Städel Museum
13 November 2019 to 16 February 2020
"Great realism, great abstraction" – the approximately 1,800, twentieth-century German drawings in the collection of the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings occupy a realm between these two poles. In the winter of 2019/2020, the museum will show a representative selection of some 100 works mirroring the emphases of the collection that have taken shape over the course of its long history.
The exhibition opens with
masterful drawings by Max Beckmann (1884–1950) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
(1880–1938), which also provide comprehensive insight into the draughtsmanship
of the two artists. This is followed by works by members of the artist group
“Die Brücke”, including Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
(1884–1976) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956). Following on from Expressionism and its
abstracting tendencies, drawings by Rolf Nesch (1893–1975), Werner Gilles
(1894–1961) and Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902–1968) are presented, as are
watercolours by Paul Klee (1879–1940), whose works oscillate between a
closeness to the subject and abstraction. Also in divided Germany during the
post-war period, this preoccupation with the representational and the
non-representational was characteristic for many artists. This can be seen in
works of the Art Informel movement, as well as in neo-expressionist tendencies
and Pop Art, as exemplified by the works of Karl Otto Götz (1914–2017), Joseph
Beuys (1921–1986), Gerhard Richter (*1932), Georg Baselitz (*1938), A. R. Penck
(1939–2017), Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) and Anselm Kiefer (*1945). The exhibition
brings together works by a total of roughly forty artists.
The Exhibition
The roughly one hundred works on view from the
twentieth century, supplemented by two paintings, are examined on the basis of
various aspects, such as how the artists dealt with reality, how they
questioned, further developed or undermined traditional pictorial ideas
conveyed at the academies, and last but not least the fundamental significance
of drawing within their respective oeuvres. The pencil sketches, brilliantly
colourful pastels and aquarelles, and the monumental collages exhibited here
also reveal the technical diversity of the medium of drawing, the specific
characteristics of which the artists exploited, each in their own way. The
drawings are loosely assigned
chronological groups which shed
light in different ways on the relationship between closeness to the subject
and abstract detachment from the model of nature.
The Expressionists already used
drawing as an autonomous art form, but at the same time it remained a medium of
experimentation. Both are reflected in the first chapters of the exhibition
dedicated to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann. Shaken by the events of
the First World War, Beckmann came to Frankfurt am Main in 1915 and initially
withdrew to his private surroundings. He produced studies of the local
environment as well as numerous portraits, including an intensive and personal
pencil drawing of his close lady friend Fridel Battenberg (1880–1965) from 1916
and a painterly pastel portrait of Marie Swarzenski (1889–1967) from circa
1927. Marie Swarzenski was the wife of Georg Swarzenski (1876–1957), the then
director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, whom Beckmann
captured shortly before his death in an impressive portrait, a charcoal drawing
on blue paper, which can also be seen in the exhibition. These and other works
illustrate Beckmann’s keen instinct for his vis-à-vis and the individual use of
drawing utensils, and also document Beckmann’s changing formal language. The
pre-war compositions are characterised by rounded lines and soft contours. The
composition then became stricter, the motifs sharply outlined, revealing
angular forms.
For Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
drawing was the “key to his art”. With over 120 drawings by Kirchner, the Städel
Museum boasts one of the most important collections of the artist’s drawings in
Germany, which is largely due to the donation of works on paper from the estate
of the Frankfurt patron of the arts Carl Hagemann (1867–1940) in 1948. One of
the masterpieces is the pastel drawing B_e_r_l_i_n_e_r_ _S_t_r_a_ße_n_s_z_e_n_e_
_(Street Scene in Berlin) from 1914. The hasty glances of the two
prostitutes depicted, their quick steps and those of the passers-by, define the
image: Kirchner was fascinated by people in motion, by the hectic mood of the
aspiring metropolis of Berlin, which he translated into striking lines. The
reality of people’s lives was the source of his art. He abstracted what he saw
by reducing natural forms to the essential.
