Steegmann Collection
The Steegmann Collection is a collection of pictures by the art collector Josef Steegmann, most of which date from the classical modern era.
The collector
Josef Stegmann was born in Saarbrücken on May 8, 1903 . He studied law in Innsbruck , Rome , Munich and Cologne . He also attended lectures in art history . After receiving his doctorate , he worked as a lawyer in his father's office from 1928 and as an independent business lawyer in Berlin from 1934. During the Second World War he worked in the "Central Finance Department" group of the Wehrmacht . When Vienna was threatened by the Soviet Army in 1945, Steegmann was involved in protecting the Prince of Liechtenstein's art objects from looting and bringing them to Vaduz . After the war Steegmann lived with his family in Liechtenstein and became an honorary citizen of the principality.
In 1954 he went back to Cologne, where he worked successfully as a business lawyer, as he did before the war. Since the 1960s he began to collect art systematically. In 1968 he returned to Vaduz and lived there until his death. After giving up his residence in Cologne, he found a new location for many of his pictures in the Kunsthaus Zürich . Steegmann acquired a large part of his collection from Ernst Beyeler in Basel. This also explains the inner proximity of the two collections: the same artists , such as Pablo Picasso , Paul Klee , and Alberto Giacometti , form the highlights. Josef Steegmann died in Vaduz in 1988.
The collection
Josef Steegmann never wanted to call his pictures a “collection”. The number of works was too small for him. Nevertheless, the collection shows a quality and cohesion that the collector has put together with consistency and system over the course of two decades. This resulted in an ensemble of around fifty collection items, all of which occupy decisive positions in the work of the individual artists and also in the art-historical context.
The focus of the collection is on works by Klee, Picasso and Giacometti, but also those by artists who can be assigned to Cubism . Common to all works is the representation of the human figure. The pieces, previously scattered in different locations, came together for an exhibition in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 1998 . The Steegmann Collection has never been seen before in this cohesion. Since then, twenty-four exhibits have been on permanent loan.
“In the Steegmann Collection, the focus remains primarily on the image of the human being, because the most intense charisma emanates from the ten pictures by Pablo Picasso, which illustrate the most important stages in the oeuvre of this 'artist of the century'. The anthropocentric view of the Spaniard, countered by six works by Alberto Giacometti as the artist who thematizes the problem of such a view in his works, and by five works by Paul Klee, who in his visionary late work places the interworld mediator function of the human figure at the center of his pictures, becomes a crystallization point in the laboratory that the Steegmann Collection makes available to us. Cubism as a crossroads, at which Picasso and his Cubist friends stuck to the object while others, namely Piet Mondrian , dared to take the step into abstraction, is another focus ... "
Works from the collection (selection)
The first painting acquired for the collection comes from the series Bathers by Paul Cézanne . The bathroom , 1882, shows a small, intimate bathroom scene that is kept in light ocher, green and blue tones. It can serve as an example for Cézanne's studies of nature. Female Head , 1907, was used by Pablo Picasso as a study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , with which the artist made a radical change in his formal language towards Cubism. By lying on a sofa , in 1910, Picasso alongside Georges Braque reached the peak of its abstraction in Cubism. Nevertheless, one can still speak of a pictorial art here, since the artist still starts from the object. Composition No. 2 , 1921, by Piet Mondrian is different . It is one of his earlier works. The formal reduction and the completely non-representational design of the picture with its geometric line structures do not allow any association with reality.
Picasso's oil crayon drawing Die Lesende , 1921, belongs to his classicist period and shows his return to objectivity. In contrast, Gray Nude with Bracelet , 1913, by Henri Matisse is in monochrome shades of gray. Matisse composed this work with the help of black lines and light and dark elements, without using other colors as a design element. With Der Harlequin , 1912, Georges Braque combines paper fragments with compositional elements of the drawing. Charcoal, imitation wood wallpaper and paper are the means of this collagen-like work.
Paul Klee's Braced Surface , 1930, may also seem like a collagen . The playful spatial composition with its geometric elements is one of several works that can be assigned to Klee's constructivist phase. The angel series includes over fifty works in his work. One of them is Angelus Militans , 1940 . Alberto Giacometti's elongated bronze figures stand out on the one hand because of their upward-striving posture, but on the other hand they appear earthbound with their heavy, massive plinths. Both Standing Figure , 1958, and Great-standing , in 1947, characterized by a seemingly archetypal form design. The bodies are not shaped at all, their surfaces remain uneven with jagged ridges and notches. Frozen in their movement, they are reminiscent of Egyptian statues.
Jean Dubuffer's “scribble drawing language” in his early phase led in his second creative period to a condensing style of painting with striking, plastic elements. His highly structured picture parts sometimes resemble that of a puzzle. The water glass I , 1967, belongs to this phase. In contrast, Antoni Tàpies reduces his artistic statements to the bare minimum. In Triangular Form on Gray , 1960, he installed a delta-shaped object in a yellowish-pastose design on a monochrome-gray background at the lower edge of the picture. In his work Gray and White on Black , 1966, the meditative component and the silence are the themes of his work.
literature
- Picasso. Clover. Giacometti: The Steegmann Collection, Ostfildern, 1998, ISBN 3-7757-0790-5
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archives for Contemporary History (PDF; 118 kB)
- ↑ a b c d e Picasso. Clover. Giacometti: The Steegmann Collection / Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Ostfildern, 1998.
- ↑ Berliner Zeitung of November 26, 1998
- ^ Ina Conzen in Picasso. Clover. Giacometti , p. 11