BONN.- The Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn presents today Encounters with Modern Art - The Kunstmuseum Winterthur, on view through August 23, 2009. This summit of leading modernist artists provides a veritable feast of outstanding paintings and sculptures – and offers the chance to trace the development from Impressionism to contemporary art through this unique collection of around 240 paintings, sculptures and drawings.
This remarkable exhibition at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn, on show from 24 April to 23 August, comprises works from the Winterthur Art Musuem by a range of artists whose names seem to read like a "Who's Who" of the art world: Arp, Artschwager, Beckmann, Bonnard, Brancusi, Braque, Calder, Cézanne, de Chirico, Delacroix, Delaunay, Dégas, Ernst, Fontana, Giacometti, van Gogh, Guston, Hodler, Kandinsky, Kelly, Kokoschka, Kounellis, Léger, Lehmbruck, Magritte, Maillol, Merz, Miró, Mondrian, Monet, Morandi, Picasso, Renoir, Richter, Rodin, Schlemmer, Sisley, Tanguy, Tapiès and many more.
The exceptional collection of the Winterthur Art Museum, offering a complete overview of the period, can be favourably compared to the collections at internationally renowned museums such as the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art. Gerhard Richter even named the Winterthur Art Museum as his favourite museum.
Wall Texts Kunstmuseum Winterthur: Like many other museums in German-speaking Switzerland, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur grew out of a joint effort of artists and art lovers who sought to establish a platform for the fine arts in their city. The Kunstverein Winterthur – to this day the supporting organisation of the museum and owner of the collection – emerged from an artists’ association founded in Winterthur as early as 1848.
In 1908, in a bid to raise the activities of the Kunstverein to European levels, the governing board set about building a museum, which was completed in 1915. Two years before its completion, the Galerieverein was founded to act as a ‘strong younger brother’ to the Kunstverein and to provide funds for larger acquisitions. The forward-looking optimism and intense activity of the 1910s was followed by a period of stagnation during which the Kunstverein focused primarily on the tried and tested, relegating modern art to the back burner. The turnaround came under the presidency of Balthasar Reinhart who, in 1960, began to acquire important works of modern art through the Reinhart family foundation, the Volkart Foundation, and to make them available to the Kunstverein as indefinite loans.
When the banker Dr Emil Friedrich, a native of Winterthur, bequeathed the collection he had put together with his wife Clara Friedrich-Jezler to the Kunstverein, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur finally entered the ranks of museums with significant holdings of modern art.
Despite generous gifts of the first generation of collectors, the Kunstmuseum’s French collection would have remained patchy had it not been for the comprehensive and coherent collection amassed by several members of the Wolfer family which began to enter the museum in 1973, complementing existing holdings and filling in gaps.
The inauguration in 1995 of the well-received extension by Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer was made possible by the great solidarity and support of the members of the Kunstverein and other patrons of the Kunstmuseum and provided the museum with much-needed space to house the growing collection and to present exhibitions.
Over the course of the past decades the Kunstmuseum has made it its goal to expand the collection by focusing on new areas of strength that mirror the quality and uniqueness of those that have made the museum’s reputation. An important consideration in this endeavour was to maintain and even accentuate the collection’s very own and unmistakable profile among Switzerland’s many outstanding museums. For this reason the Kunstmuseum has focused its attention on more recent American art, the formal sensibility of which is in many ways related to that of French art. Similarly, it made sense to expand the strong holdings of Italian art with Rosso, de Chirico and Morandi by giving space to the more recent developments around the Arte Povera movement. These strategic acquisitions have opened up a dialogue across the collection that is further enriched by a number of singular voices, among them that of Gerhard Richter. A collection of works on paper complements the holdings of paintings and sculptures and helps shed light on the ramifications and interconnectedness of individual groups of works, that transcend the limits of technique and expressive means.
