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›Haus und Bäume‹ (House and Trees) shows a motif from Dangast, the seaside resort on the Friesian North Sea coast near Varel, which Karl Schmidt-Rottluff visited several times between 1909 and 1912 and where he produced some of his most important pieces. He probably painted this piece in late summer 1912. The previous year Schmidt-Rottluff had moved to Berlin as the last member of the artists’ group ›Die Brücke‹ (The Bridge), where he found new inspiration for his painting through his contact with the art of the international avant-garde. It was above all the exhibitions in Herwarth Walden’s gallery ›Der Sturm‹ (The Storm) that encouraged Schmidt-Rottluff in his experiments with new forms of artistic expression. The gallery was opened in March 1912 with the first exhibition by the artists’ group ›Der Blaue Reiter‹ (The Blue Rider), which had already been on show in Munich and Cologne and included such works as ›La Ville‹ by Robert Delaunay. From April to May of the same year Walden showed an exhibition with works by the Italian Futurists. Schmidt-Rottluff was strongly attracted by the formal and artistic approaches in the works of artists belonging to ›The Blaue Reiter‹, such as Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay, as well as the Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà. Nonetheless the new elements in his painting may also be related to his experience of the epochal ›Sonderbund‹ exhibition in Cologne from the end of May to the end of September 1912, which featured, among others, Cubist works by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Finally, through his exploration of the works of the Cubists, Paul Cézanne’s painting also influenced the genesis of his painting style. Particularly important here are Cézanne’s late landscapes. In the context of Museum Folkwang’s collection the work, purchased in 2008, supplements its stock of Expressionist painting and visualizes the close artistic exchange that took place between France and Germany in the initial decades of the 20th century. This reference is particularly evident compared to the works of Paul Cézanne, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. Today Museum Folkwang owns five paintings by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, which illustrate his artistic development through its various stages. ›Rote Blüten‹ (Red Blossoms, 1906/07) illustrates the artist’s early days. ›Fischerkähne auf dem Haff‹ (Fishing Boats at the Backwater, 1913) and ›Kurische Nehrung‹ (Curonian Spit, 1914) were produced in the first few years after the dissolution of the artists’ group ›Die Brücke‹ (1912). Finally, the works ›Das letzte Fuder‹ (The Last Cartload, 1922) and ›Spiegelnder See‹ (Leba Lake in Pomerania, 1936) were created in the decades when Schmidt-Rottluff received public recognition, shortly before his career was destroyed by the cultural policies of the Nazis. Until it lost them as a consequence of the expropriations of »degenerate art« in 1937, Museum Folkwang owned three works from the years around 1912, which were so crucial to Schmidt-Rottluff’s artistic development. The paintings ›Landschaft mit Feldern‹ (Landscape with Fields) from 1911 (today owned by the Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg), ›Boote im Haff‹ (Boats in the Backwater) from 1913 (at the Osthaus Museum, Hagen) and ›Frauen am Meer‹ (Women by the Sea) from 1919 (whereabouts unknown) were unable to be retrieved after 1945.
»Behold the man!« Honoré Daumier was known throughout his life primarily as a caricaturist. With ›Ecce Homo‹, he transfers his satirical style to the canvas and gives the unfinished painting a sculptural quality. The Latin title stems from the Gospel of John and has enjoyed an illustrious presence in art history since then. On the one hand, it describes the scene of Pontius Pilate’s »presentation of Christ«, depicting Jesus and the people of Jerusalem mocking him. On the other hand, it is used for devotional pictures portraying the suffering Christ as a half figure or as a standing whole figure. Time and again, the Christian pictorial tradition has inspired artists to develop new means of expression in order to give Man a tangible form in his fallibility and vulnerability.
»In December 2014, I make my first entrance to Libya. I try to gain access to a detention center, which I manage to do in Zawiya, a male-only prison located 80 kilometers west of Tripoli. These are the first images I realize in Libya, and I only get one hour to take them. I am followed by a police officer who forbids some men to talk to me, and authorizes others arbitrarily. We are in the courtyard of the prison, surrounded by large walls. Some hundred people are there. The guards force the prisoners to squat for the «purpose» of the image. Stages, humiliations: media practices that seem to be commonplace in the compound. I oppose to it. I decide to start with gathering testimonials instead and not to make photographs first, as an attempt to get away from this forced staging. However, the detainees quickly confess to me that they have received instructions from the jailers to specifically tell me that they have tried to reach Italy by sea. In fact, these men state that they came to Libya hoping to find work or to flee areas of conflict. Now they are moved from prison to prison without reason, without knowing when and how they can get out. As they look straight into my camera, I record their faces, but they are men without papers, without an official identity.« Detention center for migrants, Zawiya, Libya The ›Human Writes Drawings‹ by choreographer and artist William Forsythe arise during performances – when large-format sheets of paper, mounted on sturdy metal tables, are written on by dancers, who to this end use their hands, feet, and mouths. The rough drawings, so suffused with energy, refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed in 1948. To this day, institutions and countries are often admonished to comply with it.
19th century German-speaking artists’ enthusiasm for Italy was the reason for Italian motifs in drawing and painting being very widespread. Equally, the world of the Alps, whose crossing was a prerequisite for every stay in Italy, was often reflected in the art of the day. Of special interest for today are the numerous drawings made on site which thus give a direct impression of a certain landscapes. Useful for this were sketchbooks in which optical impressions could be quickly captured with a pencil. Ludwig Richter also used sketchbooks when travelling alone to Italy in the summer of 1823, using his trip for excursions and hikes off his route to visit and draw notable landscape formations. The Grafische Sammlung in the Museum Folkwang holds 15 of Richter’s pencil drawings he made during this trip. Because of his precise labelling and often exact dating, the holding can be used to retrace Richter’s route. On 8 August, 1823 he made four drawings of the ›Traun Waterfalls‹ near Lambach, which lies to the north of Salzburg, where he stayed from 27 June to 5 August. Then Richter headed south, drawing ›The Oven‹ – cliffs which had collapsed onto one another and through which the Salzach flowed, near Golling – on 13 and 14 August. Richter then followed the Salzach towards Lend, which he reached on 15 August and in the surroundings of which he drew the narrow gorges which the river flowed through (›The Gorge near Lend‹, ›Waterfall near Lend‹). From Innsbruck, which he reached on 24 August, staying there until 5 September, Richter crossed the Brenner Pass at dawn on 6 September, as shown by another of his drawings on which Richter captured in a few words the fascinating effects of the early morning light: »The horns’ golden glow/blue humid shadows«. Apart from such detailed studies of landscapes, as often seen from a walker’s perspective, Richter also drew the large panoramas which appeared less frequently, such as ›The Tännengebirge near Salzburg‹ or the view of the ›Untersberg near Salzberg‹ which rises behind a broad plain. Independent of the question of the section he chose, Richter’s Alp drawings fascinate with directness with which they capture the events, beyond the conventions of the day for the construction of a landscape drawing as had been formulated and employed only a few years before by Adrian Zingg. Aside from such sketchbook sheets, there were also large format drawings, such as Karl Ludwig Seeger’s depiction of the ›Jochberg‹ in the Bavarian foothills, for which it is difficult to determine whether, in spite of the exact dating of 19 May, 1834, because of its size, it was made directly on site or whether Seeger used smaller preparatory sketches which he then employed in the larger format. The same is true of Christian Morgenstern’s slightly more recent depiction of ›The Black Lake in the Voges‹. Both sheets are united by a great interest in the depiction of the otherwise quite different geological features.
A father, the painter Otto Dix, looks at his child. Nelly is ecstatic amid the many flowers and the buzzing bees. Her eyes alert, her arms outstretched, and with an elated step, she discovers the world and is completely at one with herself. The initially so idyllic representation becomes slightly uncomfortable when viewed over a longer time. The plants seem to tower over Nelly, thus indicating that being a child is also connected with experiences of excessive demand, abandonment, and fear. The works of artists and photographers who depict children and their worlds often have something ambivalent about them. The adult world meets the supposedly carefree childhood and is reflected in it: childlike games and competitions anticipate the challenges of adulthood or forcefully show the viewer how fragile human existence is at every age.
After Max Pechstein returned from Paris, the nightlife in Berlin casts a spell on him. Inspired by the exciting world of vaudeville and theatre, he created his first compositions devoted to dance in 1909. In 1910, his preoccupation with the subject was even seen as the antithesis of working in the great outdoors. Pechstein notes: »Unfortunately, my Mori[t]zburg works are quite lacking in energy and [I] want to get going as soon as [I] have some means, [I] have two dance halls in mind [...]«. ›Dancers‹ is one of the paintings that Pechstein created in Berlin in autumn/winter 1910. By 1911, the work had already passed into the possession of the theatre critic and dramaturge Felix Hollaender, who succeeded Max Reinhardt as director of the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Privately owned since then, the Folkwang-Museumsverein was able to acquire the painting for the Museum Folkwang collection from the estate of Dr Walter and Liselotte Griese in December 2019. Here the new acquisition is placed in changing contexts, exhibited together with works by Edgar Degas, the artists’ group Die Brücke (The Bridge) and photographs of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre.
After working as a photojournalist, Germaine Krull (1897 Wilda, nr. Poznan – 1985 Wetzlar) managed the ›Oriental‹ hotel in Bangkok from 1946 to 1966. She published two books on Thailand, in 1964 ›Bankok. Siam’s City of Angels‹ (Robert Hale, London) and in 1966 ›Tales from Siam‹ (Robert Hale, London), in which together with Dorothea Melchers she wrote of her life there. In this period she produced over 2,000 photographs of Buddha statues in Thailand and Cambodia. Krull developed a friendship with the abbot of the Chiang Mai monastery and a deep connection to Buddhism. She later converted to Buddhism in India. Krull’s group of works was not the product of a scientific project, but attests to a personal interest and at the same time deep respect of the national culture. The statues she photographed are shown in use in their original context. Even the sculptures in temple ruins sometimes show by means of a sash that they are still revered as sacred. Krull was particularly fascinated by how the stone artefacts fused with nature by means of rampant lichens and climbing plants.
Although not as numerous as his other works, Grieshaber did not treat his posters as subsidiary products. Not only did new constellations of printing blocks, partly using new colours, produce something with a certain autonomy, it was also sometimes the case that he cut printing blocks specifically for making posters. These could be adapted in terms of size, mirror images of motifs or motifs specially produced for making posters (printing blocks). Accordingly, posters play more than a subsidiary role, becoming themselves the expression of an independent artistic examination of a topic. Exhibition posters The boundaries between independent and applied art are seldom so difficult to define and the transition between an artist’s independent graphic oeuvre and his posters so blurred as is the case with the work of HAP Grieshaber. The posters for his own exhibitions in particular were produced under the same conditions as his graphic oeuvre. Colour woodcuts were his preferred printing technique. The printing blocks produced for printing his graphic oeuvre were also used for producing the posters. Here, new constellations could emerge, as the printing blocks for various different graphic works could be reassembled in a new way for a poster. As well as the posters for his own exhibitions, he also produced a large number of posters for other clients. These commissioned posters can be divided up into two groups: one group encompasses the posters that Grieshaber produced as colour woodcuts, and the other those where the motifs use other printing techniques, e.g. offset printing. Of course, with industrial printing processes such as offset printing it is not possible to exert an individual influence on what happens, i.e., to produce anything by hand. Accordingly, such posters cannot be considered to have equal importance. Political posters HAP Grieshaber’s first political poster dates back to 1950. ›Die Wahrheit siegt‹ (Truth conquers) announces a lecture about the impending Korean War (1950-1953); other posters followed. 1967-8 saw posters such as those condemning the military dictatorship in Greece, where his motifs could also be used by other like-minded groups. In this way, Grieshaber’s motifs were connected with particular political views and became widespread as visual representations of certain ideas. Grieshaber’s political posters identify strongly with the oppressed and a longing for freedom and democracy. The oppression that he himself had suffered under the Nazi dictatorship (1933-1945) meant that this work was based on his own experiences. His last political poster appeared in connection with the 1980 election campaign for the federal government in Germany and stated ›Demokraten wählen‹ (Vote for the democrats). Posters for music and the stage Grieshaber varied his own visual language to suit the task at hand, which resulted in memorable pieces. He took the idea of a stage setting and lent it a virtual spatial depth, implying a third dimension and distancing himself from the purely two-dimensional designs of his woodcuts. He also produced three posters for Württembergisches Staatstheater for the season 1972-3. There were only a few common elements in these works, but enough for them to be perceived as a series. The way that he formulated the dates and placed the texts relating to the client and the play formed the framework. In each case, Grieshaber contented himself with a single central motif which received very restrained treatment: the outline is clear, the inner structure subtly complex, thus taking account of posters’ particular function.
Animals play different and often contradictory roles in our lives. In both literature and theater, as well as in the visual arts and in arts and crafts, the motif of the animal has been used for millennia as a vessel filled with multiple meanings. In the collection of Museum Folkwang, the depictions range from tile decorations to the design of a hood ornament. Just as Pinocchio encounters the cunning fox and the smart cat in Carlo Collodi’s novel, animals become symbols due to their manifold characteristics. In pieces of jewelry or devotional objects, they transfer their powers to humans; in narratives and fairy tales, however, they also serve to caricature human characteristics. In this respect, the works exhibited here often serve as mirror for us humans.
Around 1918 Otto Mueller produced a painting of his wife Maschka with a confident flourish. He places a wooden mask next to her face – the mask symbolizes the painter himself, who felt estranged from Maschka. It also creates pictorial distance and shows how art works from across the world changed the formal canon of European art. The mask also has a function in theatrical performances: It exaggerates, caricaturizes and reveals character traits in a subtle way that would otherwise remain hidden behind the façade of the everyday. Be it in painting, printmaking, poster art or photography, the mask is ubiquitous. It provides a surface onto which fantasies can be projected and allows the protagonists to assume new roles.
Art and advertising are closely connected with the modern metropolis. Posters, neon signs and display windows have shaped the appearance of urban space ever since the late 19th century. Modernist artists therefore frequently focused on the change this brought in people’s perceptions. Art and advertising both compete for the attention of the general public. Here, Pop Art consciously walks the fine line between a critical distance from advertising and the cult of celebrity on the one hand, and a calculated use of their aesthetic on the other. Poster designers for their part pick up on the pictorial language of art and photojournalism and work with the viewing habits and expectations that these engender. In this way, individual motifs and slogans alternate, each adapted for their own purposes, back and forth between the two sides.
Art and applied photography by German and international photographers is the focus of the Collection for the period after 1945. Subjective Composition Extensive lots from the ›fotoform‹ group and the three ›subjektive fotografie‹ exhibitions put together by Otto Steinert represent the artistic endeavours of a generation of photographers who sought freely and consciously composed pictorial solutions. For their photographic interpretations of reality they drew on photographic avant-garde experiments from the 1920’s. While the ›fotoform‹ group, which included Otto Steinert, Ludwig Windstosser, Wolfgang Reisewitz and Peter Keetman among others, first emphasised the formal in their composition, the ›subjective fotografie‹ lot points to a broader concept which also includes international reportage photography. Applied Photography In the field of applied photography, precise composition and creative pictorial solutions were also sought after. The ›economic miracle‹ of the 1950’s provided artistically ambitious professional photographers with a large and varied range of possibilities. Apart from Steinert’s and Keetman’s photographic estates, the Collection holds large groups of works of applied photographers such as Ewald Hoinkis, Willi Moegle and Nils Laugesen which offer an impression of the broad field of architectural, industrial, object and fashion photography. The mostly minimalistic still lifes of the American photographer Irving Penn arose in an editorial, advertising and artistic context. Documentary photo-journalism of this period is also represented in large groups of works of German photographers: for example photo-reportages by Rolf Gillhausen, known above all as an ambitious photo editor of the magazines ›Stern‹ and ›Geo‹ and who was honored as a photographer in his first exhibition in Essen in 1986. Other photographs and reportages are by Eberhard Seeliger, Robert Lebeck, Jürgen Heinemann and Barbara Klemm. With works by Eugene Richards, Leonard Freed, Gilles Peress and Edward Adams, the Photographic Collection also offers an impression of the international range of this genre, of individually distinct commitments and related strategies of visualization. Unusual, Individual Statements Robert Frank, a Swiss originally from Germany, who presented a very personal, socially critical statement with ›The Americans‹ in 1955, made an early contribution to emancipating reporting photography as an artistic means of expression. Beyond contract work, photography and film’s documentary qualities were increasingly used for self-reflective, experimental or metaphorical statements. Comical, tragic-comical, enigmatic and blunt examples of this development are found in the Collection in the works of, for example, Lee Friedlander, Larry Fink, Garry Winogrand and Larry Clark from the USA or the Czech Josef Koudelka. Facets of Portraits Portrayals of people from this period, multifaceted and crossing various genres, are also included in the Photographic Collection: with Steinert’s strictly composed photographs of Nobel Prize winners in the 1960’s; with works by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, with Diane Arbus’s portraits which capture social extremes. Added to the two works by Arnulf Rainer in the Collection, examples of his explorations which reflect on the media and himself from the series ›Faces Farces‹, were examples of his Photomatons. A prime example of different characterizations of ›Germans‹ in the 1960/70’s are photographs from projects by the Swiss René Burri, the Americans Leonard Freed and Will McBride as well as the German photographers Stefan Moses, Gabriele und Helmut Nothhelfer and Timm Rautert.
Artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva composes her painting ›Ville Grise‹ as if it were a mosaic. She transposes the ›grey city‹ that provides the title of the piece into an abstract space where what we experience is perhaps a rainy winter’s day, the last snow in February, or even stones laid without any greenery? In terms of associations, the piece is accompanied in the hall by scenes of what is at times miserable everyday urban life. It is thus joined Adolf Menzel’s portrait of a bearded man whose face is scarred by many years of hard work, Carl Hofer’s painting of two seated women whose corporeal texture melds with the draperies in the background, or Heinrich Kley’s male figure who stands forlorn in front of the gigantic ›Friedrich Alfred Hütte Blast Furnaces‹, surrounded by smoke and metal. Bound up with all this is the question of the extent to which what surrounds us, what we perceive, then permeates us – be it in art or in reality.
Artistic endeavour can focus in different ways on the human body, exploring it, expanding it, dissecting it, mercilessly exposing corporeality. Approaching the body with the senses tends to direct the eye to its violability, something that is then taken to the point of pain and physical decay. At the same time, individual limbs refer to the fact that a body can be dismembered, with their liberation from all functions bringing irony into play. In the differing realizations, the physical presence of the canvases itself gets tackled, with it being subjected to wounds or organic distortion. The artistic occupation with our inner and outer states can encourage a renewed awareness of our own corporeality.
Artists address the subjects of identity, gender and sexuality in a multitude of different ways. Here, the focus is on portrayals which do not adhere to accepted heterosexual norms. The amorphous figures in Yves Tanguy’s ›Les amoureux‹ (The Lovers) approach each other and simultaneously transcend the human shape. In the case of Roni Horn, flowing water has become a symbol of the mutability of self, something that is also her chosen theme in what seem at first sight to be identical double portraits and her works on paper which have been dissected and then reassembled in different ways. George Minne’s fountain sculptures and Maillol’s ›Le Coureur Cycliste‹ (The Racing Cyclist) are the expression of a delicate and vulnerable masculinity, whereas Harry Hachmeister ironically subverts standards in self-styling. As posters from the history of various activist movements make clear, current queer positions are the result of decades of social and political struggle
Artists have been exploring various routes to abstraction ever since the 19th century. The subject of the landscape is critical to that search, since it is in observing nature that the gaze becomes lost. This process is utilized in painting: As the gaze wanders, recognizing the scenery in the distance but dissolving that which is close by into fields of colour, the subject of the image recedes to make way for what is happening on the canvas. Hence, in Cézanne’s canvasses the blots of colour (»taches«) on the canvas blend to form the rural architecture of a quarry, while the large-format ›Water Lily‹ paintings by Claude Monet appear like a sea of colour. Monet had been working on the idea of space-consuming »decoration« that lay behind this series of works since as early as 1914, and in 1927 he was able to realize it in the Orangerie in Paris, which became something of a »Sistine Chapel of Impressionism« post-1945. For artists like Mark Rothko, Monet’s handling of light and colour was a model to be emulated.
Artists have been fascinated with travel for many years. They have highlighted both the subject of being in-between places, and that of the foreign and/or exotic. What travelers see and experience is absorbed in all manner of ways, with curiosity or wonder, as inspiration or with a feeling of perceived cultural superiority. In her ›Zugvögel‹ (›Migratory Birds‹, 2005–6) series, photographer Yvonne Seidel documents the life of pensioners from all over Europe who spend the winter months on a campsite in North Africa. These modern nomads are hardly interested in their surroundings, they come merely for the sunshine and remain faithful to the habits of their home countries. Images of routes travelled and the destinations continue to describe places of longing for most people down through time. After their first beginnings in the 19th century package tours became a mass phenomenon in the 20th century, one that increasingly focused on the travelers not on the places.
Be it in painting or photography – the surface of the image needs to be mastered. And so artists investigate and expand it in series and experiments that revolve around figure and form: What is an image, how does it evolve, what boundaries does it have, and what does it evoke? Günther Uecker answers these questions with three-dimensional nail pictures that begin to shimmer with a change in light and as you move around them. Roman Opalka meticulously wrote successive numbers onto his canvasses. He saw these as symbolizing the passage of time. Lotte Jacobi, Oskar Kreisel and Otto Steinert created abstract photographs in the dark room, the images’ dynamism and expressivity generated solely through the changes in light on the photographic paper.
Colonialism has also left its mark on German museum collections and cities – and not only in the works of the European avant-gardes influenced by non-Western art. Highlighting these intricate linkages and the provenance of objects while developing new perspectives are among the goals of a decolonialist art history. Colonialism did not begin in 1492 with the »discovery« of America, but this date is considered the beginning of its worldwide spread. One event that occurred around the time Museum Folkwang was founded was the brutal crushing of the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria by British troops in 1897. Royal possessions were seized as booty, taken to Europe, and sold on the art market there. More than 1,000 Benin bronzes ended up in German museums, including ›Uhumnw-elao‹ (Memorial Head of an ›Oba‹ or King). Since 2021, Museum Folkwang has participated in the Digital Benin project launched by the Benin Dialogue Group, which includes the Royal Court of Benin, the Edo State Government, and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria, as well as all European museums with significant collections of items from Benin. In Essen, the EXILE association offers city tours on the topic of colonialism.
Coptic textiles Egypt, 3rd – 8th century CE. For the followers of the Arts & Crafts movement it was virtually a must to own a collection of Egyptian textiles from Late Antiquity. Indeed, until the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s they were considered the oldest textiles in the world. They survived as filling and clothing for mummies and as rags in rubbish dumps in ancient settlements. When compiling his collection, Karl Ernst Osthaus primarily selected textiles based on the artistic or artisanal execution of the decoration. The fragments, mostly embellished sections, were cut out from surviving fabrics and garments and sold individually. These textiles are commonly described as ›Coptic‹, creating associations with Egyptian Christians and a religious context. This Christian community, however, only separated from the main church in 451 A.D., while the textiles themselves often date from much earlier. Furthermore, their motifs relate to a Hellenistic tradition that continued unbroken into the Islamic period. Thus ›Coptic‹ is used here in its original sense of ›Egyptian‹, a short form from the Greek ›Aigyptioi‹. The focus in the collection put together by Karl Ernst Osthaus, probably at the turn of the century, lies in the artistic, artisanal working of the ornamentation of the textiles. The fragments, generally decorative pieces, were cut from cloths and clothes and sold individually.
Crystals reveal the geometrical side to nature. In art, the theme of crystals combines the abstract and the figurative, because in crystals the abstract is at the same time nature. In the 1910s, crystalline shapes emerged as a symbol of a utopian departure into the domain of the transcendental. In Expressionism in particular, artists sought to enhance the simple life by artistic means – just as carbon turns into diamond crystals. The crystalline is to be found as a leitmotif in various artistic movements: By means of ›prismaism‹, Lyonel Feininger gives space crystalline form in his paintings; Max Ernst has the mineralogical shape radiate cosmologically in all directions; and in his monumental canvas ›The Star‹ Fritz Winter expands it into outer space.
Directly following the series on the tale ›Lenz‹, Walter Gramatté created illustrations for Georg Büchner’s drama ›Woyzeck‹, whose title figure is driven to murder his love by the unscrupulousness and lack of interest of his fellow man. »It has been done once more in strang, energetic lines. Quite simple, but very balanced. Like always, I’ve tried to open myself to the inner tensions, veiled by seemingly brutal forms and lines.« (W. Gramatté, 1925)
Erich Heckel dedicated this early series to the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, published only ten years earlier, in which Oscar Wilde described his shattering experience during his two-year imprisonment, which he was sentenced to because of his public declaration of his homosexuality. Wilde, who personally experienced what people can do to one another, left gaol in 1897 as a broken, sick man and died three years later.
Even if a true to nature reproduction of a real landscape gained increasing importance in the 19th century, the concept of the heroic landscape, existing since the Renaissance and very common during the Baroque period, was still current, a concept in which dramatic events, usually taken from mythology, were played out. Johann Christian Reinhart’s sepia drawing ›Atalantas fights Hyllus and Rhoecus‹ from 1799, for example, illustrates the struggle of Atalanta, the outcast daughter of the king, against two centaurs, who are attempting to approach her: one centaur is already fatally wounded, the second is about to suffer the same fate as Atalanta has already aimed her drawn bow at him. This dramatic event takes place in a fictional landscape in which the various classical pictorial elements are brought together. The foreground is characterized by a so-called repoussoir in dark colors, formed from the silhouette of a tree rising from the left and a wedge-shaped, shaded field, behind which the light clearing with the figures stands out all the more clearly. Rugged, looming cliffs, a stream tumbling over a number of falls, but also the striking grove of trees in the centre create the impression of a primeval landscape beyond civilization – corresponding to the event depicted as Atalanta was raised by bears in the wilderness far from human society. The only sign of civilization is the gate of a temple which can be made out in the distance. The principle protagonist of heroic landscapes in the 19th century was Joseph Anton Koch, who spent almost his entire artistic career in Rome. The themes he dealt with could be taken from classical mythology, as in the drawings ›Landscape with Hercules at the Crossroads‹ and ›Diana and Acteon‹, but also from the Bible, to which ›Landscape with the Flight to Egypt‹ bears witness. This scene from Hercules’ youth shows quite clearly how the landscape itself accentuates the sense of the events depicted: The different lives are promised to the hero by the standing personification of ›virtus‹ (virtue) and ›voluptas‹ (desire), lying half-naked next to the brooding Hercules, can be understood by the two types of landscapes that divide the sheet in two parts. The side of ›voluptas‹ shows a lovely summer landscape – leafy trees, a pond with swans in the foreground and people swimming and dancing in the background – while ›virtus‹ points to an inhospitable mountainous area behind her, with only a few dead trees to be seen among the rocks, but also – in the distance – a sunbathed peak which rewards the effort required to reach it. Finally, Friedrich Preller, who as a young artist lived in Italy between 1827 and 1831 and was influenced by Joseph Anton Koch, took up the theme of Odysseus on a number of occasions. From 1833 to 1836 he produced a cycle of frescos on this theme in the house of the Leipzig publisher Härtel. After making copy drawings of this cycle for documentary purposes in 1857, he produced new Odysseus drawings, which were well received and which led to his making a second cycle in Weimar. To this context belongs as well the large format drawing ›The Phaiaken carry the sleeping Odysseus on Land‹ which is notable for its unusual angle from the darkness of a cave out to a sunlit bay.
Ever since the 19th century, artists have repeatedly been challenged by the contrast between the surfeit of what a modern big city offers and the remoteness of a village in gorgeous countryside. On the one hand, there is the array of facades and roofs as well as the dynamism of technical edifices, and, on the other, solitary village roads and small towns where time seems to have stood still. In addition to such observations, the architecture often also provides the material from which the composition of the image is constructed. The architectural shapes get translated into firmly linked geometrical volumes, or, as in the work of Robert Delaunay, dissected only to be assembled anew on the canvas. The architects’ modus operandi, namely construction and montage, is thus continued and expanded in the world of artistic images
Ever since the beginning of photographic history, images of architectural monuments and artworks have been given a special significance. After the first photographs were taken on expeditions, as of the mid-19th century photo studios started popping up in such cities as Cairo and Luxor to satisfy the demand from European tourists for exotic souvenir photos. The photographers’ primary motifs are the Ancient Egyptian monuments and Oriental scenes.
For centuries, artists have been dealing with the origins of civilization in their works. Prometheus is said to have designed the first people from clay and to have endowed them with human qualities. In the most ancient tradition, he is a cunning fraud, yet other artists and poets glorify him as a benefactor of mankind. However, the representations of other mythological figures in art – such as Max Beckmann’s ›Perseus‹ or Auguste Rodin’s ›Eva‹ – are just as ambiguous as the figure of Prometheus. Some cultures view the snake as the adversary of the divine and who overturns a harmonious paradisiacal state. At the same time, the snake is associated with extremely positive values in other cultural contexts: as a cosmic primal energy in eternal flow and circulation, thus sustaining the universe, or as the mythical being from whom all others descend.
From 1911 onwards, an intense artistic exchange began between what were at the time two enemies, Germany and France: Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, the founders of the artist group ›Der Blaue Reiter‹, made the acquaintance of French painter Robert Delaunay. In his art, Delaunay pursued an »activation of the eyes«. The colours in his works are animated through complementary contrasts and fragmented image areas. Caught up in the maelstrom of colour, the objects depicted become secondary as the colours come into play. Work series such as Delaunay’s ›Window‹ paintings not only inspired Franz Marc, for now colour emerged as an element that linked the group across national boundaries. »People like to call this universality«, wrote Delaunay to Marc in 1913, »synchronicity that expands beyond Europe, that stretches out from man into the universe.«
From angels and sirens to Pan and Flora, the god of the shepherds and the goddess of blossoms respectively: Hybrid beings traveling between heaven and earth have forever inspired artists over the centuries. In allegorical works, they descend to the people or up into the sky, taking on human form as messengers of the divine or directing the fate of the people down on earth. Hybrid beings stand for the connection between the cosmos and the earth, between youth and fertility, and between transience and death. Their close affinity to nature was the starting point for numerous pictorial creations, especially for symbolist artists such as Arnold Böcklin. But these motifs and their universal symbolism can also be found in expressionist works and in contemporary art as well.
From the 19th century onwards French art and culture strongly stimulated activities elsewhere and this led in the first half of the 20th century to Paris emerging as an artistic centre that was known and revered worldwide. Numerous artists, photographers, and poster designers flocked to the French capital to seek inspiration from its hustle-and-bustle and its creative community; vaudeville theatre also experienced its heyday there in the decades straddling the turn of the century. Up until 1900 the Champs de Mars was the venue for five world exhibitions and other international fairs for trade and industry. Erected in 1889 on the occasion of the world’s fair that year, the Eiffel Tower featured as a leitmotif of Modernity in numerous images, photographs and on posters and thus established itself as a landmark for the French capital – a role it still plays today.
From the end of the 1970s, private and public institutions in Germany were increasingly active in collecting and exhibiting photography. Steadily growing possibilities for exhibiting, publishing and selling independent of specific contract work has had a fundamental effect on numerous artists’ way of working of since the 1980’s. Photo Concept Art At the beginning of the 1980’s, the legacy of Concept Art was still tangible. Artists like Hans-Peter Feldmann turned to photography as the ideal medium to undermine authorship, style and a cult of genius. Feldmann thus directed his interest at everyday imagery such as amateur photography, postcards, newspaper photos and posters, which he brought together in extensive series. If he picks up a camera himself, he pays little attention to photographic parameters such as focus and tonality. Ken Ohara had another approach: The more than 500 anonymous portraits in the photo-book ›One‹ from 1970 are distinguished by a strict reduction of the image to the face, and even lighting. Individual characteristics of those portrayed on the streets of New York are almost lost in a uniform conception of the image. A 50 piece series from this project was bought for the Photographic Collection. Objectivity Print and format received renewed attention from the mid-1980’s at the latest. If you compare Bernd and Hilla Becher’s small format serial black and white photographs with the large format color photographs which their students later made, the change in generation becomes obvious. What they have in common is a documentary, descriptive starting point which implies unvarying conditions for the photograph. This form is apparent in the sober depiction in the 40 small format portraits made by Thomas Ruff at the beginning of the 1980’s around the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, or in the urban photographs of Thomas Struth and the objective photography of Patrick Tosani. Subjectivity Examples of photographs which drop objective strictness in favor of an emotional perception can be found in the work of Michael Schmidt. Starting point of his work ›Waffenruhe‹ is the tangible conflict in the divided city of Berlin. His cropped black and white photographs of a place he knows well transforms his subjective approach into experienced reality. Similarly strongly influenced by his own experience is Paul Graham’s photographic work on unemployment in Great Britain. His presence in the image is visible in the distorted perspective and low angle of shot which – in the position of those waiting – indicates social reality. Works in the Collection by William Eggleston, Stephan Shore and Joel Sternfeld also provide indications of their influence on German photographers such as Gosbert Adler and Joachim Brohm. Documentary Photography Thanks to the Wüstenrot Stiftung, which in cooperation with the Museum Folkwang has awarded grants for contemporary documentary photography since 1994, the Photographic Collection has an extensive lot of contemporary documentary photography which reflects current forms of occupation with socio-political issues. Points in common can be found in, for example, comparing Tobias Zielony’s way of working with that of Paul Graham’s. Both react to the question of how political themes can be ethically depicted with images different from classical reportage, avoiding the usual media clichés. Staged Photography Parallel to staged documentary work, such as Rinke Dijkstra’s series on women and their newborn children, artists such as Cindy Sherman and Thomas Demand developed a reflective approach to photographic images in the context of the mass media. Both speak to a collective visual memory in their works. However, Demand’s life-sized reconstructions from paper and cardboard can be traced back to existing images while viewers of Shermann’s ›Film Stills‹ may think they recognize stills from well-known films, although no direct connection exists. An epoch-making change in the production and reception of photography came with the rise of digital computer technology. Once again, the theory of photography as analogue became the focus of debate on photography. Although well aware that the production of photographs had always been tied to numerous techniques which modified reality, especially journalists raised concerns about the new possibilities of politically motivated manipulation of photographic images.
