Gallery of Modern Art
It unfolds an overwhelming panorama full of new departures and upheavals, of deep ruptures and artistic radicalism. The art of the 20th and 21st centuries takes centre stage in a moving new exhibition at the Museum of Art and Cultural History at Gottorf Castle. Across some 1,800 square metres, you will encounter around 350 works by important artists of Modernism and the present day. Many of them come from the renowned Horn Collection. The focus is on German Expressionism, with masterpieces by the Brücke group. What makes this exhibition unique, not least, are its wide-ranging North German positions, with works by artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach and Christian Rohlfs.
This exhibition has been made possible only by the extraordinary collection of the Horn Foundation - in which private passion and institutional foresight have found a shared form over the course of decades. The Museum of Art and Cultural History has been closely associated with the foundation for decades, and the collection has been at home since 1995 in the converted former military stables of the palace. Following a comprehensive refurbishment of the building, the Gallery of Modern Art now presents itself in fresh new colours, arranged chronologically and complemented by positions from the holdings of the Museum of Art and Cultural History.
350 works by important artists of Modernism and the present day across some 1,800 square metres
The opening is formed by early paintings by Alexej von Jawlensky. His heads are not portraits in the traditional sense. He reduced physiognomic detail in favour of an iconic form that makes visible inner states rather than individual features. These works show how radically painting around 1900 moved away from naturalistic expectations.
Expressionism marks a sweeping artistic new departure that placed subjective expression, emotional intensity and the union of life and art at its centre. An important early signal of this was the founding of the artists' group Brücke in Dresden in 1905. Its initiators included Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller joined later. Their painting worked with luminous, often unmixed colours and a strongly reduced formal language that deliberately set itself apart from academic conventions. Emil Nolde belonged to the Brücke only briefly and then went his own way.
From early on, works were collected and presented at Gottorf Castle by artists who came from Schleswig-Holstein or were closely connected to the region, among them Ernst Barlach, Christian Rohlfs and, once again, Nolde. Thanks to the Horn Foundation, these positions can now be shown on a larger scale. Rolf Horn, a native of Kiel, deliberately made the art of his old homeland a focal point of his collection. Works by the Brücke that were created on Schleswig-Holstein's Baltic coast here encounter the very landscape that shaped them.
One focal point: German Expressionism, with masterpieces by the Brücke
For the Expressionist avant-garde, the founding of the Neue Secession in Berlin in 1910 was of central importance. It was initiated by Georg Tappert after numerous avant-garde artists had been rejected by the traditional Berlin Secession. Its co-founders included Max Pechstein and César Klein, among others.
The First World War marked a profound caesura. The initial enthusiasm for the war quickly gave way to disillusionment, and among the fallen were artists such as Franz Marc, August Macke, Franz Nölken and Hans Fuglsang from Hadersleben. Many artistic developments broke off abruptly; others were lastingly shaped by the experience of the war. To come to terms with what they had lived through, artists such as Christian Rohlfs, Heinrich Stegemann and Max Kahlke turned to religious pictorial formulas.
After 1918, the understanding of art changed fundamentally. Looking back, the painter and printmaker Conrad Felixmüller declared that art had now become a historical matter. By this he meant that artistic forms were increasingly being read as responses to concrete social and political upheavals. The revolution of 1918, which set out from Kiel, found its artistic echo in the so-called Kiel Revolutionary Expressionism and later in the Novembergruppe (November Group).
Art as an "Image of Its Time"
The era of National Socialism brought existential ruptures for many artists: exile, persecution, death. At the same time, the case of Emil Nolde shows the contradictory nature of the epoch. Although he was politically close to National Socialism, his works were defamed as degenerate. Other artists found their true subject only in the immediate post-war period.
Each work asserts its own independence and at the same time points to the historical context from which it emerged. Or, to paraphrase Kirchner once more, an image of its time comes into being.
One North German response of the 1960s is the figurative painting of the group ZEBRA. As a later counter-movement to the dominant abstraction, the North German Realists formed in the 1980s on the initiative of Nikolaus Störtenbecker, devoting themselves, as is well known, above all to plein-air painting (works by Klaus Fußmann, Friedel Anderson and also Christopher Lempfuhl, among others, can be seen in the gallery), as did, internationally, the Neue Wilde (New Wild Ones), with Rainer Fetting as one of their most important protagonists.
