Aufbewahrungssaal während des Museumsumbaus

Painted in 1848 in pastel and held in the Alte Nationalgalerie, 'Aufbewahrungssaal während des Museumsumbaus' (Storage Hall during Museum Renovation) belongs to Menzel's ongoing documentation of unusual interior spaces — here, a museum storage room during building work, an environment where artworks are temporarily displaced from their display settings. The subject has a characteristically Menzel quality of finding pictorial interest in circumstances of institutional transition and disorder. The pastel medium, unusual for him, allows a different kind of atmospheric notation than oil paint. The year 1848 was one of his most productive for private observational work, coinciding with the revolutions that transformed European political life. The renovation of the Berlin museum complex in the late 1840s was part of the broader cultural ambitions of the Prussian state under Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who commissioned the expansion of the Museum Island.

The pastel medium gives the image a different surface quality from Menzel's oil paintings — softer tonal gradations, a powdery luminosity, and characteristic delicacy. He adapts his tonal precision to the medium's possibilities, building the storage hall's interior from graduated colour passages.