Pro Lidice
Pro Lidice or Für Lidice is an art collection with exhibits by 52 German artists, which was initially launched in 1967 as "Hommage à Lidice" by the German gallery owner René Block as a fundraising exhibition initiative for the construction and subsequent maintenance of a museum in the Czech municipality of Lidice, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942 was launched. The museum is attached to the Lidice Memorial.
background
The place Lidice was razed to the ground by the Nazis in 1942 after the killing of the deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, who was deployed in Bohemia . The male residents over 16 years of age were shot on the spot, the women were taken to concentration camps and the children were "given special treatment". Lidice, which was never a place of resistance, thus became a worldwide beacon of resistance .
Homage to Lidice (1967)
“Hommage à Lidice” is based on the idea of the English doctor Sir Barnett Stross, who founded the Lidice shall live / Lidice must live movement as early as 1942, immediately after the destruction of Lidice, as an initially English and then an international committee. Two calls go back to this committee: the creation of a rose garden with 27,000 rose bushes from all over the world and the call for a museum with works of art from all parts of the world. The humanitarian gesture initiated by Stross only aroused public interest in 1967 on the upcoming 25th anniversary of the destruction of the place. Stross' endeavor was to address visual artists from all over the world in order to lay a symbolic foundation stone for a later museum in Lidice as a sign of reconciliation with their works, and so he started a second attempt.
In West Germany, only the politically committed Berlin avant-garde gallery owner René Block took notice of the action. He asked the artists he represented to participate. Block initially organized the exhibition “Hommage à Lidice” in the rooms of his gallery as a gift for the Lidice Museum, which is already being planned. 21 artists finally agreed in 1967 and took part in the action. In addition to Joseph Beuys , Dieter Roth , Wolf Vostell , Günther Uecker and Gotthard Graubner , the then less well-known painters Blinky Palermo , Sigmar Polke , Gerhard Richter , KP Brehmer , Karl Horst Hödicke and Jörg Immendorff also exhibited . After the exhibition was over, the works of art were transported by minibus to unrest-shaken Prague in July 1968 and presented there to the art-loving Prague public, including a delegation of the surviving women from Lidice. The works from West Germany were taken over by the Středočeská gallery (Central Bohemian Gallery) after the exhibition and added to the so-called "Liditz Collection". The entire collection was exhibited several times in 1968, but the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops and changes in political conditions after the Prague Spring ruled out further exhibitions.
Pro Lidice / For Lidice (1997)
It was not until about 30 years later, in June 1996, that Eckhart Gillen and René Block rediscovered the works completely and in remarkably good condition in the Nelahozeves castle , the birthplace of Antonín Dvořák , and in connection with the preparations for the exhibition Deutschlandbilder exhibited together again for the project in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
At the request of the Czech Museum of Fine Arts to exhibit the works after their rediscovery in Prague in 1997, René Block decided to update the present to include a younger generation of artists. This is how the follow-up project Pro Lidice came about, in which 31 artists, including the artists Dagmar Demming , Maria Eichhorn , Katharina Fritsch , Asta Gröting , Astrid Klein , Inge Mahn , Karin Sander , Katharina Sieverding , Pia Stadtbäumer and Rosemarie Trockel as representatives of the "young" Germany's art scene participated with representative work. Some of the works deal directly with the subject of “Lidice”. This time the exhibition took place in the museum "House of the Black Mother of God" in Prague.
The Prague museum director Jan Sekera described the exhibition of the two collectibles from 1967 and 1997 as a "hopefully widely visible sign of reconciliation" and saw this important contribution of the artists to the German / Czech declaration as a "welcome impetus" finally due to the lack of funds for to complete the construction of the Lidice Museum, which has been interrupted for an indefinite period.
The collection, supplemented by the documentation "We are looking for the children of Lidice" by Kerstin Schicha and Frank Metzing, was shown first in the Schleswig-Holstein House in Schwerin, then in the Kunsthalle Kiel and finally in the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel . The then Hessian Prime Minister Hans Eichel opened the exhibition in Kassel.
Conclusion
Work continues to this day to complete and expand the Lidice Museum, which the artists were assured of in 1967, so that other artists can join the once modest initiative. In 1967, in a greeting to the exhibition catalog, Herbert von Buttlar from documenta admired the courage to organize such an exhibition. The courage was probably more in squeezing 21 works of art into an old VW Bully and bringing them behind the Iron Curtain to Prague without customs papers .
Joseph Beuys later artistically legitimized this action in his own way, in that in his installation The pack (the pack) (1969) he had 32 sledges equipped with felt, grease and flashlights break out of this VW bus like sniffer dogs.
literature
- Eckhart Gillen (Ed.): Pictures of Germany. Art from a divided country. Catalog for the exhibition of the 47th Berliner Festwochen in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, September 7, 1997 to January 11, 1998, DuMont, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7701-4173-3 . (Catalog edition)
Web links
- Lidice Memorial and Museum (German, English, Czech)
- About the exhibition in Kiel
- The Fridericianum Kassel on the exhibition
Individual references and sources
Unless otherwise stated, most of the information in the article is based on the documentation and information from the Lidice Memorial and the exhibition catalog of the Fridericianum in Kassel.
- ↑ René Block: Not a monument, but food for thought. In: Eckhart Gillen (Ed.): Pictures of Germany. Art from a divided country. DuMont, Cologne 1997, p. 249