From the second half of the 19th century, an increasing number of drawings depicted a geographically definable landscape. For example, the Swiss artist Arian Zingg, who had been working at the Dresden Kunstakademie since 1766, repeatedly explored the Saxon Switzerland, at the time still completely undeveloped, to Dresden in order to draw. Elsewhere as well, Zingg made drawings directly from nature, which he noted expressly with »delineavit ad naturam« (drawn after nature), for instance on the pen and ink drawings ›Boulders on the Water‹ or ›Landscape with Cows and a Cloister‹ from 1786 and 1789. This increasing use of observed landscapes did not, however, mean giving up traditional principles of depiction and composition. Adrian Zingg described such rules and methods in his ›Anfangsgründen für Landschaftszeichner‹ from 1808 – as series of etched model sheets intended to serve as examples for beginners – from detail studies of individual blades of grass and leaves, combinations of various plants to complete compositions. As Zingg expressly encouraged beginners to draw using his models at first and only then to draw after nature, he imposed his own stylistic position on young artists, something criticized by Ludwig Richter, one of Zingg’s students at the Dresden Kunstakademie: »We were enveloped by a dead manner, like all Zinggianer, we were so schooled in a mountain of rules and stereotypical forms and formulas that a vivid feeling for nature, a real and simple observation and capturing of things could not arise, or at least not be expressed.« Especially Adrian Zingg’s topographical views are characterized by this ambivalence between trueness to nature and to detail on the one hand and their maintaining classical principles of composition on the other. His view of ›Pillnitz Castle‹, in spite of its precise depiction of the castle on the other bank of the Elbe, shows a classical pictorial construction with the foreground defined by a shaded, asymmetrical repoussoir, changing quickly to a lighter zone which in turn leads to another shaded area. Such an alteration of lighter and darker zones was the preferred mean of creating the impression of great spatial depth. The picturesque vegetation in the foreground is also, undeniably, not the result of concrete observation, but follows the depiction schemes which Zingg himself illustrated in his ›Anfangsgründen für Landschaftszeichner‹. This is equally true of ›View of St. Blasien in the Schwarzwald‹ and ›Landscape with Cows and a Cloister‹. Jakob Philipp Hackert’s large format sepia drawing ›The Cave of St. Francis‹ from 1800 of Mount Verna in the Etruscan Apennines and which served as a model for Hackert’s painting in the Museum Folkwang’s collection, is also distinguished by such a parallel of realistic depiction and artistic remodelling, as can be seen in, for instance, the picturesque wild grove of trees above the cave. A similar monumentality artistically remodelling the real situation characterizes Caspar David Friedrich’s sepia drawing ›Rock Arch in Uttewalder Grund‹, made at the same time, with Friedrich employing especially the contrast of light between the darkness of the steeply cut gorge on the one hand and the lightness of the elevated sections lit by the son on the other as his major principle of composition.
Further details on the commitment of the Stiftung für das Museum Folkwang will be posted here soon.
Glass is the first artificial material man created. It was invented in the second century BC in the southeast Mediterranean region, where its raw materials (quartz sand, lime and soda) occur naturally. The main component, quartz, melts at around 1,700°C. In ancient times it was not easy to achieve such temperatures, but by adding flux melting agents such as mineral soda or special vegetable ash the melting point was lowered and by adding stabilizing lime raw glass could be smelted. Further admixtures to the glass such as copper or iron compounds colour the glass or change its transparency (for example the addition of tin). The first vessels were made using a method known as the sand core technique. This involved attaching to a baton a sand or clay core that was covered with liquid, usually dark blue opaque glass. Threads in contrasting shades of white, turquoise or yellow were applied, pulled across to create patterns and to »marver them in« by rolling them on a surface. After this, the edges were cleaned up and a handle attached. After the item had cooled down the soft core was removed from the middle, leaving behind a hollow area.
How can artworks be created when depicting reality is no longer the central focus? For more than a century, artists have been searching for new answers to this question. Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian each experiment in their own way with boldly coloured, interrelating geometric forms. Max Bill takes up the musical idea of variations on a theme and develops a series of 15 lithographs, all based on the same initial motif. In the group of works entitled ›Chance and Order‹, Kenneth Martin intentionally incorporates chance into the creative process—a deliberate departure from the idea of artistic intuition. This results in forms that are surprising for the artist himself.
I. Expressionist Posters Expressionism was already widespread in painting before the First World War, but there were very few Expressionist posters before 1914. Only after the end of the First World War did this style find its way into the mass media, especially in posters and in film. It dominated here until around 1921/22, disappearing completely only a little later. At first it was political posters, appearing for the first time since the end of the Empire, which used this Expressionist style. This was especially true of posters for the national assembly elections (1919). Up to this point, the most brutal images ever shown in public had appeared. Posters for cultural events (film presentation, expressive dance performances, exhibitions etc.) were also designed in this highly emotional formal language. Here the film posters by Joseph Fenneker (1895–1956) deserves special mention. However, Expressionist posters found little application in product advertising. II. Decorative Posters To be exact, decorative posters are not specific to the 1920s – they naturally also existed in Art Nouveau. The particularity lies in their specific interpretation of the decorative. On the one hand, Art Nouveau was swept away, and on the other Art Déco had not (yet) appeared. A good example is in the art of Walter Schnackenberg (1880–1961). Especially in this area there was a significant international development, for example in France, where a sort of decorative Objectivity arose, which in turn influenced design in Germany and also in part Objective posters. With the growth of film posters a pictorial-decorative line generally appeared. III. Objective Posters Collected here are works which are part of New Typography, New Objectivity, Bauhaus and other currents, which developed from similar approaches. Noteworthy is the use of photography in its various forms up to and including photomontage. From this range there arose a series of works which defined styles in the long term, whose impact is still felt today. The sober (Objective) view of form and function fitted exactly with demands for good design as part of industrial mass production and the resulting changes in living conditions and rhythms. New means of expression using photography and typography determined the process of transformation and permanently altered the design of posters. The film posters by Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) – though initially not followed up – can show the potential in the concrete application of this new sense of form.
Im Jahr 1902 gründet Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874–1921) das Folkwang Museum in Hagen. Schnell richtet sich seine Sammelleidenschaft auf die zeitgenössische, damals teilweise noch nicht etablierte Kunst. So erwirbt er die ersten Gemälde Vincent van Goghs für ein deutsches Museum. Aus der ersten Einzelausstellung des Künstlers in Deutschland kauft Osthaus das Gemälde ›La moisson‹ an und zeigt es zur Eröffnung des Museum Folkwang in Hagen. Insbesondere die französische Kunst seiner Gegenwart hat es Osthaus angetan. Zu den frühen Erwerbungen zählen Werke von Gauguin, Cézanne, Signac und Matisse. Mit vielen Künstlerinnen und Künstlern, darunter Emil Nolde oder Pierre Auguste Renoir, verbindet ihn und seine Frau Gertrud eine jahrzehntelange Freundschaft. Osthaus ist nicht nur Sammler, sondern auch Mäzen und fördert zeitlebens viele Künstler in seinem Umfeld, so auch Christian Rohlfs, der 1902 im ersten Stock des Museums eine Wohnung und das Atelier bezieht und dort bis zu seinem Tod 1938 lebt und arbeitet.
In 1908/09, at Osthaus’ request, the later architect and director of the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Walter Gropius (born 1883 in Berlin, died 1969 in Boston), arranged for the export of ceramic tiles from Spain to Hagen together with art historian Hans Wendland. Gropius and Osthaus had been in close contact since they first met in Spain in 1908. After abandoning his architecture studies Gropius travelled around Spain, occasionally working in a ceramics workshop in Tirana near Seville. There he produced tile designs which he later sought to use as room decoration in his buildings. Later on Osthaus recommended the architect to van de Velde for the Arts and Crafts School in Weimar, which was to become the Bauhaus. For Osthaus this was his first encounter with Islamic art. He had had the idea while travelling in Tunisia in 1898 to establish not a science museum, but an art and arts & crafts collection. In the art of the Fatimid Caliphate (909 – 1171), which gave rise to Moorish art (11th century – 1492) in Spain, ornamentation had a central religious role. As it was forbidden to glorify Allah in the form of images, geometry was used to symbolize divine wisdom. Whereas the ornamentation of the Fatimids essentially appeared in reliefs and inlays, in the Moorish courtyards in Morocco and Spain ornamentation in coloured tiling design was developed further. Gothic and Italian Renaissance influences also become apparent in later tiling design in Spain. Naturalistic plant motifs started to dominate as of the Christian 16th century, supplanting abstract ornamentation.
In 1910, influenced by his fights with Rosa Schwab about who would have the custody of their son Nikolaus, Ernst Barlach wrote the drama The Dead Day. The play, which takes place in mythical times, deals with the liberation of the son from the control of his mother and served as the basis for this extensive series made two years after the play was written. In it there are depictions which are clearly related to its literary model but also those that Barlach added.
In 1912, the Friedrich Krupp Gussstahl AG celebrated its 100th anniversary in business. To mark the occasion, Margarethe Krupp and the couple Gustav and Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach set up the Krupp-Jubiläums-Stiftung foundation. Half of the initial assets of two million Reichsmark assigned to the foundation were to be used to »acquire artworks for the City of Essen Art Museum«; another stated object of the foundation was social and charitable work in the City of Essen. For the members of the Krupp family, social and cultural commitment was part and parcel of how they saw entrepreneurial activity and this corporate culture was reflected as early as the mid-19th century in the social welfare and housing programme that Alfred Krupp promulgated. In the fine arts, in particular Friedrich Alfred Krupp and the couple Gustav and Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach were very active, and they established a large private collection of paintings as well as commissioning countless pieces from artists they knew. The City of Essen Art Museum also benefited from this interest, and its director Ernst Gosebruch maintained good links with the family. Individual works were thus already gifted to the museum collection even before 1912. With the foundation of the Krupp-Jubiläums-Stiftung the commitment to the arts by both the Krupp family and corporation was given an institutionalized form. Amongst the first pieces acquired with funding from the foundation for the museum’s collection were Max Liebermann’s ›The Parrot Man‹ and Wilhelm Trübner’s ›Portrait of a Lady‹. In subsequent decades, the foundation on numerous occasions supported acquisitions of paintings by German artists (including Carl Gustav Carus, Johann Erdmann Hummel, Franz Kobell, Carl Spitzweg and Adolf Menzel). From the 1950s onwards, the foundation has repeatedly enabled the museum to acquire major works of Classical Modernism (including Camille Pissarro, Henri Le Fauconnier, Otto Dix, Rudolf Belling and members of the Brücke group) and of contemporary art (examples being Arman, Katharina Fritsch, Antonio Saura and Jesús Raphael Soto). Since the 1990s, support has increasingly also been provided for purchases of photographic work groups and portfolios (including Umbo, Joan Colom, Rineke Dijkstra and Darren Almond).
In Sven Johne’s expansive text-and-photo work, photographs of well-known public figures—found and collected on the Internet—are juxtaposed with fictive biographies of unknown dropouts, underdogs, and losers invented by him and Sebastian Orlac. Based on August Sander’s portfolio of over 600 photographs in ›People of the 20th Century‹, Sven Johne sketches an updated and polarizing portrait of our present society one hundred years later. The »anomalies« mentioned in the title may be read as deviations from social norms. However, the displacements between text and photography potentially also create »case studies« for the degenerate worlds of the supposed losers in our society, on the one hand, and those who are in the public limelight, on the other.
In the 1920s, the social and economic changes wrought by living in cities, the rise of industry and the new technical achievements also influenced the visual process of perception; photography, film and illustrated magazines fascinated the avant-gardists and inspired them to experiment and explore. Perspectives / reportages / abstraction The photographers of the 1920s tried out the design possibilities afforded by their medium and aspired towards a New Way of Seeing, towards a means of expressing their environment that had suddenly been set in motion, a means that was appropriate to the times. The artistic productivity of those years is attested to by extreme and new kinds of perspectives, montages and photograms, plus the way that photographers played with sections and contrasts. Moreover, these photographers also investigated their surroundings; picture journalism and the press flourished. Women During the Weimar Republic the medium of photography offered women in particular, who were gradually becoming emancipated from their classic role as wives and mothers, a new field of activity. And if their efforts after the Second World War were initially forgotten, two exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, ›Fotografinnen‹ (1970) and ›Fotografieren hieß teilnehmen‹ (1994) showed their appreciation of such women once again. In addition to this, artists such as Aenne Biermann, Lotte Jacobi, Germaine Krull and Annelise Kretschmer were presented at solo shows. Teachers / pupils In the 1920s, the growing importance of the medium of photography increasingly led to the establishment of photographic courses at arts and crafts schools. Here, the focus was on learning together and on practical activities in workshops. Many photographers acted as teachers and influenced the way that their pupils worked: Max Burchartz and, for a short time, Albert Renger-Patzsch at the Folkwang College of Design in Essen; Hans Finsler at a school for skilled workers and arts and crafts, Burg Giebichstein in Halle; Walter Peterhans and László Moholy-Nagy, who were involved with the Constructivists connected with the Bauhaus. Advertising The new media also accelerated the development of advertising, with photography assuming an increasing importance and gradually replacing drawing and illustrations. The expanding advertising market offered new fields of activity peopled by professional photographers, graphic designers and artists.
In the center of Büchner’s tale is the psychically sensitive writer Jakob Lenz, whose mental state visibly worsens to the point where he confesses to a murder he did not commit. Unlike the series ›Wozzeck‹, Gramatté does not illustrate individual episodes. Instead he concentrates on the main figure, embedded in only two depictions of nature: »The first has massed clouds, sun, thunderstorms, black, white, and within a black pine, the other is the same, but calm, grey, worn-out and without affection, it concentrates totally on drawing. In between desperate, complains, mourns, suffers, subsides Lenz« (W. Gramatté, 1924).
In the early 20th century Karl Ernst Osthaus compiled collections of Modernist artworks, European craft items and non-European artworks from a wide range of cultural regions and placed these in dialogue with one another. After his death in 1921 the Osthaus Collection was acquired by the newly founded association Folkwang-Museumsverein for the City of Essen and in 1922 it was consolidated with the existing collection of the municipal museum Städtisches Kunstmuseum under the direction of Ernst Gosebruch. Like his friend Osthaus, Gosebruch, who had managed to acquire important works for Städtisches Kunstmuseum in the previous years, advocated supporting the artistic avant-garde and consistently expanded the museum collection up until his early retirement enforced by the Nazis in 1933. Early acquisitions made for the museum collection by Osthaus and Gosebruch in the years 1902 to 1914 are presented in this room.
