff and assistants played a decisive role in this quantitative and qualitative expansion through their own research, publications and exhibition initiatives. Above all, Hans-Ernst Mittig (1933-2014) should be mentioned here, who initially devoted himself to the monument cult of the 19th century and during his assistant period 1970-1974 (subsequently professor at the Berlin University of the Arts), together with his assistant colleague Klaus Herding (born 1939, later professor in Hamburg and then chair in Frankfurt am Main), who was hired in 1971, initiated the critical reappraisal of Nazi architecture or Nazi art.

In 1979, Heikamp succeeded in permanently establishing a second professorship and filling it with Wolfgang Wolters (born in 1935, active at the institute until his retirement in 2000). With him, a scientist experienced in research organization as well as in architectural history, monument preservation practice and monument theory came to the TU. His main focus of research and work was (and still is) the history of art and architecture of modern times, especially of Venice: Before his appointment, Wolters was assistant at the Institute of Art History in Florence, in 1971 founding director of the German Study Center in Venice, and from 1974 to 1979 consultant at the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments. At the same time he taught at the LMU Munich, where he habilitated on the pictorial programs of the Doge's Palace. Many of his publications and the colloquia, conferences and expert reports for which he was responsible are dedicated to the study of Venice and its salvation. Under Wolters' leadership, the international networking and external impact of the TU Art History, which was now linked to the history departments in the "Institute for History and Art History", increased considerably. In 1992, for example, a cooperation agreement was concluded with the corresponding departments of the Istanbul Technical University (ITÜ) and implemented through exchanges of lecturers and staff such as the archaeologist Zeynep Kuban, joint colloquia and bilateral excursions to Istanbul and Berlin. In 1986, the department hosted the 20th German Art History Conference at the TU under the title "Preserving - Explaining - Using. Art History and the Artistic Heritage", and in 1992 it played a major role in the conception of the XXVIII. International Congress of Art History in Berlin. In 1992, as chairman of the "Advisory Board for Architectural Monuments", Wolters was able to obtain the writing of a monument conservation report for the competition to restore the Neues Museum on Museum Island by respected experts from East and West, which was published in 1994 under the title "Das Neue Museum in Berlin. A Historic Preservation Plea for Supplementary Restoration," and on which David Chipperfield's project, further developed after 1997, was based. Under Wolters' direction, the "Baukunst Working Group" later reviewed and approved the restoration concept for the individual rooms in numerous meetings held in the rooms of the Neues Museum. These activities established a tradition in the leadership of the Berlin State Monuments Council continued by Adrian von Buttlar from 1995-2009 and Kerstin Wittmann-Englert since 2009.

Internally, during the Wolters era, the course was further expanded and reformed in the sense of a TU-specific profile, as well as supplemented with regard to the teaching offered, among other things through teaching assignments to museum practitioners and restorers such as Bodo Buczinski, head sculpture restorer at the Bode Museum (active at the TU 1984-2014), as well as through the appointment of honorary professor Dietrich Kötzsche (1930-2008), head curator of the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts and renowned specialist for medieval treasure art. An education as close to the object as possible, including practice in front of originals, excursions and obligatory knowledge of local and regional art in the so-called "intermediate examination Berlin/Brandenburg" were required. The cooperation with the architecture faculty was considerably strengthened: the merging of the Seminar Library of Art History and the Departmental Library of Architectural History in the architecture building resulted in a specialized and reference library in the Scharoun Building that was unrivaled in Berlin.

