Why go
Names such as Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, Die Brücke and Gerhard Richter give you distinct things to look for in a museum. They also prevent a broad art collection from becoming a blur of periods. Start with a movement that interests you, then compare how later artists challenged its way of seeing.
The full story
Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder offer entry points into Renaissance art. Caspar David Friedrich's landscapes take the visitor into Romanticism, where mood and the human relationship with nature matter as much as topography. Around the early twentieth century, groups including Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter helped develop Expressionism in Germany. Their work makes a sharp comparison with the New Objectivity that emerged in the Weimar Republic, with its more unsentimental attention to contemporary life. After the Second World War, artists worked across Neo-Expressionism, performance, conceptual art and photography. Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher suggest how varied that later field became. The documenta exhibition and the Berlin Biennale are further names to know when exploring contemporary art, though any particular program needs a current check. Rather than trying to memorize an artist list, look for the shifts in subject, material and attitude between periods.