French Early Modern Painting One of the fundamental changes in French 19th-century landscape painting was the transition from studio paintings worked up from preparatory studies to paintings executed outdoors, before the motif. This radically different approach led to an equally radical reappraisal of composition and painterly technique.
Camille Corot and the painters of the Barbizon School liberated the genre of landscape painting from the theatrical trappings of academicism and introduced smaller, more intimate formats. Among the next generation of plein air painters was Eugène Boudin. Claude Monet very quickly developed a compositional style that responded directly to the motif, leaving behind conventions that demanded clearly defined foregrounds and backgrounds and the artful integration of the motif in its surroundings.
In 1874 a group of artists opened a jury-free exhibition in Paris, which soon became known as the ‘first Impressionist exhibition’, launching a new term that described the empirical perception of reality and the rejection of narrative that Monet and his artist friends pursued. Alfred Sisley showed a strong interest in architectural detail and in the contrast between the volume of buildings and the intricate small-scale busyness of its urban environment. Arguably the most consistent Impressionist painter was Camille Pissarro.
Paul Cézanne chose a different path. Like the Impressionists he focused on his impressions of reality, but unlike his colleagues, he wanted to organise them and infuse Impressionism with the solidity and durability he saw in the art of the Old Masters he admired in museums.
For Vincent van Gogh the encounter with Impressionism was no more than an episode. Yet his brushwork and autonomy of colour were embraced two decades later by young painters such as Maurice de Vlaminck. When these young artists first appeared in public in 1905, they were derided as ‘Fauves’ (wild beasts). Undeterred, the painters adopted the term as a badge of honour. Albert Marquet was not really a Fauvist. Although his works are executed in spontaneous bold brushstrokes, he used less strident colours and never abandoned tonal values.
Colour and Synthesis Alongside the trend towards Naturalism and the desire to capture the fleeting phenomena of reality there is another, more romantic current running through French 19th-century art whose main preoccupation is with colour, both as a material phenomenon and a subjective experience. Painters were not so much concerned with the direct reproduction of ephemeral perceptions as with a synthesis of perception and sentiment in a self-contained work of art. Eugène Delacroix stands for the turn away from neoclassicism and the use of radiant pure colour, emerging from the semi-darkness that had dominated painting before. He did not practice plein air painting; instead he explored the expressive potential of chiaroscuro to evoke a sense of time. Alongside the sensation of pure colour there is a darkness that absorbs and preserves the elements of the painting, as though to describe the opposition of presence and remembrance.
Odilon Redon was deeply influenced by Delacroix’s work, in which he found, as he said, not the perfect artist, but the inventor in the romantic sense of the word, whose passion gave new life to art. By subjecting detail to the agitated rhythm of the bodies, he pursued the triumph of movement over the stability of form.
Towards the end of the 1880s a new generation of artists, who conspiratorially called themselves ‘Nabis’ (from the Hebrew for prophet), enthusiastically embraced Redon’s work as a counterpoint to academic naturalism. Among them were Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard. The Nabis were more interested in the value of colour as such than in symbolist mystification.
Ferdinand Hodler, Giovanni Giacometti Swiss painting at the turn to the 20th century is dominated by the work of Ferdinand Hodler. He not only had a great gift for the decorative but also an ability to convey shock and tension with such raw realism that any decorative gesture just paled to nothing. This duality eloquently reflects the contradictions of Hodler’s time, the dawn of modernism.
At the start of the 20th century Hodler became one of the few great landscapists in Europe. For more than a decade he devoted himself to landscape motifs, and there are many who would argue that these, more than his figure subjects, laid the foundation of his lasting influence. Hodler’s landscapes are precisely observed, but they are not plein air paintings, concerned only with the depiction of fleeting phenomena. They are the work of a mature artist who found in landscape painting a sublimated form of symbolist perceptions. The confrontation with himself and the self-assertion are recurring features of his work. More than a hundred self-portraits by Hodler have been identified, making him one of the great masters of the genre. Giovanni Giacometti was the father of Alberto Giacometti. He was influenced by the Fauves, Cézanne and van Gogh as well as by Giovanni Segantini. Giacometti’s work is devoted to Impressionist landscape painting and portraits of his families and neighbours.