In 1990, Robert Suckale (born in 1943, active at the Institute until 2004), one of the most distinguished German medievalists with interests extending into the modern era, succeeded Detlef Heikamp. This gave the department a new focus: Now the art history of France and East Central Europe received a stronger weight. Beyond the subject area of French Gothic in the standard work "Gothic Architecture in France 1130-1230" (1985, ²1995), written together with Dieter Kimpel, Suckale researched, among other things, within the framework of DFG projects on medieval book and panel painting, namely on Franconian painting before Dürer, on medieval ladies' monasteries as bastions of women's power (2001), on "Art and Culture of the Jagiellonian Era" and on 19th century architecture and art. He published a widely acclaimed "History of Art in Germany" in 1998 and participated in major international exhibitions - such as "Crown and Veil. The Art of Spiritual Women in the Middle Ages" (2005) in cooperation with colleagues at Harvard University, of which he has since been a Visiting Fellow. From the Courtauld Institute of Art, Suckale received an honorary doctorate in 2011, and in 2014 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1996, Suckale and Wolters, together with colleagues at Bamberg's Otto Friedrich University, succeeded in acquiring the nine-year interdisciplinary DFG Research Training Group "Kunstwissenschaft - Bauforschung - Denkmalpflege," which led not least to closer ties with the architecture faculty: In addition to the department of "Building History" (Johannes Cramer), the new professorship of Building Research and Historic Preservation (Dorothee Sack) was also involved in this, under whose direction the postgraduate program (now a master's program) in Historic Preservation was established. From the interdisciplinary college emerged a large group of now recognized building researchers and architectural historians. After Wolters' departure, Christine Hoh-Slodczyk (Pitz & Hoh, Workshop for Architecture and Historic Preservation) and Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper (then State Office for Historic Preservation, since 2005 professor of the FG Historic Preservation at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning of the TU) took on practice-oriented courses in historic preservation as part of the art history program. In 1999, Suckale and his then assistant Christoph Brachmann published the volume "Die Technische Universität Berlin und ihre Bauten. A Tour through Two Centuries of Architecture and University History," which vividly demonstrated the integration of art and architecture research into the university's overall spectrum. Furthermore, in 2001, under Suckale's leadership, the cross-faculty forum of a "Schinkel Center for Architecture, Urban Research, and Monument Preservation" was revived, which temporarily brought together research activities in the fields of architectural and art history, building research, monument preservation, and urban planning/urban sociology under the management of the head of the TU's Architecture Collection (now again the Museum of Architecture), Hans-Dieter Nägelke (unfortunately, this initiative had to be abandoned again after 2005 in the course of the TU's radical austerity measures).

In this second phase of development, the promotion of highly qualified young academics in the assistant and staff positions should also be emphasized: among others.

In this second phase of development, the promotion of highly qualified young scholars in the assistant and staff positions should also be emphasized: among others. Sigrid Schade (later professor at the Zurich University of the Arts), Werner Schnell (later professor at the Department of Art History at the University of Göttingen), Ilka Kloten (freelance art historian Munich), Florian Zimmermann (later professor at the Munich University of Applied Sciences), Gabriele Bickendorf (chair holder at the University of Augsburg), Magdalena Bushart (chair holder at the University of Stuttgart and since 2008 as successor of Robert Suckale again at our TU Institute), Klaus Krüger (Chair at the FU Berlin), Bernd Nicolai (Chair at the University of Bern), Gregor Wedekind (Chair at the University of Mainz), Carola Jaeggi (Chair at the University of Zurich), Christoph Brachmann (Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill), Lars Blunck (Chair of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg), Kerstin Wittmann-Englert (since 2010 apl. Professor at the TU).

July 2016
Adrian von Buttlar
(with the use of preliminary work by Christoph Brachmann)

The most recent phase of development since the introduction of the new degree programs in 2004/05

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In 2001, Wolters and Suckale had succeeded in establishing an additional chair for the history of modern art, which was filled by Professor Adrian von Buttlar (born in 1948, retired since 2013), who had been teaching at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel since 1985. Buttlar - who grew up in Kassel, Berlin, and Hamburg - had studied in Munich and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and received his doctorate in 1977 with a thesis on the "English Country Estate 1715-1760. Symbol of a Liberal Weltentwurf" (Mittenwald 1982). He habilitated in 1984 with a monograph on Leo von Klenze ("Leo von Klenze, Leben - Werk - Vision," Munich 1999, 2014²) and distinguished himself in particular with research and publications on the history of garden art, the history of architecture of the 18th-20th centuries, and the preservation of monuments and monument policy. From 1996-2009 Buttlar chaired the Berlin State Monuments Council, from 2003-2008 the Scientific Advisory Board of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg, and from 2008-2013 the Board of Trustees of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. In research and teaching, he set new priorities with the series "Forschungen zur Nachkriegsmoderne" (Research on Postwar Modernism) and as co-founder of the DFG Transatlantic Research Training Group Berlin-New York 2004-2010 on "History and Culture of Metropolises in the 20th Century" (TU Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt Universität Berlin, and New York University and Columbia University). His project seminars resulted in, among other things, the critical exhibition "denkmal!moderne" in 2007 and, in 2013, the comprehensive handbook co-edited with Gabi-Dolff-Bonekämper and Kerstin Wittmann-Englert, "Baukunst der Nachkriegsmoderne. Architekturführer Berlin 1949-1979." As long-time dean of Faculty I 2005-2012, Buttlar was able to constructively promote the restructuring of the faculty required by the downsizing of the humanities due to higher education policy and the introduction of the new tiered degree programs, and in particular the establishment of the Institute for Art Studies and Historical Urban Studies. Since 2011, he has been an academic advisor to the Wüstenrot Foundation Ludwigsburg, which, among other things, carries out exemplary renovations of post-war modernist architectural monuments. Since his retirement in 2013, Buttlar has led two DFG research projects at the institute on Prussian monument preservation in the German Empire and on German-Russian cultural transfer in the 19th century, and in 2016 he took up a visiting professorship at the TU St. Petersburg.

