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

Exhibition: ‘Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models’ at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

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

Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933-2019)
Modern Mythology
2013
© 2013 Karl Lagerfeld

Hamburger Kunsthalle
Glockengießerwall 20095
Hamburg
Phone: +49 (0) 40 – 428 131 200

Opening hours:
Tuesdays to Sundays 10am – 6pm
Thursdays 10am – 9pm
Closed Mondays

Hamburger Kunsthalle website

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Exhibition: ‘European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century’, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 19th June – 10th October 2010

Media opening of European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

A huge posting – and another ‘you saw it here first’ on Art Blart!

A simple, spacious hang shows off some wonderfully vibrant paintings in the new Winter Masterpieces blockbuster at the NGV. The use of strong yellow and pale grey wall colour compliments the paintings. Conversely, other rooms have a dark brown and very dark grey wall colour. Some people will like the effect but I found the dark grey a little too sombre and heavy in the room dedicated to the work of Max Beckmann. Overall a fantastic range of paintings, especially those by the German Expressionists and a luminous painting by Odilon Redon. To see them in Australia is a joy to behold.

Note on the photographs: All the photographs were taken with a timed exposure with the camera on a tripod. While this leads to ghosting as people walk through the shot it also adds a sense of the exhibition as a living entity. I find it preferable to the use of flash photography as flash destroys any ambience that the rooms possess. The photographs are in chronological order, proceeding from the beginning of the exhibition to the end.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art, Sue Coffey and all the media team and the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to photograph the exhibition and publish the photographs online. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria.

PS. Thankx to the many people who have emailed me saying that they love the photographs, especially to Sue Coffey who said the posting looked superb = it makes it all worthwhile!

Media opening of European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbei’s panting Goethe in the Roman countryside 1787 at the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (German, 1751-1829)
Goethe in the Roman countryside (Goethe in der römischen Campagna)
1787
Oil on canvas
161.0 x 197.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 1878 as a gift by Baroness Salomon von Rothschild

Installation view of the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Alfred Sisley (English, 1839-1899)
Banks of the Seine in Autumn (installation view)
1879
Oil on canvas
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of Charles-Francois Daubigny (French 1817-1878) French Orchard at Harvest Time (Le verger) 1876 at the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Charles-Francois Daubigny (French, 1817-1878)
French Orchard at Harvest Time (Le verger) (installation view)
1876
Oil on canvas
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of Pierre Auguste Renoir (French 1841-1919) After the luncheon (La fin du déjeuner) 1879 at the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Pierre Auguste Renoir (French 1841-1919)
After the luncheon (La fin du déjeuner)
1879
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 81.3cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 1910

Installation view of Odilon Redon (French 1840-1916) Christ and the Samaritan Woman (Le Christ et la Samaritaine) c. 1895 at the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Christ and the Samaritan Woman (Le Christ et la Samaritaine)
c. 1895
Oil on canvas
64.8 x 50.0cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 1960

Installation view of the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“The appeal of the Städel Institute lies in the tremendous energy filling that confined space. Virtually all of the great emotions that have lived in the souls of the peoples of Europe are there, and all in superb works.”

Alfred Lichtwark, Director the Hamburg Museum, 1905

One of the world’s finest collections of 19th and 20th century art is showing exclusively in Melbourne as the seventh exhibition in the hugely popular Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series at the National Gallery of Victoria.

European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th Century brings together almost 100 works by 70 artists from one of Germany’s oldest and most respected museums, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

Dr Gerard Vaughan, NGV Director, said: “European Masters presents a comprehensive overview of the Städel Museum’s holdings of painting and sculpture from the last two centuries of European art. This blockbuster exhibition provides a superb survey of the key artistic movements of the time, including Realism, Impressionism and Post Impressionism, German Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism, and French Symbolism.”

The exhibition opens with a series of large-scale romantic German paintings, including Johann H.W. Tischbein’s iconic Goethe in the Roman Campagna from 1787. Visitors will also be treated to magnificent examples of 19th century French art from Corot and Courbet’s Realist landscapes to well-known beautiful Impressionist works by Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne.

European Masters then traces the development of German art, introducing audiences to rarely seen Realist and Symbolist masterpieces from artists such as Max Liebermann and Franz von Stuck.

A major highlight of the exhibition is a powerful selection of German Expressionist paintings, with ten poignant works by Max Beckmann, including The synagogue in Frankfurt am Main and his powerful Double Portrait, all of which have left the Städel for the first time to be shown outside of Europe.

The exhibition also includes a breathtaking selection of Swiss, Belgian and Dutch works by artists such as Arnold Böcklin, Fernand Khnopff and Vincent Van Gogh.

“Exclusive to Melbourne, European Masters provides an unprecedented opportunity to see a spectacular group of masterpieces spanning the dynamic and transformative years of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is something in this exhibition for everyone, from the beauty and immediacy of French Impressionism to the raw power of German Expressionism. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see superb pictures that rarely travel outside of Europe,” said Dr. Vaughan.

Founded in 1816 by the Frankfurt financier Johann Friedrich Städel, the Städel Museum has one of the world’s finest art collections. The collection boasts 2700 paintings, 600 sculptures and over 100,000 prints and drawings documenting the development of European art and culture.

The Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series began in 2004 with The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, continued in 2005 with Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, followed by Picasso in 2006, Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now in 2007, Art Deco 1910-1939 in 2008 and Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire in 2009.

