Cabinet of abstracts
The Cabinet of Abstracts is a room as a permanent exhibition with works from the late 1920s in the Sprengel Museum Hannover based on the constructivist artist El Lissitzky .
history
On behalf of Alexander Dorner , El Lissitzky set up a cabinet of abstracts based on the Dresden model in the 45th room of the picture gallery of what was then the "Provincial Museum" (today: Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover ) between autumn 1926 and February 1928 . El Lissitzky designed a dynamic “total work of art” that provided information about the current developments in art and culture at the time and gave visitors scope for their own design options.
Alexander Dorner implemented El Lissitzky's design with pictures, but also sculptures by Picasso , Piet Mondrian , Fernand Léger , László Moholy-Nagy , Alexander Archipenko , Kurt Schwitters and others.
The Cabinet of Abstracts achieved worldwide fame, such an entire room was at the time "absolutely unique in the national and international museum landscape - exclusively dedicated to modernism from the Expressionists to the abstract ". According to Alfred Barr , who later became the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York , the exhibition was “probably the most important individual room in 20th century art”.
After the seizure of power by the National Socialists Alexander Dorner sat the Cabinet, a first to the influence of modern tendencies in the Nazi cultural clarify. But with the “Aktion Degenerate Art ” in 1937, 240 works from the public domain were confiscated and the abstract cabinet destroyed.
On the initiative of Lydia Dorner , Alexander Dorner's widow, the Cabinet of Abstracts in the Lower Saxony State Museum was reconstructed under Harald Seiler in 1968 and reopened on June 20 of that year. In 1979 the collection was finally taken over by the Sprengel Museum Hannover.
Reconstruction 2016/2017
After almost five decades, the functionality and interaction of the visitors with the exhibits were no longer guaranteed. The considerations were to either fundamentally renovate the room or furnish it from scratch. The decision was made for the latter and began to reconstruct the room in terms of its architectural properties, colors and lighting as true to the original as possible. Also at the risk that a replacement always carries the risk of a certain falsification of the history. It was based on photographs showing the room as it was in 1928, as well as Lissistzky's drawings and texts. For the choice of materials, such as wood, iron strips, linoleum and paint, the requirement was to follow the standards of the 1920s craftsmanship.
On February 18, 2017, the new reconstruction, which had been carried out with the support of E) (POMONDO by Holtmann , Hannover-Langenhagen, was made accessible to the public again.
literature
- M. Gough: Constructivism Disoriented. El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover 'demonstration rooms'. In: N. Perloff, B. Reed (eds.): Situation Lissitzky , Berlin, Moscow: Vitebsk, 2003, pp. 77-263
- Monika Flacke-Knoch: Museum Concepts in the Weimar Republic. The activity of Alexander Dorner in the Provinzialmuseum Hannover , (also dissertation at the University of Hamburg 1984), in the series: Kulturwissenschaftliche Reihe , vol. 3, Marburg: Jonas-Verlag für Kunst und Literatur, 1985, ISBN 3-922561-43-8 , P. 64ff.
- Klaus Mlynek , Waldemar R. Röhrbein :Cabinet of abstractsin: History of the City of Hanover , Vol. 2, From the beginning of the 19th century to the present , with contributions by Dieter Brosius , Klaus Mlynek and Waldemar R. Röhrbein, Hanover: Schlütersche , 1994, ISBN 3-87706-364-0 , P. 462 et al.
- Ines Katenhusen : Cabinet of the abstract. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 332.
Web links
- Rooms in the permanent collection on the side of the Sprengel Museum Hannover
- Claudia Föllmer: The Cabinet of Abstracts / The Sprengel Museum shows an exhibition about the new beginnings in the Hanoverian art scene of the twenties , February 28, 2009 on langeleine.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Ines Katenhusen: Cabinet of abstracts. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 332
- ↑ a b c Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Cabinet of abstracts. In: History of the City of Hanover ... , p. 462 u.ö.
- ↑ Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Cabinet of Abstracts , in: Hannover Chronik , p. 179 u.ö.
- ↑ Information in the visitor information brochure: El Lissitzky - The Cabinet of Abstracts, Reconstruction
- ↑ Hannoversche Allgemeine from February 17, 2017