Orphism, Bauhaus, Cubism and Purism When modernism emerged in all its multifaceted forms the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Roussseau was widely hailed as the exemplary master of a new form of art. His rejection of naturalism, the conspicuous flatness of his compositions, his capacity for turning disparate images into an unreal but aesthetically unified whole that paid no heed to conventional perspective earned him the admiration of the avant-garde.
Robert Delaunay’s aesthetic device of structuring the picture plane by means of a grid became a primary characteristic of modern art, and the writer and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term Orphic Cubism to describe Delaunay’s luminous paintings. In Germany his novel compositions were viewed in the context of German preoccupations with the autonomy of colour and its liberation from the constraints of representation.
During his time at the Bauhaus Wassily Kandinsky developed a set of principles that were to have a profound influence on an entire generation of artists. In his treatise Point and Line to Plane of 1926 he analysed the nature and configuration of these three basic pictorial elements and explained their function in the picture. Like Kandinsky before him, Alexej von Jawlensky adopted strong black contour lines to achieve a cloisonné effect and impart extra luminosity to his colours. Paul Klee, on the other hand, introduced a form of pointillism to infuse his paintings with an independent pulsating rhythm before finding his way to the abstract compositions of his ‘square paintings’ that eschew all linear elements. Oskar Schlemmer, finally, looked to Italian 15th-century painting for inspiration on the integration of figure and ground.
Unlike the followers of Orphism with their nuanced colours and harmonising tendencies, Fernand Léger embraced strong contrasts, boldly isolating colour, line and form in order to reunite them with maximum impact. Wounded in the war, Georges Braque resumed his artistic career in 1917 and re-examined the Cubist revolution he had brought about together with Picasso. They had liberated all formal elements – from the shape of the objects depicted and their position in space to the colour and tactile quality of the plane – from the constraints of representation, in order to allow the viewer to piece together in his mind a more complete idea of the whole of the structure of any given object. The Swiss artist Gustave Buchet shown here was among those who adopted the Cubist innovations.
After the First World War a number of young artists, among them Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, objected to certain developments in Cubism. They advocated a return to order and purity as the guiding principles of life, particularly after the hardships of the Great War. This desire for purity gave Purism its name.
Magical Realism, New Objectivity, Surrealism The term Magical Realism was coined in 1925 in an effort to subsume the many different forms of a new wave of figurative painting under a single banner. The cool constructions of artificial, eerily static and quiet spaces that typify Magical Realism are rooted in the postulates of Cubism and abstraction and look to the art of Henri Rousseau for inspiration. The work of the Swiss artists Adolf Dietrich and Niklaus Stoecklin can be categorised under the heading of Magical Realism. One of the leading members of the New Objectivity movement in Germany was Alexander Kanoldt. Manfred Hirzel represents the austere side of the movement, eschewing magical and decorative elements in favour of extreme sobriety. Some of Beckmann’s paintings of the 1920 also approach the tenets of New Objectivity, but his work has always eluded attempts at narrow classification.
The First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 declared that Surrealism’s defining principle was ‘psychic automatism’, by which he meant thought freed from any control exercised by reason and exempt from any aesthetic or moral considerations. This goes a long way toward explaining why Surrealist painting never developed a coherent unified style. Before the First World War Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings had anticipated many of Surrealism’s concerns, but in 1918 the artist became an outspoken opponent of modern art, advocating instead a return to the masters of the Italian Renaissance.
René Magritte used painting to visualise philosophical problems such as the mysterious relationship between objects and the incompatibility of image, language and reality. In order to give expression to the subconscious Max Ernst invented new artistic techniques such as grattage, in which paint is scraped off the ground to reveal hidden layers of paint. In Yves Tanguy’s work biomorphic forms appear against a backdrop of distant imaginary horizons. Kurt Seligmann’s paintings also feature organic elements that have lost their familiar shape through isolation and distortion. Joan Miró, on the other hand, found inspiration in the work of Paul Klee and organised the picture plane around a whimsical side-by-side of characters and symbols.
