Along the Royal Road

The Bard Graduate Center Gallery produces multiple exhibitions and publications each year, serving as a vital center of learning and a catalyst for engagement in the interrelated disciplines of decorative arts, design, and material culture. The gallery is celebrated in the museum world for its longstanding legacy of landmark projects dedicated to significant—yet often understudied—figures and movements in the history of decorative arts and design; these exhibitions and publications typically represent the definitive intervention on the artists and objects they investigate. BGC Gallery is also committed to generating and supporting a vast range of diverse presentations, small and large, that challenge traditional approaches to object inquiry; these examinations of material culture explore the human experience as manifest in our creation and use of “things” of all kinds. Whether originating in internal research and expertise, or in collaboration with external subject specialists, these endeavors prioritize rigorous scholarship while seeking to adhere to the field’s highest standards in production and design.

Bard Graduate Center’s inaugural exhibition Along the Royal Road: Berlin and Potsdam in KPM Porcelain and Painting, 1815-1848 explored the intimate relationship between the decorative and the fine arts in the first half of the 19th century, setting them in a social and political context.

The exhibition featured 70 architectural and landscape paintings and drawings by Carl Daniel Freydanck as well as 30 presentation porcelains from the Royal Porcelain Manufactory (KPM) in Berlin. The porcelains were particularly distinguished by their meticulously-painted decoration—miniaturized “views” taken directly from Freydanck’s original oil paintings. Together, the canvases and porcelains depicted the sights of the royal court of Prussia as they were admired by travelers along the historic road that linked Berlin and Potsdam. In the exhibition, the scenes were arranged sequentially in the order they would have been encountered on the royal road, along with contemporary photographs of surviving sites from the same vantage points painted by Freydanck.

Presented just three years after German reunification, the exhibition illustrated how the changing urban landscape of Berlin and Potsdam inspired KPM’s designers and how these views were widely disseminated. One highlight was an amphora shaped presentation vase, dated 1848, featuring views of Berlin architecture painted on both sides: one of the Royal Palace, since destroyed, and the other showing the newly rebuilt Opera House.

On view from October 16, 1993–January 30, 1994, the exhibition was organized by Bard Graduate Center with Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, also the principal lender of objects. It was curated by Winfried Baer and Ilse Baer.

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