From Delacroix to Picasso
From Delacroix to Picasso was the name of an exhibition that was shown in the National Gallery in East Berlin in1965. According to its subtitle, it presented A Century of French Painting , with the works of the two artists Eugène Delacroix and Pablo Picasso marking the time frame. The exhibition coincided with a phase of change in GDR cultural policy and, at the museum level, reflects a rapprochement between the two German states.
Background to the exhibition
From September 4 to October 20, 1965, the exhibition From Delacroix to Picasso: A Century of French Painting took place in the National Gallery on Museum Island in East Berlin . The overview show, conceived by the art historian Vera-Maria Ruthenberg , consciously tied in with the work of the former museum directors Hugo von Tschudi and Ludwig Justi , who had particularly campaigned for the acquisition of art from France. This enabled Tschudi example, in 1900 the painting Mill of Pontoise from Paul Cézanne to win for the museum. The Nationalgalerie was the first museum to buy a work by the painter while he was still alive, something Ruthenberg expressly referred to in the exhibition catalog. While Tschudi succeeded above all in securing works of French Impressionism for the National Gallery, including pictures by Édouard Manet , Claude Monet , Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas , his successor Justi was able to keep the collection of post-impressionism works after the First World War , for example paintings by Vincent van Gogh . As a result of the work of the two directors, there was a comprehensive collection of French paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries in the National Gallery. However, this changed after the National Socialists came to power . In 1936, for example, individual works of art from French Impressionism were sold in order to use the money to buy a work by the German Caspar David Friedrich . In connection with the Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937, numerous other works were lost from the collection, and a little later painting by Vincent van Gogh was removed from the National Gallery to procure foreign currency. During the Second World War, the National Gallery was closed and the holdings relocated. The museum building suffered severe damage during the war.
Justi, who had been removed from office by the National Socialists, became Director General of the State Museums after the war. Under his direction, the first ten rooms of the National Gallery were reopened in 1949. Important works in the collection, however, were not available to Justi. Parts had been relocated to the Federal Republic , other objects were in the Soviet Union . In general, GDR cultural policy focused on promoting the art of socialist realism . After Justi's death in 1957, his colleague Vera-Maria Ruthenberg took over the management of the Nationalgalerie, the entire exhibition space of which was available again from 1959. In the meantime, works from the 19th and 20th centuries returned to the National Gallery from the Soviet Union in 1958. The previously extensive holdings of French works in the collection were, however, divided between East and West Berlin . While the paintings by Manet, Monet and Renoir were initially shown in Charlottenburg Palace in West Berlin, paintings by Degas and Cézanne returned to the main building on Museum Island.
The prerequisite for the exhibition From Delacroix to Picasso in 1965 was, in addition to the restored building and the partial return of the own collection, a changed GDR cultural policy. In the 1950s, the political and cultural orientation towards the Soviet Union was marked, with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the policy of isolation towards the west intensified. This changed in the mid-1960s with a cultural opening in various areas. Last but not least, two international exhibitions in 1965 were intended to help create “the long-missed cosmopolitanism behind the wall”. These were on the one hand the Biennale of the Baltic States as a forum for new art in Rostock , on the other hand the show From Delacroix to Picasso in the Berlin National Gallery. The importance of the Berlin exhibition was not only highlighted in magazines, but also underlined in the GDR newsreel Der Augenzeuge .
The title From Delacroix to Picasso and the associated programmatic timing were not new. For example, in 1925 the Berlin art dealer Hugo Perls showed a compilation entitled From Delacroix to Picasso: a hundred paintings, watercolors and drawings by French masters of the 19th century. In the 20th century and in 1961, the Volkswagen factory presented the exhibition French painting from Delacroix to Picasso in the Wolfsburg town hall . What all exhibitions have in common is not only the time frame, but also the classification of artists such as the Spaniard Pablo Picasso or the Dutch Vincent van Gogh in relation to French art. This corresponds to the geographical field of activity of these artists in France. In particular, the work of Pablo Picasso was still rejected as “formalistic” in the socialist cultural policy of the 1950s and was rarely seen in exhibitions.
In view of the small number of its own holdings available, the East Berlin National Gallery was primarily dependent on loans. There were particularly extensive loans from the museums in Prague and Budapest, which sent many of their important works of French painting to Berlin. In addition, there were loans from other cities in the GDR and from other socialist countries such as Poland and the Soviet Union. Other lenders were museums in Helsinki and Vienna. The French national collections also sent some selected works, which seems obvious in view of the subject of the exhibition. The high participation of West German museums was rather unusual. A few years after the Wall was built, loans from West Berlin were out of the question for ideological reasons, but the museums in Hamburg, Bremen, Essen, Wuppertal, Cologne, Stuttgart and Munich sent paintings to East Berlin, which was a good collaboration between German-speaking colleagues, but can also be seen as a sign of general political change.