Abstraction and ‘Concrétion’ The impact of the Cubist fragmentation of form can be observed on a wide range of styles in the 1910s and 1920s. Theo van Doesburg sought to trace the transition from figural representation to abstract composition. Yet the figure remains recognisable in the blank white spaces between the black grid lines. In the 1920s Kurt Schwitters felt an affinity with Constructivist ideas and formed a friendship with Theo van Doesburg. During this period he produced a number of formally interrelated reliefs from found pieces of wood. Piet Mondrian countered van Doesburg’s use of the term ‘concrete’, which he regarded as too close to naturalism, with the term ‘abstract’. He postulated that each formal element needed an equivalent opposite, citing as examples the pairing of the primary colours with the non-colours black, white an grey, the plane as opposed to the dividing line, and the horizontal countered and balanced in equal measure by the vertical.
For Alexander Calder the meeting with Mondrian in 1930 was to prove seminal. The elements of his mobiles, floating in space in a cascade of weights and counterweights, mirror the two driving forces of Calder’s art: his deeply rooted naturalism and the choreography of moving abstract shapes.
The grid-like structure of Joaquín Torres-García’s paintings was inspired by Mondrian and van Doesburg. The Uruguayan artist filled the modular grid with signs and figures whose symbolic meaning was to elucidate the cosmic universal order. The work of Hans (Jean) Arp demonstrates that despite formal conventions such as grid structures or the use of primary colours, there can be no talk of empty schematicism or restrictiveness in abstraction. To Arp Concrete Art meant the autonomous coming into existence of the object, producing instead of reproducing and not being bound by rules of composition or subjective decisions.
Concrete Art In 1937 a group of Swiss Constructivists and Surrealists founded an association of modern Swiss artists under the name Gruppe Allianz. A key figure of the group was the Bauhaus-trained artist and designer Max Bill. In 1936 he had formulated the principles of Concrete Art, sharpening the ideas published earlier by van Doesburg and postulating that all properties of a work of art, even seemingly extrinsic ones, are subject to an overriding logic. Bill’s paintings of the war years show no sign of stylistic unity; they are remarkable for their heterogeneity and bear witness to the artist’s tireless exploration of the plane. Towards the beginning of the 1950s, however, his paintings show signs of a concentration of means and an increasing simplification of composition. Dispensing with everything that smacked of linear drawing and 1930s Neoplastic theory, Bill picked the square as his format of choice and set about exploring the possible subdivisions of its area without introducing extrinsic elements. The painter Verena Loewensberg rejected Bill’s highly restrictive parameters, preferring instead to develop her work from individual inventions rather than overt formal principles.
François Morellet abandoned traditional forms of pictorial composition under the influence of Max Bill’s work, which he had encountered in 1950. He explored systematic and aleatory processes of distributing colour and form with the aim of reducing the artist’s conscious input. Morellet met with scant recognition in his native France, but the rejection of his work inspired him to new inventions that went far beyond the model of the Zurich School and that approached methods current in the 1950s and 1960s in Germany, Holland and the United States.
Giorgio Morandi Max Bill recorded the encounter with Giorgio Morandi in 1961, ‘For years I have loved Giorgio Morandi’s discreet still lifes. On the occasion of a visit I asked him for the difference between a fully resolved painting and a spontaneous one. He told me that he would leave the spontaneous one untouched if it worked, but if he was not fully satisfied then he would rework it until it matched his expectations.’ Morandi did not seek to create naturalistic depictions of objects, instead he sought to realise his vision of pictorial unity. The still life genre was particularly well suited to this pursuit; Morandi could arrange the items in his studio and work for as many days as it took under essentially unchanging conditions.
