From a German Perspective:
Moscow’s Pushkin Museum
Currently Showing Masterpieces from the Deutsche Bank Collection
Exhibition view:
Wassily Kandinskys
"Aquarell mit rotem Fleck" (1911)
The Deutsche Bank Collection makes a guest appearance at the Pushkin Museum:
with around 120 selected works, the exhibition From a German
Perspective – Masterpieces of the Deutsche Bank Collection traces
the stations in the development of 20th-century German art. Rarely
exhibited works by artists such as Emil Nolde, Ludwig Kirchner, Gerhard
Richter, or Neo Rauch were borrowed from bank buildings around the globe
and sent to Moscow, where they can be seen through mid-January 2005. As a
reflection of German culture and history, the show offers a fascinating
insight into both the concept and development of one of the most important
corporate collections worldwide, which will be celebrating its 25th
anniversary next year.
Ernst Barlach, Drunk Beggar Woman, 1906/07
Deutsche Bank Collection
©Barlach
Lizenzverwaltung Ratzeburg
For the German
sculptor and painter
Ernst Barlach, Russia began in Berlin. While it seemed to him at the
beginning of his train journey to the Ukraine in 1906 as though "half of
Russia" were hanging around the Friedrichstrasse train station, he was
already overcome by the almost mystical "happiness of an awakening soul"
when he reached Warsaw. For him, the reality of the czardom, the everyday
misery of the politically and socially disenfranchised became a "plastic
reality." Previously an adherent of Art Nouveau, his encounter with simple
rural people helped the artist find his own personal style. The basic
expression of the humane that he experienced in Eastern Europe prompted
the previously unknown sculptor to vigorously pursue an expressive
reduction in his work and arrive at the style that quickly made him
famous. The dynamic lines and elementary forms of Barlach’s sculptures and
drawings depict the nature of the suffering creature in an expressive, yet
faceless way. In his portraits they are condensed into an essence that
unites the bodily and the spiritual. A part of Barlach’s Russian
Journal, the charcoal drawing Drunk Beggar Woman from 1907
reveals an urge to grasp the nature of the subject directly, with all
one’s senses, while at the same time distilling something universal from
it that radiates far beyond the confusion of the time.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bahnhof Königstein, 1917
Deutsche Bank Collection
©Dr.
Wolfgang & Ingeborg Henze Ketterer, Wichtrach/Bern
|
Nearly a century after it was made, Barlach’s drawing,
together with works by
Käthe Kollwitz,
Emil Nolde, Paula
Modersohn Becker, and
Lovis Corinth marks the beginning of the exhibition
From a German Perspective – Masterpieces of the Deutsche Bank Collection
at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum.
The emergence of German modernism occurred almost at the same time as the
establishment of Russia’s prominent art institutions: along with the
Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum, founded in 1898 by
Czar Nicholas II, today houses Russia’s most important art collection
ranging from Ancient Egypt to the early 20th century. Exhibited in the
Museum for Private Collections attached to the main building, the manifold
artistic perspectives introduced in From a German Perspective
direct the viewer’s attention to a chapter of German history that was as
much determined by intellectual upheaval as it was by the catastrophic
effects of two world wars. In this sense, the show traces the highlights
of artistic movements ranging from Expressionism and New Objectivity to
post-war art, ending with prominent representatives of contemporary
positions.
Uwe Kowski, Untitled, 1992
Deutsche
Bank Collection
©VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2004
Arranged chronologically,
exceptional paintings, drawings, and sculptures by around 50
German-speaking artists from the
collection are presented in seven of the museum’s exhibition rooms, each
of which is assigned a certain aspect: From One Bank to the Other – the
Expressionists of 'The Bridge; Max Beckmann, Big City Dweller – Dream and
Reality of the Weimar Republic; History as Material – Postmodernism and an
Unsurmounted Past. Step by step, each section mirrors the development
of German art of the past century with treasures from the Deutsche Bank
Collection that have seldom been seen in public. Thus, along with Emil
Nolde’s oil painting Autumn Sea (1910),
Wassily Kandinsky’s Watercolor with Red Spot (1911), or
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting
Königstein Station (1917),
Max Beckmann’s Warrior With Bird Woman (1939), watercolors by
Joseph Beuys, and
Gerhard Richter’s
Kahnfahrt (1965) also count among the exhibition’s highlights.
Max Beckmann, Ruderer, 1928
Sammlung
Deutsche Bank
©VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2004
Dr. Ariane Grigoteit, Global Head Deutsche Bank Art presents the catalogue to
the press
As Dr. Ariane Grigoteit, Global
Head of Deutsche Bank Art, writes in her foreword to the accompanying
catalogue, it seems as though the collection had succeeded in grasping
"the essential – and, by deciding on the medium of paper, in documenting
the many different aspects among the main developments of the last
century." Accordingly, the exhibition takes on a double meaning.
[1]
[2]
|
