Goya, Fragonard, Tiepolo: The Freedom of Imagination
Hamburger Kunsthalle
to
With Goya, Fragonard, Tiepolo: The Freedom of Imagination, the
Hamburger Kunsthalle is devoting a large-scale show to one of the most
momentous chapters in European art history: the 18th century. This
heyday and period of great change in European art brought forth such
disparate figures as Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828),
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
(1696–1770). The exhibition assembles around 100 important paintings and
works of graphic art from major national and international museums. It
also marks the final event for the anniversary year 2019, which marks
150 years of the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
This ambitious exhibition will make it possible for the first time to
directly compare works by Goya, Fragonard, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and
his son Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo by placing them in a common context.
The artists will namely be pre-sented as precursors and pioneers of
modernism whose works already illustrate the upheavals in the mid-18th
century that would end up liberating art from the strictures of
convention.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, his son Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
(1727–1804), Fragonard and Goya all reflected in their art the
ideological, political and social transformations that shaped the 18th
century. They developed a more radical formal language, lastingly
changing painting by flouting artistic norms and breaking with the canon
in unusual and innovative ways. Their loose and free-flowing brushwork
can be taken to stand for the freedom of imagination, a freedom they
also claimed for themselves in their pictorial language. The exhibition
illustrates this developmental process in powerful images, tracing the
different creative phases of the selected artists to chronicle the
fundamental changes that laid the foundations for modernism in the art
centres of Venice, Paris and Madrid.
In general, the virtuoso and versatile bodies of work created by
Tiepolo, Fragonard and Goya seem to be characterised by contradictory
approaches. At first glance, we see a conventional mode of painting
contrasted by bold pictorial inventions, while atmospheric, idealised
images meet up with the uncanny and grotesque, and a penchant for
theatre and the theatrical shows itself in a play of reflection and
illusion. Painting style becomes here something radically personal and
contem-plative. These masters hence introduced a stylistic
transformation in painting as early as the mid-18th century, setting the
course for modernism with their innovative formal language even before
the French Revolution of 1789 would finally bring the most drastic
upheaval of all.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732– 1806)Der Philosoph, um 1764Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)Don Tomás Pérez Estala, um 1795Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)Die Opferung der Iphigenie, 1747/1750Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)Dornenkrönung Christi, nach 1753Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)Christus in Gethsemane, nach 1753
Curator: Dr. Sandra Pisot