The individual paintings show Morandi’s capacity for revealing the complexity and infinite variation of a small range of familiar items. The artist’s consummate control is evident even in his signature, the single linear element in his paintings. Its colour, size and position are carefully chosen to underpin the painting as a whole and to alert the viewer to the ultimate artifice of the work.
Post-war Period Alberto Giacometti sought to formulate his perception of the human figure not as a given unit but as a phenomenon in space. His figures became increasingly longer and thinner, as though they were crushed by the surrounding space and withdrawing from the viewer. Walking around them, the viewer can experience the interplay of projecting and receding volumes in space. While Bram van Velde’s parcelled compositions are vaguely reminiscent of the Cubist grid structure, the individual parcels appear to take on a life of their own. Yet the disparate elements of the paintings are forged into a unified whole by the powerful sweep of colour.
The influence of Braque’s elegantly balanced late compositions is evident in the paintings of Nicolas de Staël. The cloisonné technique with its black frames containing and enhancing colour was to dominate de Staël’s paintings for some time yet before he allowed the thickly impastoed patches of luminous colour to break free. Picasso’s late work still formed an erratic block in the artistic landscape of the 1960s when European art was undergoing fundamental changes. Yet, far from outdated, Picasso’s work reflects the artist’s unflagging fascination with an expressive and fantastical figuration.
A successful proponent of the new primitivism was the Dutchman Karel Appel who skilfully fused the elements of a naïve pictorial language with reminiscences of Picasso and Miró. Over the course of the 1950s he developed this into a loose gestural style that derived its impact from a grotesquely distorted figuration and the lavish use of riotous primary colours. Unlike Appel, Asger Jorn championed art flourishing off the art world’s beaten track and articulated his concept of an acausal and alogical art as a counterpoint to the functionalist principles governing composition and design in the industrialised world.
Antoni Tàpies’s collage-based work transcends modernist collage in that it relies not so much on the balanced composition of forms as on the expressive effects of ‘poor’ materials generally considered outside the realm of art. The free associations of meaning and sensual juxtaposition of materials testify to the artist’s continued commitment to the surrealist aesthetic.
Italian Art Since Fontana Lucio Fontana’s return from Argentina to Milan in 1947 ushered in a new era of art that broke with the dominant Cubist and Surrealist models of modernism. Fontana’s work bears witness to the artist’s unceasing engagement with spatial phenomena. His choice of the term Concetto attest to his awareness of the fact that his works could only ever be approximations of an idea. Towards the end of 1958 he began slashing his paintings. The slash differs from painterly interventions in that it is irreversible; it opens the picture plane to infinite space and, with it, to ideas transcending representation.
Piero Manzoni came to fame with a series of highly provocative works that called into question the nature of the art object. The seam interrupting the white continuum of his Achrome is not so much a drawing as a material effect. Giulio Paolini exemplifies the special synthesis of intellectuality and sensuality in 20thcentury Italian art. In the late 1970s he began to focus on memory as an important theme, tied to the idea of the work of art emerging from the recollection of the past. His Mnemosyne consists of nine canvases, most of which have been turned to face the wall – instead of showing a picture, they merely suggest the possibility of one. Luciano Fabro’s work is as diverse as it is whimsical. He examined the materiality and the plurality of meaning of objects and their interaction with the viewer.
Generally subsumed under the heading Arte Povera, these works are united by their use of everyday humble material, an emphasis on the work process and by the way their installation takes account of the given space.
American Abstract Painting In the 1940s Mondrian, Matisse, Picasso and Miró began to be regarded as the fixed stars of the artistic universe by whose light many members of the group of American Abstract Artists worked in the decade to come.
Fritz Glarner developed his mature style by departing from the severity of Mondrian’s rigidly orthogonal composition principles. The introduction of diagonal lines changed rectangles into trapezoids and brought a striking spatial dimension to his compositions.