In the first few years of the last century, Karl Ernst Osthaus acquired countless works for the collection of the institution he founded in Hagen in 1902: the Museum Folkwang (today’s Osthaus Museum). While he had initially collected items of natural history and of the art produced by the academies, influenced by architect Henry van de Velde Osthaus turned his attention to the artistic avant-gardes of his day. Thus, from 1902 onwards he purchased his first pieces by Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The fountain ›La fontaine aux agenouillés‹ created by Flemish sculptor George Minne was exhibited in a first version in 1900 at the Vienna Secession. For Osthaus, the fountain was a symbol of his vision for Museum Folkwang as a »fresh source, whose waves cleanse all of life and wash through it refreshingly.« Minne thereupon produced a second, marble version around 1905 destined for the entrance hall of the museum in Hagen. Today, the piece that stands there is only a copy for the original was moved to Essen in 1922 as a result of Osthaus’ untimely death and the subsequent sale of the Folkwang Collection.
In this work from 2008, Simon Starling – one of the most important contemporary artists (Turner Prize winner in 2005) – brings together various historical events; linking them into a narrative full of associations through spatial and visual references he stages. Past and present, document and invention are bound together and interweave in various media – architecture, sculpture, photography and film. In a way characteristic of the artist, the installation combines an architectural project of the German architect Eckart Muthesius from 1929 (the Indian residence Manik Bagh), the wedding of a Maharaja and the oft-filmed script ›The Indian Tombstone‹ written by Fritz Lang and Theo von Harbou in 1921 with the research on this installation which Starling presented as an exhibition in the Turin gallery building ›La Fetta di Polenta‹. The fragment of architecture in the Essen installation is an exact reproduction of the fifth of seven stories of the building in Turin. There, 32 black and white photographs and three stones of identical form were exhibited. Starling’s photographs show interior and exterior views of today’s palace. The stones are black Belgian marble, white Carrara marble and Indian marble, cut identically using a laser. These materials were chosen for the palace décor and for a group of sculptures the Maharaja commissioned from Constantin Brancusi but which were never completed. Starling demonstrates that a transfer of culture must always also be seen as a process of perception to which belong, on both sides – in this case Germany and India – stereotypes and misunderstandings as much as attributions and fantasies with political implications. The work therefore simultaneously opens a new perspective on a juxtaposition of European avant-garde and Non-European art already initiated by the founder of the Museum Folkwang, K.E. Osthaus. The relation between various cultural points of contact of the two countries (Germany and India) which Starling makes visible, makes clear the early collection history of the Museum Folkwang as expression of a specific historical and cultural constellation.
Incunabulum Otto Steinert, from 1959 photography professor at the Folkwang-Schule, arranged for the establishment of a teaching collection after his nomination by the City of Essen. This was integrated into the Museum Folkwang as the Photographic Collection under the direction of Ute Eskildsen in 1979. In 1961, a unique opportunity arose to considerably expand the newly founded collection with numerous incunabula all at once. At the time one of the first major auctions of ›Photografica‹ took place in Geneva, and Steinert acquired 369 works altogether, with the support of the City of Essen. Included in this lot were, for example, 144 portraits by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson from the early 1840’s; large format architectural photographs from the early 1850’s by Edouard Denis Baldus (45 photographs) and Henri Le Secq (25 photographs) as well as architectural photographs by the brothers Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson from the end of the 1850’s. Also outstanding are two photographs, one by Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray, ›Marine, Grand Vague, Sète‹ (1856) and the other by Julia Margaret Cameron, ›Sir John Frederick William Herschel, Baronet, Collingswood‹ (April 7, 1867). Shortly thereafter, Otto Steinert was also able to acquire five works by William Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, for the collection. William Henry Fox Talbot – Drawings with Light Unlike Daguerreotypes, a unique print process on metal with an impressive richness of detail and very popular early on, Talbot’s process on paper, which he patented in 1841, produced a negative from which a number of positive images could be made. The first images on light-sensitive material had already been made in the 1820’s. Light darkened the sensitive material and thus ›drew‹ a negative image in an hour. It was immediately visible, but was not fixed and could only be exposed to light for a short time, as it would continue to darken. The discovery of the latent image reduced exposure time to a few seconds. The image, not visible at first, would then appear, without further processing, to the surprise of the onlookers. However, it was only with the discovery of a chemical process to fix the images that the invention of photography was completed. The images could be exposed to light permanently without fading away. Talbot began with simple experiments, which he called »photogenic drawings«. He exposed transparent objects directly on paper. As soon as shorter exposure times allowed, he photographed his surroundings, family and friends. Five such prints are in the Photographic Collection. While the French State gave Daguerre’s discovery to the nation to do with it as it wished, the Talbotype, later called the calotype, found little interest in England, although its future was more promising. Embittered, Talbot patented his process and sued anyone who used it without a license. This and early problems with the sharpness of the negative image restricted its spread. David Octavius Hill/Robert Adamson – The Calotype Improvements in calotype image sharpness led to a first heyday for this process in England and France in the mid 19th century. One impressive example is the just five year-long partnership between the painter David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, a photographer. They produced portraits of exceptional quality. Adamson had the technical ability to deal with photography and Hill concentrated on composition. For his historical painting ‘Signing of the Deed of Demission, 1843’ (1844-66) - the founding assembly of the Scottish Free Church - instead of using a sketchbook, Hill, together with Adamson, used a camera to photograph each of the 470 people who would figure in the painting. In an ›open air studio‹, and taken with an exposure time of a few seconds, these portraits are among the most outstanding achievements of early photography. The painting, on the other hand, remained a footnote in art history. Otto Steinert was able to acquire 144 of these calotypes. From Baldus to Atget – Documentation as Mission The French ›Commission des Monuments historiques‹, the first government agency for the preservation of historical monuments, recognized the advantages of photography for precise descriptions of Roman and Medieval constructions increasingly disappearing due to decay and vandalism. In 1851, it engaged 5 photographers to document the most important monuments throughout France. The cooperative efforts of the Commission, architects and photographers was a success. Some photographers, specialized in architectural photography, using improved techniques such as glass negatives and large formats in order to sell their work to architects, painters, collectors and libraries. Among them, Edouard Denis Baldus and Henri Le Secq deserve special mention. There are 4 works by Baldus and 25 by Le Secq in our collection. Baldus made beautifully illuminated images of multifaceted facades and photographs of monuments embedded in their surroundings; Henri Le Secq concentrated on architectural sculpture and monuments whose stone figures he sought to portray as if they were humans in flesh and blood. The project later came to be known as ›La Mission héliographique‹. The images, long assumed to have disappeared, were only officially identified in 1980. However, their existence was first suggested by André Jammes in 1966 in a Museum Folkwang catalogue on ›Calotypes in France‹. Independently of Commission assignments, other photographers took up the genre of architectural photography. The brothers Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson documented the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris. When the architect Viollet le Duc published a book on his controversial restoration in 1860, he included plans, drawings and 12 of these photographs. The Collection holds 34 works by these two photographers. Prefect Georges Eugène Baron Haussmann’s creation of broad boulevards in the 1860’s changed the face of Paris. The Commission contracted Jean-Eugène Durand and Séraphin Médéric Mieusement to document the townhouses due for demolition. The Collection holds, respectively, 9 and 26 of their works. Eugène Atget, painter and photographer of ›documents for artists‹, carried on this tradition from 1897 until the 1920’s. He captured old parts of the city which were disappearing because of further modernisation. The Museum Folkwang has five of his photographs.
International Avant-Garde Photographic praxis in the 1920s and 1930s is one focal point of the Fotografische Sammlung in the Museum Folkwang. After the First World War – a period of decisive political and social change – a cultural production developed where the limits of art forms were extended and photography and technical imagery was conferred a new status. Protagonists of new photography distanced themselves deliberately from a romantic depiction of the genre of turn of the century art photography. The perception of the modern metropolis, industrial production, its world of machines and technology were taken as themes. Technology and tempo, the new popular themes, inspired the entertainment industry, art and the press. Experimental Photography Radical perspectives, isolation of object with close-ups, unusual sectioning and cuts, plays with light and shadow, regular use of diagonals, black and white contrasts and reflections were among the most important design elements in photographic praxis for reporters, artists, photographers and autodidacts. The works mentioned below serve as examples for the temporally defined focus of the Fotografischen Sammlung of the Museum Folkwang. Anne Biermann’s unusual view on and in the Eiffel Tower in Paris are and example for the discovery of the world from a perspective until then unnoticed; or the Frenchwoman Florence Henri’s experiments, creating unusual spaces for her still lifes with mirrors and panes of glass. Germaine Krull, fascinated by architectural construction of iron, published the book ›Métal‹ in Paris in 1927. In the Czech Republic, Jaromir Funke was a mentor of Neue Sehen. The Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy and the Austrian Herbert Bayer both taught at the Bauhaus, Germany’s most progressive college for art and design at the time. Many new ideas and starting points came from Bauhaus teachers and their students. Collages, montages, multiple exposures and photograms were experimented with by students there. One of he most influential experimenters was Moholy-Nagy, both with his montages using imagery he found an in the lab. He and Man Ray created exceptional imagery with camera-less photography. Already in 1922, the American Man Ray published a folio entitled ›Champs Délicieux‹ with 12 photograms which he called Rayogrammes or Rayographs. Neue Sachlichkeit Parallel to this experimental exploration, Albert Renger-Patzsch developed an objective photographic pictorial form. His range of motifs was large. Apart from nature and landscape photos, there are also photos of everyday objects, portraits, architecture, and themes from the areas of industry and technology. Albert Renger-Patzsch achieved his international breakthrough with the publication of his photobook ›Die Welt ist schön‹ by the Kurt Wolff Verlag in Munich in 1928. Also in the Sachlichkeit style, August Sander created a social portrait of the Weimar Republic. Entitled ›Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts‹, he photographed representatives of various social classes he selected because of their profession, their social status or their role in society. Without making value judgments, but with an eye to the context, he directed his gaze towards people while leaving room for self-presentation in their living and work environs. Also for Helmar Lerski, who turned away from human portraiture, the reproductive character of photography was decisive. However, he was not interested in reproducing people; rather it was a staged role-play of the person opposite him achieved with light and framing. In his ›Verwandlungen durch Licht‹ (Metamorphose) project made in Tel Aviv in 1937, he made 175 portraits of one person. His estate is held by the Museum. Images for the Press The need for visual information material increased at the beginning of the 20th century. People’s curiosity for what was happening in the world was unlimited. Their hunger for images of the unknown world but also of everyday events led to an expansion of the print media. Their inquisitiveness was increased by a growing use of photographs in magazines and opened a new market for photographers. This led to the modern photoreportage, whose most prominent exponent in Germany was Erich Salomon. Like many of his co-reporters, he was not a trained photographer, having taught himself. He acquired a name with his photographs of politicians in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and with his book, which shows the ›Berühmte Zeitgenossen in unbewachten Augenblicken‹. Wolfgang Weber also recognized the professional opportunities that photojournalism offered young people, »outsidern«. Together with Felix H. Man, the Gidal brothers, Kurt Hübschmann, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Harald Lechenperg and others, he was among the photojournalists who provided reportages at home and abroad for the illustrated newspapers and magazines of the day. In the recently founded USSR, too, film and photography developed into the most important information and propaganda form. Boris Ignatovic, student and companion of the artist Alexander Rodtschenko, was the exponent of a current which sought to introduce Neue Sehen in photography into photoreporting. Sought after was a new pictorial language which could express changing social and political conditions and to propagate for the future. After 1933 Because of the National Socialist take over of power in 1933 in Germany and the immediate subordination of the press, many photographers, agency and magazine employees had to leave Germany. With their ideas and experience, they found respect and new opportunities for work especially in England and the USA. Lisette Model had already left Austria in 1922 to study painting in Paris. Photography only became her profession some years later in her new home in the USA. The photo shown here was made in 1934 on the French Riviera as part of a series on the ‘Promenade des Anglais’ in Nice, on her way to the USA. The Fotografische Sammlung, in its exhibition work, has frequently returned, both thematically and in monograph, to the protagonists of the 20s and especially some emigrants. We were fortunate to be able to acquire, in order, extensive work groups by Aenne Biermann, Lotte Jacobi and Annelise Kretschmer, the estates of Errell, Lotte Errel, Helmar Lerski, Germaine Krull an Walter Peterhans as well as, through the mediation of Floris Neusüss, in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, an exceptional collection of works by Moholy-Nagy.
Josef Albers, who immigrated to the United States in 1933, became one of the main driving forces in American art in the second half of the 20th century with his series ›Homage to the Square‹. For the representatives of hard-edge painting, the image is not a pictorial illusion but a real object that occupies the wall of the exhibition space. They reject any recognizable artistic individuality and free composition of the image structure. Instead, the paint is applied extensively and evenly. The systematic division of the surface of the image emerges from its external form, which is not necessarily rectangular; rather, as in the case of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, it can take the form of various geometric shapes (»shaped canvas«). Thanks to their dimensions, the pictures make a strong impact on the space.
Karl Ernst Osthaus was the first German museum director to acquire works by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Between 1902 and 1905 he purchased three of the artist’s paintings. In an exchange with Henry van de Velde, Osthaus developed a good feel for contemporary art and as of 1902 collected works not only by van Gogh but also by artists such as Gauguin, Daumier, Renoir and Cézanne. When 18 van Gogh paintings were sent to Hagen on approval in 1902 by an art dealer, Paul Cassirer, this was very probably organized by van de Velde. This Flemish artist saw van Gogh’s estate when visiting Theo van Gogh’s widow in Bussum and enthusiastically suggested that Osthaus, who was a friend of his, should initially purchase two of these works. As of 1903 Osthaus also started collecting drawings by the artist; he acquired his first sketches from an art dealer in Paris, Ambroise Vollard, including ›Peasant Woman, Stooping and Gleaning‹ (1885). The paintings acquired in 1902 include the unusually clear ›Portrait of Armand Roulin‹ (1888), with its rich contrasts. One art historian, Julius Meier-Graefe, described the innovative painting techniques in this picture, after seeing it in Hagen: »The picture uses thin paint, not at all like the others. The colours are: a blue hat, a green background in the colours of water, everything in unified yellow and blue. The execution is consummate, not at all artificial.« Van Gogh had made friends with the young man’s father in Arles, as numerous portraits of him and his family demonstrate. Another masterpiece by van Gogh is the painting ›A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawed-Off Tree‹ (1889), showing the garden, surrounded by a natural stone wall, at the institution sought out by the artist in 1889 because of his acute mood swings. We know from a letter to Émile Bernard about the strong effect the asylum’s park exerted on the artist. In ›A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawed-Off Tree‹ van Gogh atmospherically evokes a landscape shaped by the weather and the seasons. On the other side of the natural stone wall surrounding the garden a vista opens up over a wide plain in front of a hilly landscape. Van Gogh could see this daily from his window. The fields of sulphurous yellow served as his inspiration for wonderful pictures such as ›The Wheatfield behind Saint Paul's Hospital with a Reaper‹ (1889). He varied this motif on several occasions, in paintings and drawings. In the fall of 1905 Karl Ernst Osthaus showed 11 paintings and three drawings by van Gogh at Museum Folkwang, works he had received through the mediation of Ms. Cohen-Gosschalk-Bonger as the representative of the van Gogh family. We can assume that it was from this assortment that the collector acquired the painting ›A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawed-Off Tree‹ plus a selection of the drawings that have remained in the museum’s collection to this day, for instance ›Enclosed Field with a Sawer in the Rain‹ (1890) or ›The Plain of La Crau‹ (1888). By contrast, the painting ›Quay with Men Unloading Sand Barges‹ (1888) was bought by Ernst Gosebruch in 1912 from art dealer Eugène Druet in Paris for the Essen art museum, in a bold move encouraged by the example set by Karl Ernst Osthaus in Hagen. The busy procedure of unloading the skiffs at the quay on the river Rhône held an especial fascination for van Gogh. At the time of their acquisition works by van Gogh and other contemporary French artists such as Honoré Daumier, Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne were not yet recognized as those »classics« that, by working through the problems of their own age in an exemplary fashion, were to exert a fundamental influence on Modern art. It is all the more impressive how rapidly Karl Ernst Osthaus recognized the potential shown by these artists to act as the most eloquent representatives of the creative power of their epoch and of its changes. Because of its completely new painting techniques, van Gogh’s oeuvre attracted particular attention. Osthaus had already exhibited ›Enclosed Field with a Sawer in the Rain‹ as the first work by van Gogh acquired at the museum’s opening in 1902. Together with Renoir’s ›Lise‹ (1867) and van Gogh’s works, Museum Folkwang houses testimonials both to the start of Impressionism and to the time of its demise.
