Neue Nationalgalerie to Survey Ulay 50 Years After Spitzweg Heist

Fifty years after Ulay brazenly lifted Carl Spitzweg’s Der arme Poet (1839) from the Neue Nationalgalerie to hang it in the Kreuzberg living room of a Turkish guest-worker family, the Berlin museum is opening its doors to the artist who once breached them.

Running from November 28 to May 2, the major survey Ulay, Ulay & Abramović directly confronts his 1976 action and its aftermath.

On December 12, 1976, Ulay took Spitzweg's beloved Biedermeier canvas off the wall, carried it out to a waiting vehicle, and transported it across the city to an immigrant household before alerting the authorities.

He intended the act as an assault on the cloistered sanctity of national museums, a challenge to German bourgeois culture and a spotlight on the systemic marginalization of Berlin's migrant laborers.

Ulay, Ulay & Abramović leans heavily on archival video, photographic records and period ephemera detailing the 1976 theft and its media fallout.