Hans Hofmann’s teachings on the laws of harmony and counterpoint left their mark on Myron Stout. His idiosyncratic small paintings show abstract orders in which the individual elements often seem caught in an upward surge. Another German artist who had a profound effect on American painting was Josef Albers who arrived in the United States in 1933. His celebrated Homage to the Square series, begun around 1950 and pursued until the artist’s death in 1976, explored the fundamental chromatic interactions of flat planes of colour within a given mathematically determined template.
Inspired by Abstract Expressionism, Agnes Martin’s paintings eschew any concrete representation. The artist’s additive sequences of bands and lines of colour appear to oscillate and dissolve the boundary between painting and drawing. Philip Guston experienced his struggle with representation as a necessary dilemma that underpinned his artistic development. The underpainting of his work remains visible beneath the loose mesh of the artist’s dynamic brushwork, which tends to neutralise colours by mixing them until they take on a grey cast. John Chamberlain translated the free mark making and the elimination of conscious decision that are a defining characteristic of Abstract Expressionism into the medium of sculpture. In 1958 he began working with automobile parts, cutting them into pieces and crushing them in a press before reassembling them into sculptures that draw on the deliberate and accidental deformation of the raw material.
Eva Hesse’s work is marked by the complex relationship between vague forms and diagrammatic representation. Time and again she resorted to the grid structure, one of the key formal elements of European modernism. James Bishop’s work is rooted in Abstract Expressionism – not so much in its gestural freedom, but in the dream-like openness of the brushwork and the utilisation of the entire picture plane as an imaginary space. Central to Brice Marden’s work is the artist’s preoccupation with a set of complex relationships: between dynamic lines and the static ground, between suggested figuration and allover painting, between the knotting and untangling of lines and their relationship to the edges of the work.
With the emergence of the concept of the painting as an object, American art turned away from European modernism. Richard Tuttle’s plywood pieces are both painterly and sculptural. In the beginning the form is unstructured, at one with the colour, inviting the viewer to focus on the contour line. Later the line takes the shape of the irregular contour of the boards, of a painted linear shape or of the overlap of two pieces of wood.
Robert Mangold investigates the relationship between outer form and inner structure and between drawing and coloured plane, striking a subtle balance between the quiet restraint of his motifs and the sensual effect of the pictures.
Fictions The generation of artists that came to the fore in the 1980s was rooted in the formulations of American and European art of the 1960s. The status of the work of art or investigations of formal problems were no longer at the forefront of artistic debate, giving artists the freedom to undermine the consensus with playful gusto.
Mario Merz, who began his career as a painter in the Art Informel style in the mid-1950s, exhibited the first of his iconic igloos in 1968. Transferred into the museum context, this elementary form sheds its ethnological content and begins to represent a concept of space. His tapestry-like paintings are often based on the Fibonacci sequence. These numbers, intended to mirror the universal principles of creation and growth, can also be visualised as a dynamic spiral. Giuseppe Penone’s work explores the traces the artist leaves on the material. To shape something is to start a process in which the material itself finds the shape.
Taking traditional bronze casting as its starting point, the six-part series Riflesso del bronzo is a sequence that makes light disappear: a poetic image for the emergence of the visible word from light and shadow. Rooted in the Minimalism of the 1960s, which she quotes with respectful irony, Rita McBride examines sculpture in the light of the formal language of architecture and design, an often overlooked subtext of sculptural conception.
Thomas Schütte responds to the dissolution of conventional boundaries in artistic practice by starting from several points at once, by exposing contradictions and looking for makeshift solutions. In the 1990s he turned to ceramics, generally considered a lowly applied art and, with the notable exception of Picasso and Fontana, taken seriously by very few artists with high art aspirations.
Mario Sala’s work resists easy classification. Where he seems to invent he is close to reality, the unemotional observation of which supplies him with material for his work. Sala’s conception matches reality and could easily be mistaken for it. His work makes it clear that reality itself is in fact a representation – but a representation of what?