Klaus vom Bruch, Ulrike Rosenbach and Marcel Odenbach were the first artists in Germany to broadcast their own TV show in 1977 – not on one of the public service broadcasting channels but illegally on one of the free channels. This pirate broadcast station was available in the immediate vicinity, up to a radius of 100 meters. Program schedules were distributed and there was a TV screen available on a sculptor’s base in the middle of the studio for any friends who were not able to receive the broadcast station. ›Alternativ-Television‹ was on the air. In 1976, Klaus vom Bruch and Ulrike Rosenbach had returned from the United States where they had discovered the ›guerrilla television‹ movement. Together with Marcel Odenbach they founded the video label ›ATV‹. Until then artists had had to rely on the goodwill of the major TV studios for post-producing their videos. After four years the label was renamed ›Videorebellen‹. In 1981 it collaborated with Rune Mields to broadcast ›Westprotest‹, a revolt against the exclusion of video art from the museums. But the group was unable to realize its hope of conquering the TV stations, even with the advent of the new private channels. In the course of the 1980s the presentation of installation videos became increasingly widespread and the video label produced its last film in 1984. The rebellion – ›ATV‹ and ›Videorebellen‹ 1979 – 1982 ›ATV‹ boasted a playful program – alongside its own productions it also showed videos by its artist friends. Its schedules had TV parodies followed by documentary formats, performance recordings by TV quotes and a sound meditation by contemporary politics. It announced its program in 1978 at an exhibition ›Spurensuche‹ (Looking for Clues) at Kölnischen Kunstverein: The intention was for a fixed program of 12 titles to be shown daily as of 6 p.m. »Fade-ins of viewers must be possible at any time as ›pictures-in-pictures‹ via a back channel. Acoustic fade-ins are something that is left up to the viewers,« were the video rebels’ directions. Regime – TV and the power of images »Alternativ Television, Cologne, was born after thousands of hours in front of European and American TV.« (1978) The schedule’s pictorial language and content contravened the rules of the official media, they subverted and questioned its strategies. Unlike revolutions, this rebellion was not dependent on any concepts of a new system of power. Albert Camus interpreted the revolt as an individual form of resistance against a lack of freedom and as such he considered it existential. The revolt allowed for an process of understanding in society – the manifestation of a kind of suppression. Rebels, male and female – role models A number of the videos are characterized by a subtle irony. Their examination of clichéd male and female roles do not fail to include the modern artist. In the latter’s image, the youthful radical and the avant-garde warrior are superimposed on each other. The notion of the martial amazon is also significant. The contemporary insignia of rebellion are also reflected in the videos, the kind of insignia a guerrilla needs to fight blanket camera surveillance – a hood or balaclava with slits for the eyes concealing the identity of the rebel. The situation has not changed despite the rebellion – videos after 1982 The artistic work of vom Bruch, Odenbach and Rosenbach, even after the ›Videorebellen‹ studio closed, is characterized by a wish to resist the constant flood of images from the media characterizes. In ›Azimut‹ vom Bruch has that global phenomenon of the satellite dish circling, Rosenbach questions the exploitation of nature, Odenbach takes issue with suppression and rebellion in the former colonies. With their concept of a guerrilla TV they anticipated current-day video platforms. The video rebellion lives on.
Known primarily for his sculptural work, from 1959 onwards Eduardo Chillida’s focus turned to printing. Space forms the central theme of his work, rendering the void visible and palpable, which is why he often referred to himself as »architect of the void«. The group of works ›Aundi I-III‹ (presumably named after the Basque word »handi« meaning large), all three parts of which are now part of the Museum Folkwang graphic collection, is characterized by an abstract formal language and the particularly flat appearance of the motifs. Chillida used just one printing plate for each print in the series. The artist employed the aquatint method to produce these large, black surfaces, whereby acid-resistant dust (resin, asphalt or colophony) is applied to the plate by controlled heating. And so, when placed in an acid bath the dust is only corroded around the grains, which in turn creates a rough surface on which the paint adheres to larger sections at a time. When contemplating the works one is initially struck by the unusual relationship between the pictorial plane and the motif. The latter moves to the upper edge of the plane such that the black shapes almost seem to be floating, in defiance of gravity. In combination with the clearly visible graphic plate the artist plays with the relationship between fore- and background. In ›Aundi I‹ the black shape consists of two parts, which are perceived as a whole. The slight distance between them comes across as a fracture, which although visible does not detract from the feeling of togetherness. As in almost all of Chillida’s graphic works, despite the lack right angles and straight contours there is something geometrical about the composition. The upper left end finishes at exactly the same point as the edge of the plate, giving the impression of a floating object. Both the left and the right ends stretch beyond the rectangle formed by the graphic plate. This creates an impression of various levels such that the black shape seems to hover in front of the rectangle. ›Aundi II‹ is the most complex work of the group. It also contains curved elements, which as part of the black shape combine two block-like elements. The lower edge of the rectangle formed by the graphic plate is perforated by another white shape. One is left unable to determine which is in the foreground and which is in the background, or how the surfaces are composed – which are positive, which are negative. This creates the vague suggestion of three-dimensionality on the two-dimensional surface. In the final work in the group, ›Aundi III‹, the entire black shape moves to the upper edge. Broad lines, some of them curved, emerge from a horizontal beam and extend into the centre of the plate. Once again, the black areas extend beyond the rectangle of the graphic plate, while the positioning of the object brings gravity back into play. Experimentation with seemingly light and heavy shapes is a common theme that runs throughout the series. Thanks to the interaction of the empty space and solid shape, the artists merely suggests the presence of space, and since the latter cannot be grasped in the truest sense of the word, we are brought back to Chillida as »architect of the void«. Therefore the formal vocabulary of the artist’s sculptural works is also reflected in his prints, and the prints often resemble plans for his sculptures. However, the prints do form an independent medium used to shape the idea of the space. They create a special tension between fullness and emptiness or lightness and heaviness that is immediately comprehensible to the beholder.
Man – his life, his dignity, his rights: these are the central themes of HAP Grieshaber’s artistic work. The oppression Grieshaber experienced at the hands of the Nazis, the war, and in captivity as a prisoner of war made him develop into a committed artist who, throughout his life, never neglected political and social issues. Although Grieshaber’s output spans an impressive scope of artistic activities – ranging from single prints, portfolio works, and book illustrations to commemorative sheets, pamphlets, and posters – he realized the greater part of these works using the medium of the woodcut. Museum Folkwang has an extensive collection of works by HAP Grieshaber. The woodcut series dating from the 1960s and comprising the most important works in Grieshaber’s total œuvre form the focal point in the collection of Grieshaber’s graphic output. The prints were generally acquired by Museum Folkwang shortly after their completion by Grieshaber, and the thematic scope of the series is notable: woodcut series illustrating musical works appear alongside others addressing political and social themes. In the series of woodcuts › The Dark World of the Animals ‹, man and animal appear as equals or – as in the case of the »Birdmen« – have grown together to form entirely new beings. In their flowing lines and contours as well as their loose internal structure, the five works of this series (published in 1959) clearly differ from other series by Grieshaber shown in the exhibition dating from the 1960s. (cp. Inv. A 75/60 and A 77/60) Igor Stravinsky’s ballet ›The Firebird‹, which premiered in Paris in 1910, forms the basis of this series of the same title. Fifty years after the premiere, Grieshaber explored the Firebird theme and designed the state set and costumes for a performance of the ballet at the Städtische Bühne in Heidelberg. A series of ten woodcuts resulted, in which the artist uses one sole woodblock to print a series of differently colored woodcuts – something which, upon first glance, does not strike the viewer as such. The portrayal of the figures and the three settings or tableaux is based on the sketches for the stage set. (cp. Inv. B 2/62_01 and B 2/62_04) This series › The Blossoming of the Trees‹ is thematically devoted to the portrayal of man in complete harmony with nature. In six color woodcuts, Grieshaber explores different representations of individual figures as well as couples amidst a bountiful world of nature at springtime. White blossoms are the unifying element to be found in every woodcut of the series. It is particularly fascinating that the artist created such a delicate motif in a relatively mechanical way: He pressed the shape of the blossoms using a range of tools resembling cogwheels into the ready-cut woodblocks. (cp. Inv. B 5/63_4 and B 5/63_5) »Grieshaber once wanted to link his present life near the Achalm with that of his early childhood in Upper Swabia, to rediscover and capture his homeland with his very own eyes. On Easter Sunday in 1963, he finally followed his dream: he went to the stables, saddled his Iceland mare, Sweina, packed a sketch book, shaving things, and toothbrush into his saddlebag, said goodbye to his wife and child, and rode away« (Riccarda Gregor-Grieshaber). The result of this journey are the 39 woodcuts of the series entitled ›Easter Horse Ride‹, which the artist’s wife – Riccarda Gregor-Grieshaber – accompanied with texts based on her husband’s stories and accounts. (cp. Inv. B 4/64_08 and B 4/64_38) Grieshaber dedicated the series ›Dedicated to the Lord’s Black Nightingale‹ to the gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972), referred to in the title as the »Lord’s Black Nightingale«. Dating from the time of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the political focus of the series is more than evident. In subtle tones and colors inspired by nature, the woodcuts depict the life of the African Americans in the United States, beginning with the programmatic representation of a »black family«. (cp. Inv. B 6/64_01 and B 6/64_02) In ›Carmina Burana (Songs from Benediktbeuern)‹ – his main work composed in 1937 – Carl Orff turns to the texts of medieval poems passed down in a manuscript of 1230 that was found in the library of the monastery of Benediktbeuern. This manuscript contains several illustrations, which Grieshaber presumably knew and partly responded to with his woodcuts on the ›Carmina Burana‹. A distinctive feature of the series is the artist’s way of combining woodcuts with sheets of musical score, which Carl Orff produced solely for this edition. (cp. Inv. B 5/65_05 and B 5/65_14) In his largest woodcut series, Grieshaber looks to the ›Basel Dance of Death‹ that was destroyed in 1805, the visual motifs of which are documented in a nineteenth-century booklet (cf. Cabinet and screen presentation). Death bids his counterpart to dance without looking at him – from the pope to the heathen, from the emperor to the painter (an evident self-portrait on the part of the artist). Grieshaber realized the polychromy of the series by printing every color using a separate woodblock. The first public exhibition of the ›Dance of Death‹ simultaneously took place in Leipzig, where the series was printed, and Essen. (cp. Inv. A 80/66_37 and A 80/66_40) The basis for the ›Polish Stations of the Cross‹ was Grieshaber’s commission to design the Stations of the Cross in the court chapel of Bruchsal (Hofkirche Bruchsal), which was rebuilt between 1960 and 1966 after its total destruction during the Second World War. Grieshaber first completed 14 sketches (70 x 80 cm), using these as a model to realize the slightly smaller sheets of the woodcut series. In the publication of the series as a book (see example in the cabinet), Grieshaber combined the woodcuts with meditations by Cardinal Stefan Wysynski, the Primate of Poland at the time. (cp. Inv. B 2/67_03 and B 2/67_11) In terms of their style, the two series concerning the Stations of the Cross are very different from one another. The woodcuts of ›The Stations of the Cross of Reconciliation‹ are even more closely related to Grieshaber’s commission to design the Stations of the Cross in the court chapel of Bruchsal than his ›Polish Stations of the Cross‹. Grieshaber decided to depict the stations on woodblock plates. Before using them as a wall relief, Grieshaber printed a small edition from these plates and published it as a series. (cp. Inv.-Nr. A 34/70 and A 48/70) These series are completely mapped in the exhibition catalogue ›HAP Grieshaber. Series and Posters‹.
Monuments are reminders of glorious persons, of victorious or lost battles. But even in smaller formats, sculptural works of art often move us with their gestures. From ancient Egypt to the Middle Ages and right up to the present century, the subject of human vulnerability has preoccupied sculptors since time immemorial. In the case of devotional objects, the thought of a life after death is the driving force behind the aesthetic examination. However, as in Käthe Kollwitz’s ›Tower of Mothers‹ or Emile-Antoine Bourdelle’s ›Study of a Wounded Soldier Standing‹, it can also reflect upon what has happened and create a sense of sympathy. In his work, George Minne illustrates a sensibility that is experienced both physically and emotionally by his figures. After all, it is the pieces themselves that speak as fragments of grievance and injury, thus narrating a part of their story.
More direct than the widespread genre of the portrait, the double portrait reveals the relationships between people. Emil Nolde portrays two sisters; Rudolf Belling lets Cain and Abel struggle. Portraits expose emotions, thoughts, and behavior—love and affection, but also conflict and alienation. The depictions range from the nervous first meeting or the lovers’ sexual act to the spirit of frolic and play or the struggle with death. Joy and sadness, elation and pain as well as affection and contempt find expression in very different ways. But the intimacy that is portrayed is sometimes also deceptive. Glances are cut short; they are often directed at the viewer and thus make us into observers and those who are observed at the same time. The counterpart depicted in the double portrait also enables a form of self-recognition thanks to the other.
Museum Folkwang boasts a small, select collection of 19 works by Melanesian artists, most of which were added to the inventory around 1915. Most of these come from Papua New Guinea, an island state that has been independent since 1975 and whose northern territories were part of the German colonial empire from 1884 through 1914. The largest coherent group of works consists of seven sculptures from the island of New Ireland located in the north east of this state. Franz Wiesner, a civil servant born in Hagen and serving as an imperial police chief for the German colonial administration of Papua New Guinea, presented them to Osthaus through the mediation of Ada and Emil Nolde. Malagans are multi-coloured, highly diverse carvings, usually involving openwork. Often the artists combined human forms with others from the worlds of animals and plants. These carvings, which were sometimes assembled from different elements, were given additional depth and vivacity by means of elaborate painting. The production process was divided up into phases and could take several weeks or even months. It was conducted by specialists who were paid in shell money. The artists’ work was considered dangerous because it involved contact with otherworldly beings. The carvings – both the malagans and the uli – were used in the context of large-scale memorial ceremonies for the dead. They were popular at the time when the rituals were conducted and, in the case of the malagan carvings, they were presented in show huts or on meter-high walls, as the medium through which the dead could finally enter the afterworld. In this way, their spiritual power could be passed on to their descendants. Malagan figures in human shape used in rituals could represent recently departed relations, ancestors who died a long time ago or even the life-force that is transmitted from generation to generation. Two other malagan figures can also be identified by their formal and stylistic characteristics. They probably belong to the Marada sub-tradition that is associated with rain magic. This was important not only with regard to fertility and ensuring fruitful plant cycles, but moreover was an indispensable component of all rituals. As a rule, families or sub-clans who had the rights to Marada were also the guardians of rainmaker groves, where not only carved figures but also the skulls of famous deceased rain conjurers were kept in large bowls made of tridacna shells (cf. the blossom-like ornament on which the two figures were kept). Important examples of a sub-clan were horizontal friezes known as kobokobor. The presentation of such friezes meant that the recipient had reached the ranks of a ritual leader. The horizontal frieze in Museum Folkwang’s collection features three male figures between whom two so-called »eyes of fire« (mataling) are portrayed. This enables the sculpture to be identified as a kobokobor from the Valik sub-tradition. In earlier days, according to ritual use, friezes of this kind were sometimes hung up at initiation houses.
On closer inspection, the things that surround us at times appear strange and mysterious. The Surrealists harnessed this moment of wonder: In their works they united contrasting or disconnected aspects, or things happened upon by chance. In this way René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí created visual worlds that appear to have emerged from dreams or a state of intoxication, yet remain so close to reality that we feel like we know them. Whole landscapes grow out of blotches of paint here, or a street lamp illuminates the interior of a house. The ›Hallucinogenic Gaze‹ onto things remained important even after the dissolution of the close circle of Surrealists around André Breton in 1930. Following this, artists such as Max Ernst or WOLS became mediators who with their works passed on Surrealist principles down through generations and across national borders.
Over the course of the 20th century, artists radically distanced themselves from an understanding of painting as a window on the world, replacing the painter’s eye-level perspective with views below the horizon. Jackson Pollock laid his canvases on the floor. Dirt, sand, and shapeless organic abstraction started to find their way into many artists’ pictorial imagery and was, in many cases, amongst other things, not least a response to the cataclysmic world wars of the 20th century, which razed everything to the ground. The marginal, repressed, misshapen and undefinable now came to represent the focus of people’s attention. The works in this gallery all take our relationships with the Earth as their subject matter, whilst simultaneously playing with their metaphorical significance.