The close connection between man and nature
linked Kirchner and Emil Nolde with each other, even after their time together
in the artist group “Die Brücke” (1905–1913). The closeness to nature becomes
particularly visible in Nolde’s watercolours, such as V_i_e_r_w_a_l_d_s_t_a_̈t_t_e_r_
_S_e_e_ _(Lake Lucerne) from circa 1930. Here, Nolde transformed the nature
he had experienced into a composition of planes with bright, contrasting
colours. Control and chance both played a decisive role in the creative process
– it was precisely this combination that made the drawing a mirror of the
forces acting between man and nature.At
the beginning of the twentieth
century, August Macke (1887–1914) was also searching for adequate forms of
expression for the “tremendous life” that swept over him. In the study Zwei
Mädchen (Two Girls) from 1913, which is closely related to the painting of
the same name, two young girls are depicted in an urban setting. The lines
translate rhythmic impulses, light effects and the ambient sound of the big
city into an abstract structure of forms and lend the drawing a dynamic effect.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of artists developed a strongly abstracted
formal vocabulary, often following on from Expressionism. They also turned away
from traditional compositional principles taught at the academies and initially
tested new means of representation on paper. They abandoned naturalistic
depictions and transformed what they had seen and experienced into fundamental
pictorial elements such as line and surface, colour and form. Rolf Nesch,
Werner Gilles and Ernst Wilhelm Nay worked with two-dimensional colour forms,
striking lines and geometric figural depictions and dispensed with an
illusionistic representation of depth. These formal tendencies can also be
observed in Willi Baumeister’s (1889–1955) Sportler in Ruhe (Athletes Resting)
from 1929. Baumeister, however, distinguished himself from Expressionist models
and cultivated a more objective means of expression. Nevertheless, the
immediate visual experience was the starting point for all of their works,
regardless of the artists’ different modes of representation. Their artistic
goal was to depict the primal forces of nature, which they perceived as
expressions of life and translated into their pictorial compositions – such as
Nay into rushing colour gradients, Gilles into clear colours seemingly flooded
with sunlight, or Baumeister into relief-like surface structures reminiscent of
rock formations.
Two drawings by Paul Klee, who
had travelled to Tunisia with August Macke and had been inspired by his
impressions on this journey to increasingly abstract compositions, reflect his
virtuosity and joy of experimentation in drawing. For Fruchtbares geregelt (Fertile
Well-Ordered) from 1933, the artist used a brush and a stamp to press the paint
onto the paper. For the late drawing alea jacta from 1940, Klee applied
a blend of pigment and glue to a rough paper clearly marked by the signs of the
times. He combined abstract signs and expressive field of colour – enigmatic
ciphers reminiscent of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s ‘hieroglyphics’ – with a
gestural application of paint that already points to the intuitive painting and
drawing style of Art Informel.
Drawing served the artists as a means of immediate expression, whether
in the trenches of World War I, the boulevards of the awakening
metropolis of Berlin or in the midst of the emerging world of
consumption and commodities. In this medium, they constructed idealistic
life plans, rebelled against established traditions in politics and
society, or reflected on decisive events in German history. Because it
was the respective context that determined the technique, the works on
view will range from simple pencil sketches and miniature-like chalk
drawings to vivid pastels and watercolours and even monumental collages.Max Beckmann’s “Transcendental Objectivity”
Max Beckmann (1884‒1950) was one of the many artists who were deeply affected by the cruelties of World War I. In 1915, certified unfit for military service owing to a physical and mental breakdown, he did not return to his family in Berlin but settled in Frankfurt. In an abrupt departure from his previous artistic work, he developed a new style that is first evident in his drawings. He now sought to capture his motifs directly, without regard for spatial or anatomical correctness. Even the types of lines he drew changed, becoming harder and more prominent. He wanted to reproduce not only what was outwardly visible, but also tensions and forces lying concealed beneath the surface. In his attempt to verbalize his new pictorial language he arrived at the term “transcendental objectivity”.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner From Nature Impression to “Hieroglyph”
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) engaged in drawing on a daily basis. Whether he was on the street, in the cinema, at a concert or variety show, studying nudes in the studio or the outdoors, he always had his drawing utensils with him so as to capture what he experienced directly. As he worked in this medium, he reduced natural forms to simple signs conveying their essence – so-called “hieroglyphs”. Yet even if these abstract forms consist of just a few distinct lines, they always retain a certain closeness to reality. To quote the artist himself, his pictures were “not illustrations of certain things or beings, but independent organisms of line, surface and colour that contain the natural forms only to the extent necessary to serve as a key to comprehension”.
German Expressionism – Colour-Form Events
In the years around 1900, a spirit of optimism and new departure prevailed – also in art. In the search for artistic renewal, a great number of often very different avant-gardist currents emerged simultaneously. Young artists joined in associations such as the Brücke or Blauer Reiter and sought adequate means of expressing what August Macke called the “stupendous life” rushing in on them. They turned away from the traditional conceptions of art taught at the academies and, initially on paper, experimented with new modes of depiction. Rejecting naturalistic representation, they translated what they saw and experienced into basic visual elements such as line, surface, colour and form. They no longer modelled bodies to look three-dimensional but worked instead with bold contours and two-dimensional, monochrome zones of colour from palettes that departed from the natural appearance of things. What is more, the artists emphasized the material qualities of their crayons, charcoals, opaque body colours and delicate watercolours and integrated chance into their compositions and application of the paint. In their watercolours, for example, they allowed the paints to spread across the paper uncontrolled, bringing about lively interplays between colour and form: colour-form events.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be the first ever to investigate the Städel Museum’s collection of twentieth-century German drawings on the basis of selected examples.