This year Melbourne Winter Masterpieces includes European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th Century at the NGV, and Tim Burton at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria website

Installation views of Max Liebermann (German 1847-1935, lived in France 1874-78) Samson and Delilah (Simson und Delila) 1901 at the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Max Liebermann (German, 1847-1935, lived in France 1874-1878)
Samson and Delilah (Simson und Delila)
1901
Oil on canvas
151.2 x 212.0cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 1910

Max Klinger (German, 1857-1920)
Portrait of a Roman woman on a flat roof (Bildnis einer Römerin auf einem Dach in Rom)
1891
Oil on canvas
182 x 182cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 1926 as a gift in commemoration of Walther Rathenau

Installation view of Max Klinger (German 1857-1920) Portrait of a Roman woman on a flat roof (Bildnis einer Römerin auf einem Dach in Rom) 1891 at the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Max Beckmann room, installation view of European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Max Beckmann (German 1884-1950, worked in the Netherlands 1937-1947, United States 1947-1950)
Female dancer (Tanzerin) (installation view)
c. 1935
Bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of European Masters: Städel Museum 19th – 20th Century, Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938)
Reclining woman in a white chemise (Liegende Frau im weiβen Hemd)
1909
Oil on canvas
95.0 x 121.0cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 1950

NGV International
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Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘Snow Machine’ by Florian Maier-Aichen at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London

Exhibition dates: 3rd September – 3rd October 2009

Florian Maier-Aichen (German, b. 1973)
Der Watzmann
2009

Florian Maier-Aichen brings a contemporary sensibility to bear on a range of historical references, from German Romantic painting to 19th-century photographs of the American West. The German-born photographer shoots images with a large-format camera then alters them digitally by combining negatives, adding computer-drawn elements or otherwise changing the originals. The effects are painterly and the works large-scale (the biggest one in this show, all but one of them C-prints, was around 8 by 71⁄3 feet). In one untitled print (2009), a digitally created brushstroke cuts diagonally across a snowy mountainside. Alluding to the trails ploughed across mountains to prevent avalanches, the photograph also suggests the black-and-white paintings of Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline. The sky above a dark mountainous outcropping in Der Watzmann (2009) references the Caspar David Friedrich painting of the same name (Maier-Aichen appropriated the image of the peak from the painting itself), while the sky suggests an airbrush version of the aurora borealis in red-orange and blue-green.

Der Watzmann may be the most direct reference to 19th-century German Romanticism and the sublime, but these are themes that Maier-Aichen frequently evokes, only to upend them.

Jean Dykstra. “Florian Maier-Aichen,” on the Art in America website May 4, 2009 [Online] Cited 24/09/2019

Florian Maier-Aichen (German, b. 1973)
Untitled
2008

Snow Machine by Florian Maier-Aichen installation view at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London

“Florian Maier-Aichen’s images reinterpret landscape photography for the 21st century. Often shot at obscure angles or from aerial views, his estranged vantage points are both alien and familiar; a sensation enhanced by his subtle manipulation of the images. Conceiving the representation of sites with a sense of dislocation, Maier-Aichen’s work addresses issues of globalisation and virtual perception. In Untitled, Maier-Aichen’s coastline is far from postcard perfect: a virgin beach lined with superhighway and luxury homes expanding into the misty distance. Tinting the surrounding forest in an unnatural shade of red, he casts an apocalyptic glow over the seascape, framing wilderness and human intervention as a scene of science fiction portent.”

Text from the Saatchi Gallery website [Online] Cited 24/04/2019

Florian Maier-Aichen (German, b. 1973)
Untitled
2009

“I have always been interested in the making of things. Most products and materials conceal their process of manufacture. It’s the same with photography, which turned from a discipline that was subject to the mastery of the few (alchemists) into a readily available industrial mass product, too transparent and too technical.”

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Florian Maier-Aichen

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent photographs by Florian Maier-Aichen. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London.

A photographer schooled on both sides of the Atlantic, Maier-Aichen’s work reflects on the dual influences of the history of photography and the history of painting, whether drawing on such dichotomies as German Romantic painting and the pioneers of German “objective” photography, or applying his post-factum experience of American frontier art – from the Hudson River School and Abstract Expressionism to Land Art and West Coast conceptualism – to his own topographical depictions of landscape subjects. He focuses on the camera’s consummate power to establish typologies of thought, perception, and feeling, producing images that, in mining the past, come to embody a matrix of issues salient to recent photographic practice.

Approaching the photographic field like a painter approaches a canvas, Maier-Aichen does for the contemporary image-world what pictorial photographers attempted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using the strategies and motifs of Romantic and Luminist painting. Unnaturally high-keyed or delicately tinted images of soaring mountain ranges, moody seas, and the industrial architecture of bridges, waterways, and dams carving through the natural landscape are all emanations of a rich and diverse imagination where a keen and critical grasp of art history coexists with more pronounced literary and cinematic conceits.

In a creative process that is as intensive as it is subtle and opaque, Maier-Aichen combines an exhaustive range of staged effects and traditional photographic techniques – albumen, silver-gelatin, and c-printing – with drawing and current computer-imaging processes. Weaving together often disparate elements from distinct sources, he applies myriad creative adjustments to each in order to produce seamless photographs that do not betray their intricate and layered compositions. Multiple negatives, digital manipulation, and elaborate studio techniques are employed to produce seemingly straightforward photographic landscape subjects while other images that engage the most conventional photographic techniques may themselves be subjects of pure fabrication.”

Text from the Gagosian Gallery website [Online] Cited 20/09/2009 no longer available online

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Many thankx to the Gagosian Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.