Painting outdoors, or »en plein air« in French, where the light and shade are natural givens, came to define a painterly style from the mid-19th century onwards. Pierre Auguste Renoir’s ›Lise‹, dating from 1867, is closely affiliated with the so-called Pleinairist movement, yet is considered the masterpiece of Early Impressionism. It was the first of the painter’s works to be exhibited at the Paris Salon, in 1868. Renoir portrayed his young love, Lise Tréhot, in front of a shady glade in the Fontainebleau woods outside Paris. Impressionist painting is characterized by offering snapshots of moments that underscored the fleeting quality of natural lighting conditions. No German artist came closer to this ideal than Max Liebermann: With swift brushstrokes and intense colours he recorded his first impression of a warden at Amsterdam Zoo on a bright summer’s day. The photography practised by the Pictorialism around 1900 relied on diffuse lighting and a deliberate lack of focus to create painterly testimony to life outdoors under the open sky.
Paul Gangolf (real name Paul Loewy) was an autodidact and, apart from painting, his main interest was in graphic work. As of 1914 Gangolf produced his first Expressionist woodcuts in which he reflected, amongst other things, on his experiences as a soldier in the First World War. At the beginning of the 1920s he also published several portfolios. Gangolf’s most important works include a portfolio produced in 1923, ›Großstadt‹ (City) and a series published by Malikverlag, ›Metropolis‹. In a review in ›Das Kunstblatt‹ the same year, Gustav Schiefler published an in-depth appreciation of the pictorial sequence and described the artist’s method of working as follows: »He has covered the block with broad chalk strokes, thus producing a base and a scaffolding from which he has scraped off the areas of light and bright spaces with a needle and a scraper, spreading out a kind of shimmering fabric over the dark parts of the background.« In terms of style this sequence of nine lithographs displays a certain similarity to the work of George Grosz, particularly in the figure scenes. Gustav Schiefler and Paul Gangolf agreed that Schiefler would produce a catalogue raisonné of Gangolf’s prints – as he had done before for the print oeuvre of Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. This too evidences Schiefler’s high opinion of Gangolf’s oeuvre. Schiefler’s death in 1935 put an end to these already far advanced plans. That same year Gangolf was arrested in Berlin for criticizing the regime and was detained in a concentration camp for some time. He later emigrated to Portugal and was shot dead at the border attempting to return to Germany illegally in 1939.
Pictorialism At the end of the century two important factors spurred the development of photography: a steadily increasing demand for photographic images and a related expansion of the trade. Up to then photography was only accessible to a limited number of people. However, simplification of the process of taking a photograph and improved camera technology expanded the number of people who earned their living as photographers. With the ›carte de visite‹, photographic portraits became affordable for a large section of the population for the first time. It was no longer the quality of the image, but quantity that became important. An international group of amateur photographers sought to oppose this general trend towards standardization and commercialization. There ideas were given the name art photography or Pictoralism. The Kleeblatt Heinrich Kühn was among the most important figures in the German art photography movement. In 1887 he formed a group called ›Kleeblatt‹ in Vienna with Hugo Henneberg and Hans Watzek. They shared their experience, criticized each other’s works and organized group exhibitions to better defend their interests vis-à-vis other exhibition organizers and gallery owners. Their aim was to establish photography as an independent art medium and refute accusations that it was a simply mechanical and thus not artistic form of imagery. In order to have the greatest possible influence on the photographic process, art photographers used so-called ›noble photographic processes‹, which include gum printing and oil printing. With their great potential for modification, an image could be changed to the extent that it little resembled the original exposure. Working on the positive was thus seen as the true artistry, with the negative simply providing a stating point. When Hans Watzak introduced Heinrich Kühn to gum printing in 1895, they were making use of a process known in France since the 1850’s. The two then improved the technique of multi-level gum prints. Choice and composition of the motif was oriented towards tastes in art of the day. The photographers left their studios to work en plein-air or in private homes. The photographic Collection holds an exceptional lot of 127 works by Kühn, including the first double gum print ›Portrait of Emma Kühn‹ from 1896 and a three color gum print, ›The Meadow‹ form 1898, a paper negative of 73 x 55 cm as well as five of Henneberg’s prints and one of Watzek’s. Hugo Erfurth Hugo Erfurth, from Halle, was in fact a professional photographer, but from very early on was also active as an art photographer in the sense of being an enthusiastic amateur. He became well-known above all because of his portraits. His studio in Dresden was always a popular meeting place for artists and other figures of society. While art photographer portraits concentrated above all on artistic and pictorial structuring, Erfurth sought to capture the essence of his subject. He stuck to the complicated ›noble print methods‹ well into the 1920’s although other aesthetic standards had in the meantime proliferated. There are 115 of his works in the Collection.
Shadow puppets are known on the two Indonesian islands of Java and Bali as well as a few other islands. The shadow (wayang) of the puppet cut from leather (kulit) brings to life ancient, existential stories in a ›wayang kulit‹ presentation. The exact origins of ›wayang kulit‹ are not known. It is mentioned for the first time in the old Javanese poem ›Arjunawiwaha‹ from the early 11th century in which is written that everything perceived is an illusion, like the shadows in a shadow puppet theater. The stories, still part of the repertoire today, had already been recounted in stone relief on temples from Java’s Hindu-Buddhist period from the 9th century. Most of the historical ›wayang kulit‹ sets known today come from the 19th and early 20th century. The ›wayang‹ figures can be distinguished through various characteristics: while female figures from Solo wear a train which hangs to the back, female figures from Yogya wear a train which hangs to the front. In earlier times, ›wayang‹ was presented as part of a ceremonial ritual, for example, for the birth of a child, a wedding or inaugurating a house. An original shadow puppet presentation begins at about 7 in the evening and usually lasts until about 5 the next morning. A large screen is hung from a horizontal banana tree branch, in which the figures from the sets are placed, the ›evil‹ to the right and the ›noble‹ to the left (as seen from the front of the screen. The puppet master, ›dalang‹, sits behind the screen; next to him, on a wooden box, on the ca 50 figures he will need during the presentation. Behind him is the ›gamelan‹ orchestra of metallophones, gongs and other instruments. The oil lamps, ›blencong‹ hung behind the screen create the shadow of the puppet on the screen during the presentation. The stories (lakon) that serve as models for a ›wayang‹ presentation come from the Hindu-Buddhist context. ›Wayang‹ was, however, integrated into the Islamic religion that had established itself as the ruling belief in Java and a large part of Indonesia from the beginning of the 16th century. The core of the ›lakon‹ plot is the unification of the human with the divine, which was also the aim of the Sufist orientation of the Islam originally introduced in Java. To this extent, the Hindu-Buddhist themes do not conflict with Islamic practice.
Since 2005, the Aterlier Van Lieshout has been working on an extensive work group entitled ›Slave City‹, which includes plans, drawings, models and installations. ›Slave City‹ is an artistic dystopia full of historical, art historical, literary and cinematic references. Atelier van Lieshout’s urban project, strictly organized around rationality, efficiency and profit, assumes the possibility of an initial investment which seems to offer enormous returns, thus reflecting not least some of the developments in the economy in the recent past. As a starting point for the project, begun in 2005, Joep van Lieshout – head of the atelier – juggled with contemporary ethical and aesthetic values, ideas on nutrition, environmental and climate protection, organization, management and markets, combining and interpreting them anew. ›Slave City‹ aims at the realization of compete autarchy, presenting itself at the same time as a perversion of a highly modern achievement-oriented society. The green city, using only energy it produces, is juxtaposed with breaking of taboos such as enslavement and total recycling of humans. To a certain extent, the city is a new interpretation of concentration camps which use the latest technology. The only pay comes from prostitution. Four of the sketch-like paintings in the collection illustrate organizational structures. ›Participants‹ in the project – as the residents are called – work seven hours a day in service industries (long distance communication, call-shops, computer programming etc.), seven hours in the fields, workshops or in surveillance. Together with seven hours for sleeping, each resident has three hours leisure time. A strict surveillance system ensures that any deviation will be draconically punished. The model of the ›City of Slaves‹ shows a perfectly organized and creative city which contains, apart from the necessary infrastructure, service buildings, universities, health and shopping centers, villages, brothels and museums. The ›Call-Center-Units‹ where people work and sleep, are collective camps for 20736 people per block and a minimum of 72 people per segment. Atelier Lieshout became known internationally in the 1990s with the production of mobile houses and ›shells‹, whose conception aimed at a freedom of movement, flexibility in form and evasion of planning authorities. AVL also produced ready-made furniture (Bad Furniture), functional toilet units, bunks, living capsules and office units. Up to today, the Atelier has developed, in a unique way, small and large format artworks and installations between architecture, design and sculpture. In 2001, ›AVL-Ville‹, an independent city-state in the harbor of Rotterdam, was declared. The failure in the end of an anarchist utopia was followed by the still continuing project ›Slave-City‹.
Stefana McClure’s sequence of eight drawings were inspired by the two-line subtitles of the 2001 BBC documentary ›The Blue Planet‹, an eight-part series exploring the world’s oceans and their importance for the Earth. All the subtitles relating to each episode are summarized in a drawing: on top of a sheet of carbon paper whose carbon side was uppermost during the creative phase, the artist placed another sheet of paper onto which she wrote the entire text of the subtitles by hand – always at exactly the position on the two-line template where the text would be faded in during the programme. This caused the blue particles of ink to rub off from the carbon paper, which was almost entirely the case whenever a particularly large number of letters were written down, in other words in the middle of the lines of text. Here there was almost nothing left of the blue pigment and the whiteness of the paper became visible. By contrast, on the left and right-hand edges individual letters could be made out. Accordingly, each drawing contains an enormous density of information, without the viewer being able to access the relevant information. The series can be seen as a metaphor for our media society flooded by a wave of overlapping information in such a way that the individual items cancel one another out and can no longer serve as an aid to making the right kinds of decisions – even in the case of matters of global proportions.
The artistic work of Andreas Köchler is characterized by a desire to use the media of language and art to transpose the personal experiences of his dreams to the world of consciousness. What is actually essential in this is a desire “to avoid losing the original experience or distorting it by reworking it. Prompt, undistorted depiction is the working principle” (Köchler). To this end the artist developed a way of working divided up into three areas. Directly after waking up the artist formulated in words his memories of what he had experienced in his dream. Initially, this took the form of written notes but later Köchler resorted to dictating texts onto a tape recorder in order to achieve greater directness. After making his language recordings – and thus still under the influence of his recollections – he painted large watercolours that did not record or illustrate any specific situation in a figurative way, but that could be seen as a visual method of approaching the shapes in his memory, things that are not accessible to language. In a third step, Köchler undertook an interpretation of the happenings in his dreams with the aid of small-format photographs, some of which paraphrased visual elements of the watercolours.
The changes that took place in the painting of the 1920s are also to be observed in the drawings and reproductions of this period. Expressionism, which had dominated graphics in the years around the First World War, lost its preeminent influence. For many artists, its place was taken by the desire to reproduce the visual appearance of things. The title of an exhibition at Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1925 gave a name to this artistic trend – Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). One of the most important exponents of this trend was Alexander Kanoldt. The latter was primarily interested in making portraits not only of women but also of landscapes, focusing particularly on the harmony between the urban settlement and unspoilt nature. He found motifs of this kind in Italy, which he visited several times. In the 1920s, Erich Heckel portrayed a nature whose peaceful serenity contrasted sharply with his older, more Expressionist work. The fact that Max Beckmann was seen by his contemporaries as an exponent of Neue Sachlichkeit is most understandable looking at the portrait he painted in these years. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner has a special status. As the most important exponent of the ›Brücke‹, a community of artists existing between 1905 in 1913, in the 1920s, he adopted a new style which had nothing in common with his Expressionist work, but that could not be assigned to Neue Sachlichkeit either. At Museum Folkwang there are, amongst other things, a number of portraits by Kirchner, including a portrayal of the director of Museum Folkwang at the time, Ernst Gosebruch. In the 1920s, Constructivism was also in its heyday. The objective of the Constructivists was to come up with principles for composing works made entirely of geometric shapes. One of the main exponents was Russian artist El Lissitzky, who also worked in Germany, where he exerted a great influence. Composed of ten colour lithographs, his series Sieg über die Sonne (Victory over the sun), dating from 1923, was repurchased for Museum Folkwang after it was seized for being »degenerate« in 1938 and sold. After attending a De Stijl course held by Theo van Doesburg at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922 at the age of 35, Max Burchartz started consistently using the formal vocabulary of the Constructivists. The influence of László Moholy-Nagy, who was also a teacher at the Bauhaus, doubtless played a role here, too.
The collection of Japanese theater masks in the Museum Folkwang contains 29 objects and is thus among the largest holding of this type in Europe. Half of the collection is of Nô dance theater masks and the other of Kyôgen comedy masks. Nô and Kyôgen belong together and embody contrasts; they characterize seriousness and laughter, pathos and parody, the spiritual world and life on earth. In contrast with their original use in popular religious theater, the use and significance of these masks changed under the influence of the nobles who carried on the theater tradition. Use of masks in Nô and especially in Kyôgen was strictly limited In Nô, only the leading figure Shite and his companions wore masks, in Kyôgen masks were only used in a few pieces. The face masks are made from wood with much inlay work, come primarily from the 16th to the 19th centuries and show various traces of use. The smaller-than-life-sized masks do not quite cover the human face; the actor embodying a character on the stage remains visible under the mask. The collection features two particularly exquisite kyôgen masks from different periods, portraying a plain, not particularly pretty woman and known as oto or okame. The okame as a woman’s mask is representative of the kyôgen, while the ›ko-omote‹ mask, which also depicts a young woman and may be by the renowned woodcarver Kodama Omi who died in 1704, is the definitive female mask for the Nô form of theatre. We find a transformed version of this beautiful young woman into a crazy old lady in the ›deigan‹ mask (gold-painted eyes), which could be the work of woodcarver Deme Kogenkyû Mitsunaga (died 1672), a teacher of Kodama Omi. The technique on the inside of the mask may also suggest it is the work of the master Deme Tōhaku, who died in 1715. In the late 19th century Japanese arts and crafts gained great popularity in Europe. Japan had succeeded in maintaining its political and cultural sovereignty after the USA forced the country to open its doors to trade and in aligning its economy with Western industrialization. Now for the first time, Japanese objects were finding their way onto the European art market that had not been made for export, and were also highly valued at home. Like other contemporary artists, Düsseldorf Kunstakademie Professor and painter Benjamin Vautier built up an extensive collection of theatre masks, which he bequeathed to Museum Folkwang.
The development of posters for luxury travel around 1900 is presented in three parts: In the first part, the transition from timetable to illustrated poster is dealt with, showing the developments in posters for luxury travel between 1880 and 1914, how their design changed and how they remained relatively unaffected by general developments in posters. The second part – as excursion – goes into the further development of luxury trains and their advertising in the 1920s. Theme and focus of train advertising changed. The focus was no longer only on the luxury of travel. Much more emphasis was placed on technical achievements, the power of the large engines – here in the locomotive as expression of trust in new technology and its effects. Acceleration and speed were sold as a part of travelling worth experiencing for itself. The third part deals with travel destinations – regions, places and hotels in Europe and, in part, beyond who sought to met the demands of the luxury traveller. Hotels in unique surroundings, the best service, golf, tennis, horse riding, horse-drawn coach trips, and all this in spectacular landscapes, all this aimed at attracting wealthy travellers.
The drama Sakuntala, by the Indian author Kalidasa (315 to 415 A.D.) describes a love crossing caste lines, one put to the test by divine intervention, but which turns out for the best in the end. Kirchner illustrated scenes from the beginning of the story where the wedding of Sakuntala, a girl from a hermitage and King Dusyanta is being prepared. A continuation of the series, one of the earliest of Kirchner’s lithographic works, was planned but never realized.