Wolfgang Wolters was succeeded in 2001 by Roland Kanz (b.1961) with a focus on Italian art, but he moved to the tradition-rich chair at the University of Bonn as early as 2002. The position was withdrawn in the then dawning crisis and one of the four assistant positions was replaced instead by a temporary junior professorship, for which the Institute was able to recruit the young French art historian Bénédicte Savoy (b. 1972). In 2009, she moved to a temporary professorship funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and in 2013 to the vacant chair of "Art History of Modernism." Bénédicte Savoy, who received her doctorate with a study of Napoleon's art theft in 2000 (French, 2003; German, 2011), together with her team of young scholars opened up new avenues in both research and teaching through numerous innovative third-party-funded projects, some of which grew out of seminars, such as "Tempel der Kunst. The Emergence of the Public Museum in Germany. 1701-1815" (Mainz 2006, Cologne 2015²), "Museumsgeschichte. Kommentierte Quellentexte 1750-1950" (Berlin 2010), "Die Berliner Museumsinsel. Impressions of International Visitors (1830-1990)" (Cologne 2013) and with the curation of the exhibitions "Napoleon and Europe. Dream and Trauma" at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn 2010/11 and "The Humboldt Brothers. The Europe of the Spirit" at the Paris Observatory in 2014 ("Les frères Humboldt. L'Europe de l'Esprit," catalog Paris 2014), and with research on "Nefertiti. A Franco-German Affair 1912-1931" (Cologne 2011) and handbooks such as "Pariser Lehrjahre. An Encyclopedia on the Training of German Painters in the French Capital," 2 vols. (Berlin 2012/2015) provide new perspectives in cultural history, namely focused on European cultural transfer and museum studies. Focusing her work on the artistic and cultural relationship between Germany and France, Savoy has received numerous national and international awards in rapid succession since 2009, most recently the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation and election to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2016). Since 2014, she has been represented in teaching by Prof. Dr. Bärbel Küster as part of the Volkswagen Foundation's Opus Magnum funding.

Suckale's successor as representative of the art history department since 2008 is Magdalena Bushart, who had studied at the FU Berlin, at the University of Vienna and at the Courtauld Institute London. She taught after her doctorate (with the standard work on the Gothic reception of modernism "Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst. Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie 1911 - 1925," Munich 1990) and after her assistantship at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, she held the chair of art history at the TU Munich from 1992 to 1997 and subsequently at the TU Berlin until 2006. Bushart habilitated in Munich in 2002 with a thesis on "Albrecht Altdorfer in seiner Zeit. Religious and Profane Themes in Art around 1500" (published under the title "Sehen und erkennen. Albrecht Altdorfer's Religious Images," Munich 2004) and was appointed to the chair of art history at the University of Stuttgart in 2006. In 2008 she returned to the chair of Robert Suckales at the TU, which she had held in the meantime. Bushart teaches and researches architecture and the visual arts from the late Middle Ages to the present (including Nazi art), as well as art theory and art criticism, for example on Adolf Behne, Walter Gropius and Wilhelm Worringer. A new focus is the research on the materiality of the arts and on artistic techniques and processes, which, under Bushart's direction, decisively determine the profile of the institute in teaching and not least through the conference and publication series "Interdependencies," which is oriented toward the history of science. Her most recent publications include "Technische Innovationen und künstlerisches Wissen in der Frühen Neuzeit" (with Henrike Haug; Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2015), "Colour histories. Science, art, and technology in the 17th and 18th centuries" (together with Friedrich Steinle; Berlin 2015), "Die Farbe Grau" (together with Gregor Wedekind, Berlin 2016), "Formlos - formbar. Bronze as Artistic Material" (together with Henrike Haug; Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2016), and "Art History in the Occupied Territories" (together with Agnieska Gasior and Alena Janatková; Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2016). Bushart also succeeded in acquiring a new junior professorship for the Institute, awarded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which was filled by Aleksandra Lipińska in 2012 until her appointment to Munich in 2016 and was dedicated to the Eastern European focus introduced by Robert Suckale.