List of exhibited works
The following list shows all of the works shown in the exhibition. The information relates to those in the exhibition catalog. In some cases, the title has been adapted to the new spelling (example: still life instead of still life ), if the year is missing, the abbreviation o. J. appears ( without year ). In individual cases, the museum information was adapted to the current locations (Musée d'Orsay instead of Louvre) and city names were added (Leningrad, East Berlin). All other information corresponds to the catalog entries.
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literature
- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie (Ed.): From Delacroix to Picasso: A Century of French Painting . National Museums in Berlin, National Gallery, Berlin 1965.
- Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern , Peter-Klaus Schuster (ed.): Manet to van Gogh, Hugo von Tschudi and the struggle for modernity. Nationalgalerie Berlin and Neue Pinakothek Munich 1996, ISBN 3-7913-1748-2 .
- Claudia Rückert, Sven Kuhrau (Eds.): "The German Art ...". National Gallery and National Identity, 1876–1998 . Verlag der Kunst, Amsterdam 1998, ISBN 90-5705-093-5 .
- Angelika Wesenberg , Eve Förschl: National Gallery Berlin. The XIX. Century, catalog of the works exhibited. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Seemann Verlag, Berlin and Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-363-00765-5 .
- Michael F. Zimmermann, Christoph Hölz, Ulrike Steiner (eds.): Berlin's museums, history and future . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-422-06135-5 .
- Timo Saalmann: The art policy of the Berlin museums . De Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-05-006101-6 .
- Gunnar Decker: 1965 - the short summer of the GDR . Hanser, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-446-24735-2 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Only the two exhibition months are noted in the exhibition catalog. The exact dates of the exhibition can be found in the central archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
- ↑ Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie (ed.): From Delacroix to Picasso: A Century of French Painting , p. 12.
- ↑ Timo Saalmann: The Art Policy of the Berlin Museums , p. 129.
- ↑ Among other things, the paintings Landhaus in der Hermitage by Camille Pissarro (today Kunstmuseum St. Gallen ) and Frühschnee in Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley (today Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ) were sold; in return, husband and wife came to contemplate the moon by Caspar David Friedrich in the National Gallery. See in detail Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, Peter-Klaus Schuster (ed.): Manet bis van Gogh, Hugo von Tschudi and the fight for modern, pp. 104-106.
- ↑ Three paintings by van Gogh were removed from the National Gallery in the late 1930s. The whereabouts of lovers and cornfield with mower is unclear, Daubigny's garden is now in the Hiroshima Museum of Art . See Michael F. Zimmermann, Christoph Hölz, Ulrike Steiner (eds.): Berlins Museen, Geschichte und Zukunft , p. 170-
- ↑ Angelika Wesenberg, Eve Förschl: National Gallery Berlin. The XIX. Century, catalog of the works exhibited. , P. 20.
- ^ Willi Geismeier: Interior views. The National Gallery on Museum Island in the fifties and sixties of this century in Claudia Rückert, Sven Kuhrau (ed.): "Der Deutschen Kunst ...". National Gallery and National Identity, 1876–1998 , p. 138.
- ↑ On the cultural policy of the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s see more in Willi Geismeier: Innenansichten. The National Gallery on Museum Island in the fifties and sixties of this century in Claudia Rückert, Sven Kuhrau (ed.): "Der Deutschen Kunst ...". National Gallery and National Identity, 1876–1998 , pp. 132–151.
- ↑ Gunnar Decker: 1965-the short summer of the GDR , o. P.
- ↑ Information on the weekly newsreel Der Augenzeuge from October 1, 1965 in the DEFA Foundation archive
- ↑ Catalog for the exhibition From Delacroix to Picasso: a hundred paintings, watercolors and drawings by French masters of the XIX. Century , Hugo Perls art dealer, February-March 1925.
- ^ Franz Resch (Ed.): French painting from Delacroix to Picasso . Exhibition catalog, Wolfsburg 1961.
- ↑ In 1957, director Ludwig Justi succeeded in showing a Picasso exhibition in the Nationalgalerie, but this remained a rare exception. See Willi Geismeier: Interior views. The National Gallery on Museum Island in the fifties and sixties of this century in Claudia Rückert, Sven Kuhrau (ed.): "Der Deutschen Kunst ...". National Gallery and National Identity, 1876–1998 , p. 138.
- ↑ The painting is no longer attributed to Manet and is not included in the catalog raisonné.
- ↑ The year is controversial.