The elegance of East Asian lacquer work provides little clue to the adaptability and durability of the material on which it is based. The sap of the lacquer tree from East Asia – Rhus vernicifera is drawn through cuts in its bark and then, in several steps, is purified, dehydrated and colored. Black and red dominate a limited range of colors as only a few natural pigments can resist the corrosive force of the liquid lacquer. Applied in extremely thin layers, the lacquer needs several days to dry with high humidity. Once it is completely hardened, however, it is highly resistant to water, acid and lye, alcohol and all types of solvents. A quite independent and traditionally very widespread Japanese lacquer technique is the sprinkled picture –maki-e. Mentioned in literature from the 9th century, the oldest existing object dates from the 10th century. The sprinkled picture is a process in which, on a hardened lacquer surface, gold and silver powder is sprinkled on a lacquer decor before it hardens. The powder can create a wide range of effects through graded tones and consistency as well as through various thicknesses of sprinkling. A further increase in expressive possibilities arises through sprinkling across an entire surface (hiramaki-e) or sprinkling on a decor in relief (takamaki-e), as well as through an especially delicate variation in which a flat scattered décor is completely covered with a lacquer in the base color and then exposed through polishing (togidashi maki-e). A quite new style in its choice of technique and decor is represented by a writing box from the early Edo period. This flat box contained water color bars, water dropper and rubbing stone as well as brushes and thus all the utensils necessary for writing and painting. For Japanese lacquer art, the compartments are especially significant as they are almost all lacquered. In the combination of flat scattering technique with lead inserts, in its large diagonal composition and especially with its crane motif, the décor draws directly on models from the Rimpa school and its prominent genius Hon’ami Koetsu (1558-1637). The tea culture, with its established rules and utensils, was introduced into Japan by Japanese monks after their stay in a south Chinese Zen monastery in the 12th century. They used either original Chinese tea vessels or those closely oriented on the Chinese model. A good example of this is the Japanese cup stand which dates from the 15th or 16th century – a period which, under the influence of the Ashikaga Shogun, modeled itself closely on Chinese culture. It is decorated in negoro nuri, a technique named after the Negoro temple, in which black lacquer is completely covered with red lacquer. It was directly modeled on the monochrome lacquers of the Song period, from which is drawn the blossom-like trimming of the cup stand. Used over many years, the red lacquer of the vessel was worn down on certain spots, allowing the black lacquer to show through. These stripes or spots were not seen as detracting; instead they were held to increase the beauty and venerability of the object, which led increasingly to objects being worn down artificially or even black lacquer being applied afterwards for an artificial Negoro effect.
The fire of Notre Dame de Paris has showen that churches and cathedrals continue to have a symbolic character in our age. They are at the centre of urban society, an expression of human striving in art, and symbolize the connection between the heavens and the earth. Their architecture lets us experience this through imposing towers, lofty windows that flood the interior with light, or a raised location. Since the turn of the 20th century, structures such as the Eiffel Tower or utopian edifices such as by Vladimir Tatlin’s ›Monument for the Third International‹ (a never-realized design which envisaged a 300-metre-high structure) have been gaining symbolic meaning. Dan Flavin reflects Tatlin’s design in his staggered arrangements of fluorescent tubes, which bring the materials of glass and metal intended for use in the ›Monument‹ as well as its luminous character into the present.
The foundation was established in 1934 by entrepreneur and merchant Eugen von Waldthausen (1855–1941) in memory of his wife Agnes, nee Platzhoff (1861–1927). Eugen von Waldthausen defined the purpose of the foundation to be to contribute »to the intellectual development of the citizens of the City of Essen« by stimulating and encouraging »their feel for art and interest in things beautiful«. The statutes thus expressed the patron’s direct wish to combine art and education and was something he shared with those who founded the museum. From the 18th century onwards, there was a long-standing tradition in Essen of local families who during the days of the Second Reich had been granted hereditary peerages and went on to make generous donations and bequeathals to social, medical and cultural institutions. Eugen and Agnes von Waldthausen had already repeatedly publicly supported the museum in their hometown before Eugen von Waldthausen then decided to institutionalize this commitment by establishing a foundation on behalf of Museum Folkwang. Since 2012 the family tomb in the Bredeney cemetery is a City of Essen cenotaph. Thanks to the support of the Eugen-und-Agnes-von-Waldthausen-Platzhoff-Museums-Stiftung Museum Folkwang is repeatedly able to acquire new works for its collections. In the 1950s and 1960s, the focus was initially on renewing and advancing the collection of paintings, sculptures and prints that Karl Ernst Osthaus had established. During this period, the museum succeeded, for example, in acquiring works by Pablo Picasso (›Femme au corsage bleu‹), Franz Marc (›Lying Bull‹), Max Beckmann (›Promenade des Anglais in Nice‹), and Piet Mondrian (›Composition X‹). The countless new acquisitions for the Photographic Collection made since the 1990s with the help of the Foundatin include, amongst others, larger portfolios and groups of works by photographers of the likes of László Moholy-Nagy, Ellen Auerbach, Grete Stern, Peter Keetman and most recently pieces by Lynne Cohen and Thomas Struth. Museum Folkwang likewise has the support of the Eugen-und-Agnes-von-Waldthausen-Platzhoff-Museums-Stiftung to thank for the extensive collection of Martin Kippenberger posters.
The fully sculpted, 72-cm-tall wooden statuette ›Jeune fille debout‹ is a variation on another similarly clad, female figure, which according to Maillol was his first ever wooden sculpture. This piece can therefore be counted among the earliest testimonies to this artist’s extraordinary talent, now considered one of the most eminent sculptors of Classical Modernism. The sculpture comes to us from the bequest of Museum Folkwang’s founder, Karl Ernst Osthaus. Maillol initially started his artistic career as a painter and did not turn his hand to sculpture until 1895. The few remaining specimens of the artist’s early wooden figures all display the same feminine phenotype and feature very similar or related stationary subjects. A young woman with a slim yet somehow sturdy looking body stands in a slight »contrapposto«, her legs together, her arms by her sides. Her small round head, poised upon a rather short neck, is at a slight angle to the axis of her body. These closed contours and balanced distribution lend even Maillol’s smaller figures an air of calm monumentality. In the context of Maillol’s early sculptural work, the Essen figure is representative of one of the most memorable and original formulations, whereby Maillol uses the garment and the contrapuntal variation of the position of her arms and legs to give the impression of confident balance. Essentially, the ›Jeune fille debout‹ evinces all the important aspects of Maillol’s sculptural concept, his highly specific notion of the standing figure: Not only does it display his penchant for the type of female physique that is somewhat more voluptuous and firm that was the case in the canon of Classical Antiquity but also for entirely stationary figures whose impulse to move plays out around the central corporal axis, or rather balances out the centripetal and fugal energies in and directed toward the figure’s core. The joint exhibition also presents works from the collection by Auguste Rodin, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Alexander Archipenko, who were likewise active in France around the turn of the 20th century. In doing so it visualizes a decisive period of transition in early Modernist sculpture, which Osthaus had already observed rather attentively himself: In addition to those mentioned his most important purchases in this field included works by George Minne and Medardo Rosso dating back to the opening years of the 20th century. Karl Ernst Osthaus and his wife Gertrud stumbled across sculptor Aristide Maillol quite by accident during one of their many visits to Paris. Gertrud Osthaus wrote afterwards: »They were visiting Vollard, intending to buy a number of Gauguin works, when they saw someone carrying the figure through the shop. The sight moved the couple such that they immediately sought out its maker and thus initiated what would turn into years of close contact with Maillol.« Osthaus and his wife purchased the ›Jeune fille debout‹ from Parisian gallerist Ambroise Vollard at the latest in early 1904. In a newspaper article published on October 19, 1904, Karl Ernst Osthaus publicly announced the new acquisition, which was initially on display in Museum Folkwang and then later in Osthaus’ Hohenhof residence in Hagen. Osthaus subsequently acquired more works by the sculptor to round out his collection. He went on to buy the terracotta figure ›Jeune fille agenouillée‹, presumably in the same year, and the bronze sculpture ›Baigneuse sans bras‹ (around 1905) was brought to Hagen at the very latest in 1908, followed by the early cast ›Le coureur cycliste‹ (1907-8) the next year. Furthermore, in 1905 Osthaus had commissioned Maillol to create a sculpture for the gardens at Hohenhof, where the work entitled ›Sérénité‹ would eventually go on show in 1908. After Karl Ernst Osthaus’ death in 1921 the collection was sold to the City of Essen. However, from the group of Maillol works only the ›Le coureur cycliste‹ made it into the new Museum Folkwang collection. Gertrud Osthaus had exempted the artist’s other works from sale together with a few other sculptures. In fact the collector held onto this single figure until her death in 1975. After spending the subsequent years in the possession of her family and other close friends, it finally found its way into Museum Folkwang in 2011.
The industrialization of the 19th and early 20th centuries not only transformed old-established, natural sceneries, but also gave rise to entirely new professions and workplaces. Despite a gap of 100 years lying between them, Ernst Isselmann’s painting ›Brücke in Duisburg‹ (Bridge in Duisburg) and the series photographed by Christine Steiner, ›Mehr als ein Arbeitsplatz‹ (More than a Workplace) both mark the radical metamorphosis of work and the artist’s perception of its locations and tools. With Steiner, deserted offices and conference rooms tell of norms and practiced rituals in our professional interaction, whilst in ›Métal‹, her portfolio published in 1928, Germaine Krull highlights the symbolic and utopian power of new materials and shapes. The idealized figure of a worker by Constantin Meunier, or photographed job profiles and the paintings of Max Liebermann and Chaim Soutine all contrast sharply with such an approach.
The New York artist Jill Baroff, in her ›Tide Drawings‹ which she has been making since 2002, bases her work on a natural process; she translates ebb and flow into an artistic form. Starting point are tide tables of different bodies of water, document in detail water levels with date and time. In the case of her series ›New York Harbor March 31 – April 30 2005‹, based on the tides of the period in the title, data on ebbing water served as the basis for a series of vertical lines and data on rising water for the horizontal lines. Distances between the extremely thin lines depend on how much the level changed compared to the previous measurement. As the difference between individual measurements was smaller the closer the water level got to the changing tide, the red lines move ever closer together in the drawing until the white of the paper is completely covered. As the tide turns later from day to day, this compression of lines moves in the course of the series.
The presentation of the Sammlung Museum Folkwang and its individual objects were documented between 1929 and 1944 by photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897 Würzburg – 1966 Wamel), who had received a studio at the museum in 1929. When Karl Ernst Osthaus had shown the objects from the collection of Archaeology, Global Art, Applied Arts at Museum Folkwang in Hagen, he put them on an equal footing with the rest of the artworks and integrated them here and there in Henry van de Velde’s form of architectural ornamentation, with its reliance on flora as inspiration. The museum building by architect Edmund Körner in Essen gave the objects a purist setting in 1929. The simple, unembellished presentation was in line with the »objective« view propagated, as was also evident in contemporary art books. His photographs of the glass objects evidence his experiences as a photographer of industrial glass objects at Jenaer Werke. By using various light sources, he succeeded in making the glass objects glow and in emphasizing their materiality. Albert Renger-Patzsch had managed the image archive of the Folkwang-Verlag from 1922, until he went freelance as a photographer in 1925. His book ›Die Welt ist schön‹ (The World is Beautiful, 1928) contains shots of landscapes as well as photographs of industrial complexes and products.
The principle change in the depiction of landscapes around the beginning of the 19th century, which can be described as a gradual dropping of traditional principles of composition in favor of a manner of depiction more closely bound to reality, can also be seen in the detailed studies of that period preserved in the Grafische Sammlung of the Museum Folkwang. For example, Adrian Zingg’s sanguine ›Trees‹ from 1780 gives less the impression of reproducing a real, observed situation and more of following a type of depiction groups of trees as often used as elements in the foreground of classically constructed landscape compositions. Such models, which could then be introduced into a larger depiction, can also be found in Zingg’s collection of models ›Basic Principles for Landscape Drawers‹ from 1808. Contrasting with this, studies from the early 19th century in the Museum Folkwang are distinguished by a greater use of observed reality. Both small, close up motifs as well as those at a distance could serve for study drawings, as can be seen in the ›Plant Studies‹ and the sketch ›Pine Trees‹ by Caspar David Friedrich. In the enormous œuvre, with many thousands of sheets, of the artist Franz Kobell, who lived in Munich, studies form a large majority. The sheets of Kobell held by the Museum Folkwang are distinguished by their use of a new principle of composition – the section. This is clear in the pen and ink drawings ›Flank of a Hill‹ and ›House Behind Trees‹ whose motifs are shown close up but sharply sectioned at the same time, with the sectional nature of the composition especially accented. Ludwig Richter, on the other hand, chose a clearly much less strongly contoured section for his study ›Old Willows‹ made around the same time.
The sight of the rising sun, a moonlit night above the lofty cliffs, a lively party on the edge of the forest, two people on the beach: landscapes often show places of longing and memory. In the works, the viewer sees mountains, plains, forests, and seas. At the same time, however, the paintings and photographs make human experiences and desires visible. Despite temporal and spatial distance, they enable the viewer to experience the ineffable and the unreachable. While Camille Corot takes up the ancient narrative of a Golden Age (Arcadia) and has fauns dance around a temple, contemporary artists question landscape ideals such as paradise or untouched nature. Beate Gütschow, Katharina Fritsch, and Darren Almond use photographic means to address the rapture of the world through images by creating views of an imaginary reality. Those who miss the world begin to search for it, possibly penetrating deep into its vegetation and bedrock like Per Kirkeby.
The tale ›The Rebel‹ describes an unsuccessful attempt by the soldier Robert Boor, who had released a fatally wounded comrade from his suffering by shooting him in the head during the war, to try to re-establish a normal life after the war. Gramatté’s series begins with a portrait of the shot comrade and ends, like the tale, with the image of an eternal fall, as Robert’s life had been robbed of its basis: »With Robert swelled a horror of the inescapable so that, hitting out senselessly with both arms, to the floor he fell and fell, fell, fell…« (M. Georg).
The term Islamic Art describes art works made in countries from Spain to China and Indonesia when this area was, from the 7th century, part of the newly formed Islamic empire. From the beginning, Islamic art tended towards abstract or stylized motifs. It therefore preferred expansive two dimensional and abstract motifs. Harmony was constantly highlighted by Islamic artists and theoreticians and the predominant foundation for artistic beauty. In the depiction of equilibrium and order a possibility of expressing the nature of god was seen. Geometric patterns should, therefore, not be interpreted as purely decorative décor. Rather they are intended to reveal the beauty of God. In Islamic art, unlike in Europe, no three-dimensional and naturalistic decorative motifs could be used in the décor. This was not a religious concept of Islamic art but an exploration of its principles from a purely aesthetic standpoint. The large holding of Spanish-Islamic objects in the Essen collection is due to Karl Ernst Osthaus’s personal admiration for this artistic craftwork. In the winter of 1908/1090 he travelled to Spain, accompanied by an art dealer and Walter Gropius (1883-1969, an architecture student at the time, to acquire ceramics and others art because of its range of forms, its decor and glazing. The almost 500 examples of Spanish-Moorish art in the Museum Folkwang were acquired for the museum during this trip. Among them are many tiles, purchased individually or as tile panels, as well as twelve flat plates with their much admired luster décor, a glazing with metal alloy. Islamic glass Originally the collection contained glass objects from the beginnings of the craft in Egypt 3,500 years ago up to 19th-century pieces. The history of inspirations is often a history of happy chances. The iridescent effects of glass pieces from the Middle East, for instance, were not intended by the glassblowers: they appeared over time as a result of oxidation. Yet precisely these shimmering colours inspired Art Nouveau glass designers and ceramists in the Lorraine to develop new techniques.
The trend toward Japonism did not pass by Osthaus and his collecting activities. Whereas East Asian arts and crafts could be found in many contemporary private collections and artists’ studios, Osthaus also managed to compile an extensive collection of Buddhist sculptures. When his collecting activities became known, he received numerous offers from dealers and private owners. Members of East Asian trading companies and expedition corps of the colonial powers had brought back objects to put on the European art market that had not originally been produced for export or for trading. Soldiers sent to quash the Boxer Rebellion in China, for instance, looted the Chinese emperor’s summer palace and brought back objects with them as souvenirs to Germany too. Thailand was one of the few Southeast Asian states that managed to resist European colonisation. Traditional Thai architecture and sculpture dates back to the Sukhothai period (1238 – 1350), when Buddhism was declared the state religion. Thai religious art incorporates influences from India, Cambodia and China. The representations of Buddha follow strict rules, for example, that the shoulders should be as round as the head and the arms as supple as an elephant’s trunk. The raised hand is intended to dispel fear. The monks’ sculptures depict Buddha’s students (arhats) discussing the teachings or practicing meditation. Buddha head sculptures such as are found in many European collections are unusual in traditional Buddhist art. The human body is always represented as a whole.
The variety of table scenes in art reflects the great diversity of human communication: families come together at the dining table to discuss the latest events; a table in the café hosts a casual meeting, and at the regular’s table in the local pub people drink, discuss, and play cards or games. But tables are also places of concentration and reflection, where people read, write down thoughts, or work. The best place to do this is in a secluded room. With ›SleepStudySkull‹, the Dutch artist collective Atelier van Lieshout has created a radical version of the study. Those who close the door behind them find themselves in a narrow cell that contains nothing but a bed, a bench, and a table.
