German portrait painting – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 15th June 2014: Gallery of Contemporary Art

Curators: Professor Hubertus Gaßner and Luisa Pauline Fink

Installation view of Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models at Hamburger Kunsthalle

Don’t give up your day job

From the sublime (Feuerbach) to the downright awful (Lagerfeld).

From gorgeous, sensitive portrait paintings of women, full of detail and texture, colour and stillness to what I would term soft-cock porn. Fashion influenced, hyper airbrushed faces; Saint Sebastian poses referencing classical ideals of male beauty (done so much more authentically and grittily by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden), all staged in sylvan settings. Then printed onto silver- and gold-coloured fabric. Can’t wait to see that…

Not absolutely fabulous, just absolutely hideous.

Marcus

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Many thankx to Hamburger Kunsthalle for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Installation views of Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models at Hamburger Kunsthalle

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Nanna
1864
Oil on canvas
61 x 47.2cm
© Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover
Photo: Ursula Bohnhorst

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Studienkopf zur Stuttgarter Iphigenie [Study of a Head for Stuttgart Iphigenia]
1870
Oil on canvas
62.5 x 49.5cm
© Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur
Photo: SIK-ISEA (Philipp Hitz)

Iphigenia (Greek mythology) the daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon; Agamemnon was obliged to offer her as a sacrifice to Artemis when the Greek fleet was becalmed on its way to Troy; Artemis rescued her and she later became a priestess.

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Poesie, Zweite Fassung [Poetry, Second Version]
1863
Oil on canvas
62 x 50cm
© Kunstbesitz der Stadt Speyer
Photo: G. Kayser

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Lucrezia Borgia, Bildnis einer Römerin in weißer Tunika und rotem Mantel [Lucrezia Borgia, Portrait of a roman in white tunic and red cloak]
1864-65
Oil on canvas
98 x 81cm
© Städel Museum, Frankfurt a. M.
Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Nanna
1861
Oil on canvas
137.8 x 99.3cm
© München, Bayerische
Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Neue Pinakothek
Photo: bpk I Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung

From February 2014 the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting an unusual double exhibition on beauty, eroticism and the adoration of muses and models that brings together paintings by Anselm Feuerbach and hit her to unseen photographs by Karl Lagerfeld. In a similar way both Feuerbach and Lagerfeld seek an actualisation of an ideal of timeless beauty founded in the ancient world. The exhibition examines the cult of beauty, which stylises the model to an icon. Over forty works by Feuerbach, most of them from the years 1860-70, will be on show. They are loans from the Feuerbachhaus Speyer and from numerous German, Swiss and Austrian museums ad private collections. Karl Lagerfeld has created a series of around sixty black-and-white photographs specially for the exhibition. Mostly in large formats, they have been printed in a complex procedure onto silver- and gold-coloured fabric.

Anselm Feuerbach (1829-80) one of the most important German painters of the late nineteenth century, lived in Rome from 1856 onwards. The city, with its magnificent architecture and heroic surrounding landscape, was a place of yearning that seemed eligible like no other to revive the classical ideal of ancient times. Feuerbach devoted himself to antique subject matter, which he filled with imagination and personal feeling. This is most excitingly shown in the series of unique portraits, begun in 1860, which portray Feuerbach’s model and muse, Anna Risi, known as Nanna. Feuerbach painted Nana in a wide variety of roles and sensitively staged settings that reveal an almost cultic veneration for his model. When Nanna left Feuerbach in 1865, she was followed by Lucia Brunacci. Similarly to Nanna she matched the classical ideal of beauty of the time, with her Greek profile and thick dark hair. Lucia inspired Feuerbach to impressive portrayals of mythological themes that form the highpoint of his ouevre.

‘Happy is he whom the muses love’, wrote the Greek poet Hesiod, and so the muses are a symbol of the higher power that is needed, according to the ancients, to be creative. The photographic series Modern Mythology (2013) by Karl Lagerfeld, explores the love story of Daphnis and Chloe, and shows models such as Baptiste Giabiconi and Bianca Balti, who have accompanied Lagerfeld in his work for several years. The story, by the poet Longus, tells of a boy and a girl who grow up without parents among shepherds and over the years develop a strong affection for one another. The narration has been taken up many times since the Renaissance. Lagerfeld’s photographs belong to a series of works by Pierre Bonnard, François Boucher or Aristide Maillol which present the ancient text as a symbol of the idyllic life. Karl Lagerfeld’s stagings were shot against the picturesque natural background of the South of France, and are the actualisation of an ancient theme.

The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: the catalogue on Anselm Feuerbach is published jointly with the Museum Wiesbaden and introduces Feuerbach’s paintings and drawings from an art-historical perspective; the second book combines Karl Lagerfeld’s photographs and Longus’s mythological narrative of Daphnis and Chloe in a bibliophile volume that will be elaborately produced by the publisher Gerhard Steidl.

Curators: Professor Hubertus Gaßner and Luisa Pauline Fink

Press release from the Hamburger Kunsthalle website

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Das Urteil des Paris [The Judgement of Paris]
1870
Oil on canvas
228 x 443cm
© Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk
Photo: Elke Walford

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Ruhende Nymphe [Resting Nymph]
1870
Oil on canvas
112 x 190cm
© Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Leihgabe Privatbesitz
Photo: Monika Runge