Rock art archive of the Frobenius Institute

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The rock art archive of the Frobenius Institute comprises over 8,600 copies of rock art from Africa , Oceania , Australia and Europe, which are now often considered rarities . It is one of the oldest and most comprehensive collections of rock art in the world.

Creation of the collection

Leo Frobenius recognized the cultural and historical value of rock art in the Sahara and southern Africa at a very early stage . His interest in rock art research began in 1898 and already manifested itself in his first trip to West Africa (1907–1909). The first expedition explicitly dedicated to rock art research (1912–1914) took him and a staff of staff and painters to the North African Sahara Atlas . Later he organized further rock art expeditions e.g. B. to the Sahara, South Africa , Norway , southern France and eastern Spain as well as New Guinea and Australia . The result is a collection of over 8,600 rock art copies from four continents.

  • Rock art of a giraffe in Libya

  • Creation of a rock art copy in Zimbabwe

technical features

The prehistoric motifs were mostly copied on canvas in their original size. The archive consists of drawings , watercolors and rubbings in various techniques and in variable formats from 30 × 40 cm to 250 × 350 cm as well as photographs . The graphic documentation of rock paintings ended in 1964.

In the years 2006–2009 the holdings were reworked as part of the DFG project Digitization and Indexing of the Ethnographic Picture Collection of the Frobenius Institute .

In 2013, the physical reorganization of the collection by student assistants was largely completed. All image holdings in the rock art archive and most of the ethnographic image archive were brought together in one archive room and stored in accordance with preserving standards. The smaller B and C formats were separated by buffered archival paper and stored horizontally in modern plan cabinets; for the large-format rock art copies up to a width of three meters, folders were made from archival cardboard and polyester film. The storage of the approximately two dozen very large rock art copies (up to 2.5 × 10 m) remains problematic, and due to the cramped space, they still have to be kept rolled up today. In the aftermath of the "Art of Prehistoric Times" exhibition, however, they were rolled up on new material and archived.

  • Three crouching figures (Zimbabwe)

  • Elisabeth Pauli (1933): Two human figures (Egypt)

  • Albert Hahn (1937–1938): Large rock painting with human motifs (Indonesia)

  • Elisabeth Pauli (1936): Standing female bison, polychrome painting

  • Agnes Schulz (1938): Kalingi Grotto (Northwest Australia)

  • Elisabeth Mannsfeld (1930): Elephantilopen. Very long-limbed people (South Africa)

  • Agnes Schulz (1935): Elch (Norway, Askollen)

  • Douglas C. Fox (1938): Head surrounded by rays (Northwest Australia)

  • Agnes Schulz (1930): procession of striding people approaching the king (Zimbabwe)

  • Agnes Schulz (1930): Reclining man with horn mask, figure and accompanying figures (Zimbabwe)

  • Elisabeth Mannsfeld (1930): Large white elephant (Zimbabwe)

  • Albert Hahn (1938): Silhouette of a fish, in front of it a representation of the sun (West Papua)

Exhibitions

Even before the Second World War , parts of the collection had been shown in numerous exhibitions. The unusual pictures were shown in various German cities but also in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Zurich, Johannesburg and New York and inspired modern artists. The 1937 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art was so successful that the pictures went on a two-year tour of 31 cities in the United States. It was the first time that the American public came into contact with prehistoric art in this form.

Since then, individual copies have repeatedly been shown in exhibitions, most recently in the shows "Herbarium der Kultur" (2011) and "I see wonderful things" (2014). The last major exhibition in Germany took place in 2015 under the title "Art of the past. Rock paintings from the Frobenius Collection" as part of the Berlin Festival in the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Reprints of the original copies have since been shown in an international touring exhibition. a. shown in Senegal, Mexico and France.

literature

  • The Frobenius Institute at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. 1898-1998 . Foreword: Karl-Heinz Kohl . Frankfurt am Main, Frobenius Institute, 1998
  • Ancient art. Rock paintings from the Frobenius collection. Kohl, Karl-Heinz; Richard Kuba, Hélène Ivanoff (eds.). Frankfurt am Main, Prestel, 2015

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rock picture archive - Frobenius Institute Frankfurt am Main. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on July 22, 2017 ; accessed on June 12, 2017 (German). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / frobenius-institut.de