There are many reasons why objects from non-Europeans cultures found their way into European museums. Karl Ernst Osthaus collected commodities and material samples on the basis of the concept used by arts and crafts museums: they were to serve as inspiration for designers. The selection of ceramics for Museum Folkwang was also influenced by contemporary arts & crafts movements. On the one hand there are groups with floral patterns, such as those Gallé used as templates. On the other there are vases with abstract surface designs, informed solely by the materiality of the glazes – a concept that came to distinguish »modern« design in the 1920s. These simple ceramics designed with the deliberate use of chance first enjoyed high regard and were collected as artworks in China during the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279).
This sheet comes from a copy of the Schlemihl series which Karl Ernst Osthaus owned and which came to Essen with the rest of the Folkwang collection in 1922. The series was confiscated in 1937 and then sold. To replace it, the copy of the Schlemihl series also on display here was acquired in 1964 for the Museum Folkwang’s Grafische Sammlung.
Through the enthusiasm for ruins which began to appear in the 18th century on the one hand and a glorification of the Middle Ages which was central to Romantic artistic intentions on the other, depictions of historical castles and fortresses were quite common in 19th century art. More than just the buildings themselves, the interest lay in their being embedded in nature. A pictorial convention which originated in the 18th century presented the buildings from a lower standpoint, to which castles often built on notable landscape elevations – lent themselves in particular. In this manner, Ludwig Richter, for example, created some drawings. Richter travelled to Franconia in the late summer of 1837 for his publisher Georg Wiegand to draw cultural and landscape sights. These then served as models for the 30 steel engravings in ›Wanderungen durch Franken‹, published in 1840 by Wiegand as part of his series of books ›Das malerische und romantische Deutschland‹. The small format sheet ›Streitberg with Castle Ruins‹ is a drawing made on site, and the engraving in the book follows it exactly. During this trip, Richter must have captured the nearby Rabeneck castle in one or more drawings as it also appears in the volume. It is certain that on his way home to Dresden, Richter made the large format pen-and-ink drawing ›Medieval Castle in Forest Landscape‹, unusual for his œuvre, which dramatically depicts from below the castle perched high up on a rock spur. Apart from this staging of a castle as the highpoint of the surrounding landscape, the pictorial hierarchy could also be reversed, as was the case with one of G. Haderer’s aquarelles from the 1830s which shows a body of water in the foreground and middle ground, with the fortress almost completely hidden in the background. This is also true of Rudolf von Alt’s aquarelle ›View of a Castle in Wooded Valley‹ from the mid 1850s in which he presents above all a wooded valley which stretches toward Rosenburg castle, peaking out in the background along the Moldau.
Time and again, natural phenomena form the starting point for the painterly exploration of their overwhelming manifestations and the question of how best to represent nature by means of painting. During his stays in Étretat on the French Atlantic coast, Courbet painted manifold variations on the powerfully surging breaking waves with their foamy spray. While in Courbet’s work, the motif of nature becomes a compelling symbol of his efforts to create a new, realistic depiction of nature, Zao Wou-Ki’s almost entirely abstract paintings penetrate right into the heart of nature and seek to capture its quintessence through painting. In Gerhard Richter’s ›Wolken‹ (Clouds), in contrast, a blurred painted detail of a photograph serves as a foil for regarding the copied image and the essence of painting as >second nature.< Morris Louis’ monumental poured painting is only remotely reminiscent of natural phenomena and—via abstraction and associative connections—returns to the depiction of natural forces as seen in the works of his counterparts.
Volker Noth (born in 1941) is considered one of those poster designers who lent the cultural advertisements that plastered Berlin from the end of the 1970s to the dawn of the 21st century their own distinct character and thanks to their unparalleled qualities garnered international renown. A special mention must go to his collaborative work with the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) – lasting over 25 years; in addition, Noth also designed numerous posters for other public institutions such as museums and theatres. Early poster work It was in 1965, still during his University years, that Volker Noth created the first of his posters that found its way onto the advertising columns; it announced a talk on the role of nuclear power in the European energy industry of the future, hosted by the Europa-Union Deutschland (EUD). For the most part, Volker Noth’s early posters reflect the rudiments of his overall artistic approach, properties that would really come to bear in his later work for the Berlin IFF and other prestigious museums and theatres. These elements include, to name but a few, a visual language that is at times poetic but always appropriate to the commission at hand; but most notably a reduced approach to typography and the strategic planning of an overarching character that would then run throughout any given series, even those over a long period of time. These were the essential elements that can most certainly be regarded as prerequisites for his future work. Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) Between 1977 and 2001, Noth was entrusted with the task of designing the posters for the annual festival, not only announcing the Berlinale itself but the numerous fringe events and exhibitions that accompany it too, such as those part of the Generation (dedicated to children and young people) and Panorama sections. Volker Noth’s pieces for the Berlinale were rather gentle in their provocation yet still succeeded in polarizing opinion. There was barely a single poster that passed without comment or critique, the gamut of responses ranged from admiration to distain. In this way, Volker Noth’s posters fulfilled their function in the public space to a tee: Attracting attention to both the subject and the medium itself. His posters are thus inextricably linked to the history of the Berlinale. Posters for (other) cultural events In contrast to the posters for the Berlinale, where Noth was set out on his own with an extremely free design brief and the luxuries and burdens that came with it, his commissions for other public institutions and museums came with a rather different set of conditions. Here the client prescribed fundamental elements of the design, such as the theme, corporate colours, typography, how the sponsor’s logo (here an indispensable element) should be integrated into the design, and more besides. Volker Noth’s works are testimony to his fine feel for creating bold, striking designs, for making an impact. Photography and typography form the bedrock, often combined with strong colours to achieve high-contrast levels. His works are seldom »loud« and bright, rather vibrant and colourful; they don’t try to steamroll the beholder but to convince them. His personal style thus communicates the respect that drives him in the interpretation of the theme or subject at hand.
What is »here« for some is »there« for others. Borders separate, determine territories, turn people into immigrants and emigrants, and distinguish different political systems and conventions from each other. With buildings and monuments, nations mark and visualise border demarcations. Yet borders can also change. German post-war history is marked by the building and surmounting of the Wall. In ›You are leaving the American Sector‹ (1964), Wolf Vostell assembles media images as collages depicting scenes around Checkpoint Charlie, while Meuser refers with the title of his objects ›DDR Wachturm und DDR Laster‹ (GDR Watchtower and GDR Vice) to the guarding of the inner German border. Deimantas Narkevicius also reflects on the former border between East and West. For his film ›The Head‹, he uses historical footage from the inauguration of the Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz in 1971. Borders, however, are not only territorial. In Lovis Corinth’s work ›Thomas in Rüstung‹ (Thomas in Armour), the portrait of his own armoured son becomes a symbol of interpersonal father–son relationships.
When the Sammlung Folkwang (Folkwang Collection) was established at the turn of the 20th century, art dealers had more or less unlimited access to Egyptian objects whose export was subject to virtually no restrictions in the khedivial empire, which was under English protectorate. However, the collectors faced the problem of having to rely above all on their own quality awareness and sense of style when selecting objects. As a rule they were able to judge the aesthetic value of the objects, but less so their historical and cultural context, as the monuments and inscriptions had barely been studied at that time. Showing great skill, Karl Ernst Osthaus succeeded in compiling an overview of the Egyptian production of artistic and artisanal objects, which range from prehistoric times to the end of Classical Antiquity (6th century CE). Almost all the objects come from graves or have some relation to the afterlife. Under Ramses II Egypt enjoyed lasting peace for almost 50 years as well as a major cultural and economic heyday. This torso ›Sceptre-carrier statue Ramses II‹ (KPL 7) is one of the rare Egyptian »sceptre-carrier figures«. The sceptre carried during processions was presumably dedicated to Amun, the god of herds, pastures and fertility. The sculptors’ models, which often bear aiding grid lines and sometimes also Greek and Demotic (a cursive form of hieroglyphic writing) inscriptions, refer to the efforts to preserve the traditional canon of Egyptian art forms and pass it on to Greek artists. Some may have also served as votive offerings. They primarily appear in the Ptolemaic era, and estimates suggest that they number around 2,000. Whereas the two-sided relief from the time of Ptolemy II and Ptolemy III depicts a common motif (on the front a king with a nemes headdress; on the back the half-length portrait of a goddess with a vulture’s crest), the deep-set relief of a human face is unique. It bears the Greek inscription »For Ptollas«. (See KPL 1 and KPL 2) In Ancient Egypt model-like representations of the deceased’s household were laid in the grave along with the body in the belief that this ensured people of high rank were cared for in the afterlife. (See KPL 14) Vessels of hard stone were already being produced in the prehistoric Naqada culture around 3500 to 3100 B.C. and in the early dynastic period in a perfection hardly bettered later. While houses and everyday objects were made of short-lived materials, long-lasting stone was used to honor the gods and the cult of the dead. It was seen as a guarantee of eternity, ensuring the continued care of the dead with the burial objects. Materials were experimented with, providing an expertise that allowed the making of statues and reliefs in the old empire and the construction in stone of such buildings as the pyramids. The forms of the vessels were generally not new, drawing instead from models in other materials such as clay, metal or plant material. Coloured hard stone such as diorite, breccia, gabbro, serpentinite, basalt or limestone first served as raw materials for production, From the Middle Kingdom Egyptian alabaster (sintered lime, calcite-alabaster), whose varied grain was used for refined effects, and anhydrite (so-called »blue marble«) was preferred. The especially artistic forms of oil and make-up vessels belong generally to the New Kingdom.
When, at the beginning of the 20th century, painters such as Emil Nolde (1867 – 1956) saw African sculptures for the first time in exhibitions and museums, they assigned these objects a new role in European culture. They saw in them both beauty and foreignness to the European canon. The abstract representations offered them confirmation of their own artistic path in life. At the same time they imagined paradisiacal cultures in close touch with nature to go with these objects; a longing for the origins of man, which resounded in many European reform movements of the time. On the advice of artists Emil Nolde and August Macke, Karl Ernst Osthaus also began collecting African objects. He purchased several sculptures and masks from the DIAFE expedition by Africanist Leo Frobenius to ›Yoruba-land‹ (Nigeria). Later these were joined by vessels with woven decoration from the Bakuba (Congo) as well as other African objects. The pieces come from various tribal groups and were intended for ritual use. However it is often difficult to reconstruct the precise context, as with the Kanga for instance, a Dogon mask, whose symbols are not clearly identifiable. The ›Guro Zamble dance mask‹ (Ivory Coast) shows an antelope, hyena, crocodile and leopard hybrid, these being the tribe’s sacred animals. Only the chosen members of the tribe were allowed to wear the mask in ritual dances. The magical effect of the sculptures can be found in the culture of many African tribes. The statue from the neighbouring Baule tribe depicts a ›blolo-bian‹. The Baule believe that everyone has a ghost-like doppelgänger in the hereafter, of which people make a wooden figure that has to be regularly oiled in order for the spirit to remain gracious. What is remarkable about both the statue and the mask is the fine carving work, showing skin scarification marks, a Baule practice. Images of the Baule sculpture and the Bayaka mask were published by Carl Einstein in his sensational book ›Negerplastik‹ in 1915.
Within the 19th century drawings and aquarelles held by the Grafische Samlung of the Museum Folkwang, those made in Italy form an independent and large group. These are not works made by Italian artists; they are, without exception, works by Germans, Austrians and Swiss, who spent at least a few years there in the wake of an aspiration for things Italian of the day – Joseph Rebell, Friedrich Preller the Older and Johann Heinrich Schillbach, for example. Others settled permanently in Italy (and then usually in Rome), such as Joseph Anton Koch, Johann Christian Reinhart, Salomon Corrodi, Heinrich Dreber and Johann Martin von Rohden. Just as in the landscape paintings of the time, the works on paper also show the desire to capture the fascination of the southern light in works of art. What is remarkable, however, is that this desire manifested itself not only in such aquarelles which presented a landscape in a certain light, such as for example Salomon Corrodi’s panoramic ›View of Rome from Monte Mario‹, characterized quite successfully by the soft light of a setting sun. At the same time there were washed sheets, such as Joseph Rebell’s ›View of Frascati‹, Johann Martin von Rohden’s ›View of Tivoli‹ and Johann Heinrich Schilbach’s description of the landscape ›Between Albano and Ariccia‹, with their finely differentiated tonality giving the impression of landscapes flooded by light and characterized by the contrast between brightly lit and shaded areas. The sheets can also be divided into two groups on the basis of compositional organization. On the one hand there were works which meticulously reproduce a certain section of a landscape, such as Joseph Rebell’s ›View of the Gulf of Salerno‹ or Leo von Klenze’s ›The Gate of King Kokolos‹. There were also landscape views in which only a certain motif is precisely done with the other parts either being only hinted at or left out altogether. This holds true, for example, for Rebell’s ›View of Frascati‹ in which, unlike in reality, the most distant elements of the work – the Mondragone and Falconieri villas – are captured in detail while the closer foreground is almost completely excluded and only hinted at with a few strokes of the pencil. This may reflect the demands of the landscape painter and art theoretician Pierre-Henri de Valencienne, who in his ›Practical Introduction to Linear and Aerial Perspective for Drawers and Painters‹ from 1803 stipulated that an artist should capture as quickly as possible the rapidly changing mood of a certain time of day – and only this »as to aim to capture all the following moments of the day and their changing effects in one moment is a major sin against the truth and absolute proof of a complete lack of consideration.« If an artist took into consideration Valencienne’s call to spend no more that two hours on a sheet, then logically only one area could be indicated. At the same time, with such seemingly uncompleted works, the creative process itself becomes the focus of attention.
You might imagine that the theatre would guarantee designers special liberty as it has long been one of the creatively most challenging and artistically most demanding themes for the poster medium. However, such liberty needs to be fought for on every occasion; in the exploration of the piece, its current interpretation and mode of presentation, as well as in taking into consideration the ideas of the intendant, director, dramaturge, cast and the theatre owners. The designer needs to make a fundamental decision: when designing the poster, either he orients himself towards the intentions of the presentation or he includes his subjective perspective, developing the poster as an independent contribution to the piece and its presentation. It is within these limits that a theatre poster arises. The exhibition ›Spaces that mean the world‹ is dedicated to two designers who have been designing theatre posters for many years. Both design their posters as independent contributions: Frieder Grindler uses photomontage, Volker Pfüller drawings and handwritten typography. It is this difference in their starting points that makes it especially interesting to confront their two positions. Doing so not only sharpens one’s view of their particularities and differences, but also makes obvious the equal validity of different solutions for the same task. Frieder Grindler (*1941) achieved recognition at the end of the 1960s with his spectacular photomontages, made at first for posters for the ›Tübinger Zimmertheater‹. His works seemed to present to the viewer an objective reality whose sources wee photographic. This perception soon proved, at second glance, to be a complete mistake. With complex manipulations of the image, Grindler pierces a theme, visualizing the essential. Together with photomontage, he uses »real montage« to create this impression; situations are staged specifically for the poster and photographed. His playful treatment of the contents allows a complete understanding of the references in the poster only with knowledge of the piece and its presentation. Volker Pfüller (*1939) leaves a mark with each of his works – only one of his posters can look like that. Few designers stick so closely to their own pictorial language and move flexibly only within self-defined limits. His type of drawing, his use of color and typography are always expressions of a seemingly private style. This raises the question: How much of Volker Pfüller himself is there in each poster? More than you would imagine at first, because he himself draws on the stone, printing plate or foil, himself cuts into the linoleum as often as possible. It is only during the printing process that the design is complete. Pfüller usually depicts the central characters of the piece with the features of the respective actor. Drawing, color and typography provide a portrait study full of character and a commentary on the interpretation of the piece. Two separate catalogues appear with the exhibition. They conclude a first series of monographs on contemporary poster designers [see http://www.museum-folkwang.de/de/buchbestellung/publikationen]
Youth is a time of transition. Young people no longer see themselves as children, yet nor are they considered by older people to be adults. For centuries, youth in all its ambivalence has provided inspiration for artists creating images. The pieces on show here present the diversity of this phase in life: The figures explore forms of expression for their nascent sexuality or highlight the ambiguity of gender. The youth in the painting by Edvard Munch, which originally belonged to a cycle of representations of various different age groups, appears manly and confident to the observer; Aristide Maillol, meanwhile, gives his ›Standing Figure‹ a sense of inner calm and composure. Roland Kopp’s photographs of young people in a village, on the other hand, make it clear that by growing up, you also lose the carefree abandon of childhood.
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