James Simon Gallery

This guide to the James Simon Gallery on Berlin's Museum Island tells the story of James Simon, a cotton merchant who financed the 1912 excavation at Tell el-Amarna that turned up the bust of Nefertiti and kept her, for years, in his own dining room before giving her to the city. It follows his enormous, deliberately quiet philanthropy, roughly a third of his fortune and thousands of objects donated to Berlin's museums, and the disdain he had for being thanked. You'll hear how the Nazi regime treated his name afterward. Look up at the seventy slender white columns of David Chipperfield's entrance pavilion as you listen.