Max Imdahl

The grave of Max Imdahl and his wife Ebba in the Querenburg cemetery in Bochum.

Max Imdahl (* 6. September 1925 in Aachen ; † 11. October 1988 in Bochum ) was a German art historian who especially illustrative interpretation which art of modernity and the reflection of the methods dedicated art-historical research.

Live and act

Max Imdahl was the son of bank director Hermann Peter Josef Imdahl (1876–1953) and Emilie (Niny), née Krabbel (1889–1969), sister of suffragette Gerta Krabbel and brother of surgeon Max Krabbel .

Max Imdahl initially saw himself primarily as a painter and found public recognition (Blevin Davis Prize) with an early picture ( Man of Sorrows ). However, he then turned almost entirely to art history; Only in the last years of his life did he paint more intensely.

Imdahl taught art history from 1965 until his death in 1988 as the first professor for art history at the newly founded Ruhr University in Bochum . He was also head of the modern department of the art collections of the Ruhr University. His research and teaching focuses on Ottonics , Giotto's painting , painting of the Dutch Baroque and French Classical periods, and the development of art since the late 19th century. Imdahl was particularly interested in the theoretical debate on the artistic design means of color and line from the discourses at the early modern academies until the early 20th century. As one of the very first German university teachers, Imdahl emphatically represented the newer and newest art as self-evident subject areas in art history.

Max Imdahl was critical of art-historical methods without a sense of the specifics of the individual work of art . His teaching and his writings are characterized by intensive image analysis in a descriptive and interpretative reproduction of individual works. He named his method of image- appropriate interpretation iconic . Only when the work of art cannot be caught by language can its genuinely image-based meaning be experienced. Accordingly, Imdahl's texts show a pronounced reflection on terms and the greatest linguistic care.

In his own subject, Imdahl was seen as an outsider until the early 1980s. The traditionalists saw his methodical approach as an attack on the then dominant methods of the history of style and form, and of iconography and iconology ; they also refused to work with contemporary art. Marxist interpreters around and after 1968 accused his image analyzes of a lack of historical awareness and criticized his preference for concrete (non-representational) art of Western provenance. On the other hand, Imdahl found support for his considerations from philosophers, Catholic theologians and in the research group “Poetics and Hermeneutics” to which he himself belonged.

From 1966 to 1968 he was a member of the documenta council for the 4th documenta in 1968 in Kassel .

Because of Imdahl's professional orientation and because Bochum was one of the few university institutes that were consistently concerned with modernity at the time, numerous students of Max Imdahl with a corresponding focus became active in the curatorial field. Your work has shaped the museum landscape in North Rhine-Westphalia in particular.

The " Situation Art - for Max Imdahl" in the park of Haus Weitmar in Bochum as part of the university art collections reminds of Max Imdahl ; the written legacy is also archived there. A Max Imdahl scholarship for art education has been awarded by the North Rhine-Westphalia Foundation since 1993 .

On January 1, 2011, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum established a new guest professorship named after him in honor of Max Imdahl. For a year it was occupied by the Protestant theologian Margot Käßmann . Federal President Joachim Gauck took over this professorship in the 2019/2020 winter semester .

Imdahl's son is the art critic and university professor Georg Imdahl .

literature

• Max Imdahl, Collected Writings , 3 volumes, Frankfurt am Main 1996; Volume 1: On Modern Art, ed. by Angeli Janhsen -Vukicevic; Volume 2: On the Art of Tradition, ed. by Gundolf Winter; Volume 3: Reflection - Theory - Method, ed. by Gottfried Boehm
• Max Imdahl, Giotto. Arena frescoes. Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik, Munich 1988.
• Hubertus coal , Max Imdahl , in: Ulrich Pfisterer (ed.), Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte, Vol. 2, Munich 2008, pp. 217–225.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ rub.de August 4, 2010
2. ^ Website of the Ruhr University Bochum. Retrieved January 18, 2020.
3. ↑ Stefan Lüddemann : The royal road to art? Article dated December 4, 2000 in the noz .de portal , accessed on September 17, 2019

Web links

• Literature by and about Max Imdahl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography and bibliography (Engl.)