In 2013, von Buttlar's successor as chair of the Landesdenkmalrat Berlin (since 2009) and in research and teaching on the history of modernist architecture was Professor Kerstin Wittmann-Englert (born in 1962). 1962), who after her studies in Berlin and Bonn (where she received her doctorate on a topic of Byzantine architectural history) had been an assistant at the National Museums in Berlin from 1992 to 1994, then taught at Freie Universität and from 1998 worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the research training group "Kunstwissenschaft, Bauforschung, Denkmalpflege" and then as a research assistant at our institute, where she habilitated in 2005 with the study "Zelt, Schiff, Wohnung - Kirchenbauten der Nachkriegsmoderne" (Lindenberg 2006). Since then, Wittmann-Englert has been involved in architectural history project seminars and conferences and corresponding publications for the research and preservation of recent architectural heritage. Most recently, monographs resulting from project seminars on the new embassy buildings in Berlin (2004) and on the buildings of the state representations (2013) were published, as well as the 2015 conference volume co-edited with Paul Sigel, "Der Freiraum unter dem Berliner Fernsehturm. Historical Dimensions of a Modernist Urban Space." Since 2014, Wittmann-Englert has also been a member of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee Expert Group on 20th Century Heritage.

Teaching and organization in the departments are supported not least by the current generation of research assistants Andrea Meyer (since 2003); Henrike Haug 2009-2015 (since then at the KHI Florence); Stefanie Stallschus and Ilka Waßewitz (both since 2012) and Isabelle Dolezalek (since 2016), who set new accents, especially in material iconology and modern and contemporary art.

 Once again, the broad and attractive range of courses offered by the TU's art history departments has been and continues to be indebted to the contribution of numerous visiting scholars, collaborators in externally funded projects, and lecturers, including for many years the restorers Mechthild Most and Hildegard Homburger, the private lecturers Gerhard Charles Rump, Annemarie Jaeggi (director of the Bauhaus Archive), Frank Martin (†, former head of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi at the BBAW), Jiří Veit (since 2014 director of the Czech National Gallery in Prague), Veronica Biermann (since 2014 director of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi at the BBAW). Head of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi at the BBAW), Jiří Veit (since 2014 Director of the Czech National Gallery in Prague), Veronica Biermann (currently Professor at the University of Leipzig), and Gerrit Walczak (currently Professor at the University of Cologne), as well as the Hororar Professors Hartmut Krohm (b. 1940), who served as deputy director of the sculpture collection at Berlin's Bode Museum until 2005, and Stefan Simon (formerly Rathgen Research Laboratory, since 2014 director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University). In addition, numerous staff members are involved in externally funded research projects at the Institute.

Last but not least: the position at the photo library of our institute, occupied since 1990 by the photographer and image author Markus Hilbich, enabled the establishment and expansion of a comprehensive specialized library and the continuous conversion of courses to digital media, the creation of special image databases and the targeted documentary support of numerous research projects and publications. The changing staff of tutors and the two institute secretaries, Eva Wolff and Annick Trellu, should also not go unmentioned and unpraised as guarantors of the increasingly complex but still smoothly functioning operation of TU Art Science.

As has been the case for some 200 years now, the subject of Art Studies remains "in flux" and will continue in the future with a critical eye, on the one hand, to remain aware of the high obligations of the artistic heritage and its research, mediation and preservation, and on the other hand, to try to respond to the new challenges and desiderata of modern social and academic development.

July 2016

Adrian von Buttlar
(using preliminary work by Christoph Brachmann)