The

The Lenbachhaus 09 The 19 th century 47 The Blue Rider 75 129 141 Art after 1945 153 Annex 206 Preface Roughly half of the museum’s total floor space is entirely new construction; all other sections have undergone thorough renovation. The exhibition and event spaces now meet all the facilities and amenities a modern museum operation requires. In addition to the historic Lenbach rooms, visitors will once again find our stunning collection of the art of the Blue Rider group () as well as the works of nineteenth- century painters. This division of our collection is 6 now enhanced by landscapes from the Christoph Heilmann 7 Foundation, whose generosity enables us to present works of the Romantics, the and Düsseldorf schools, and the influential of as well. With the acquisition of Joseph Beuys’s show your wound in 1979, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus resolutely opened its collection-building efforts to the art of the present. In 2012, Since reopening in May 2013, the Lenbachhaus presents itself in we were able to purchase another environment by Beuys, before a striking new guise. After four years of construction, the building departing from camp I. Lothar Schirmer, moreover, has donated appears transformed on the outside as much as the inside; the a wonderful group of eminent Beuys created between most conspicuous new feature is the façade clad in brass-colored 1948 and 1972 to the Lenbachhaus. With these additions, the metal. The three-wing complex as it stood after an extension museum’s collection has gained a new highlight; the exceptional was added to Lenbach’s studio building and villa on occasion artist’s art has been installed in Lenbach’s former studio. of the establishment of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus The collection of art after 1945 has been substantively (Municipal Gallery in the Lenbachhaus) in 1929 remained enlarged; in particular, both the museum itself and the KiCo virtually unchanged. Several eminent works of now Foundation have acquired several recent positions. In close grace the wonderful historic garden. The new approach to the collaboration with two dedicated collectors, we have been able gallery via the museum plaza facing the Propylaea presents to make selective purchases over the past fifteen years that the new wing by Foster + Partners from its most splendid side. complement our own holdings perfectly. The building is open, via the terrace, toward Klenze’s classicist A distinctive feature of the Lenbachhaus’s collections ensemble around Königsplatz, with the exhibition rooms on throughout all departments are the artists’ rooms, most of which the upper floors sheltered by the closed façade and Lenbach’s were designed specifically for the museum. No less stimulating studio wing, designed by , adjoining on the are the dialogues between different artistic positions that meet right-hand side. in the galleries. The museum’s interior, too, presents an exciting dialogue In presenting the art of the nineteenth century and between old and new architecture. Lenbach’s historic villa, especially the of the Blue Rider, it was once again which had been wedged between adjacent former neighboring important to us to show these works not in what is known as buildings, has been unstuck and now emerges within the museum a White Cube — a bare room with whitewashed walls — but on as an exhibit in its own right. walls painted in carefully selected colors and treated with special

materials and techniques. The Lenbachhaus first presented its Blue Rider collection on colorful walls in 1992. This decision, which was at the time felt to be a radical departure from the practice of showing modernist works on white walls, was based on the observation that and , T HE designing the first Blue Rider show, had deliberately exhibited the group’s art before a dark — presumably black — wallpaper backdrop. Since then, we have frequently returned to the 8 question of the adequate background for these pictures and the 9 right color for the walls around them. Most recently, we invited artists — Franz Ackermann, Katharina Grosse, Olafur Eliasson, and — to design the galleries for Franz Marc, Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and . After learning from these past experiences, the Lenbachhaus has yet again redesigned the exhibition of this division of its collection. We believe that the new presentation in the beautifully proportioned spaces Foster + Partner architects have created will afford all visitors to our galleries exciting and richly diverse

visual experiences. Moreover, the new Lenbachhaus is a crucial Lenbachhaus building block toward the completion of Munich’s , a neighborhood that brings museums, universities, and galleries together in an art and education hub of global stature.

Helmut Friedel, Matthias Mühling History of the Museum The Lenbachhaus

The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus was established in the 11 former residence of the artist in 1929. When his widow, Lolo von Lenbach, offered to sell the property to the City of Munich in 1924, her proposal included the donation of the building’s furnishings and interior decorations as well as numerous works by Lenbach. The acquisition of the Lenbachhaus made it possible to fulfill the desire for a municipal art museum, which had been widely felt for many years. The city’s art holdings, which were scattered across various municipal institutions, were united; municipal funding was used to expand the collection. To create enough floor space for the collection and exhibitions, the architect Hans Grässel added an extension to Lenbach’s studio and residence building, creating a three-wing complex. On May 1, 1929, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus opened its doors to the public. Its founding director, Eberhard Hanfstaengl, set the goal of bringing together paintings from Munich and contemporary art to build a municipal art collection of European stature, but his plans were thwarted only a few years later when Hitler rose to power in 1933. In 1944 – 45, the museum suffered heavy damage, and large parts of the building were destroyed. After a period of rapid reconstruction, the first shows of the postwar era were held in 1947. Despite the museum’s limited funding, new works, especially by contemporary artists, were added to the collection. On the occasion of her eightieth birthday on February 19, 1957, Gabriele Münter made an extraordinarily generous donation to the Städtische Galerie, giving the art of the Blue Rider, including eminent works by the artist herself, Wassily Kandinsky, her companion of many years, and their artist friends The Lenbachhaus

12 13

Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys 1980 posing in front of Lenbach’s Self-Portrait with His Family Photograph: Angela Neuke to the museum. The Lenbachhaus, which had been a municipal institution that primarily catered to local audiences, became a central venue for classical and a world-class museum. In 1965, Jr. donated his valuable holdings of paintings by Franz Marc and August Macke to the Lenbachhaus.

An extension built between 1969 and 1972 added the necessary The Lenbachhaus floor space for an adequate presentation. Four years after Gabriele Münter’s death, in 1966, the Gabriele Münter and 14 Johannes Eichner Foundation, which holds considerable archival 15 materials concerning the art of the Blue Rider group, became operative. In 1971, the Lenbachhaus also acquired the Kubin archive of the Hamburg-based collector Kurt Otte. Over the years, acquisition funding provided by the city and the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation enabled us to purchase eminent works by and by major representatives of the Blue Rider and other artists in its orbit. The collection now includes extensive holdings of outstanding works by the leading Blue Rider artists — first and foremost, Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, but also Alexej Jawlensky, , Franz Marc, and August Macke. Since the 1970s, the museum has held exhibitions that in- troduced audiences to central tendencies and protagonists of the international contemporary art scene. The purchase of Joseph Beuys’s show your wound in 1979 paved the way for a redefinition of the Lenbachhaus’s acquisition policies, after which the museum started adding national and international contemporary art to its collections. Since 1994, the Kunstbau, an exhibition space located beneath Königsplatz square, in the immediate vicinity of the artist’s villa, has hosted large special exhibitions. Planning for the refurbishment and redesign of the Lenbachhaus and the addition of a new wing began in 2003, and work on the site commenced in the spring of 2009. After a Europe-wide selection process, Foster + Partners architects were commissioned to develop a rehabilitation and redesign concept to create state-of-the-art facilities for an internationally renowned View of Richard-Wagner-Straße museum drawing large numbers of visitors. The renovated gallery 2013 with its new extension was inaugurated in May 2013. FRANZ VON LENBACH Prince of Painters

“ I intend to build The Lenbachhaus a palace for myself that will eclipse 16 everything the 17 world has seen; it will link the power centers of Euro- pean high art to the world of the present. ”

Franz von Lenbach 1885

Franz von Lenbach Self Portrait with His Wife and Daughters 1903 Franz von Lenbach (1836 – 1904) was a central protagonist in the late-nineteenth-century rise of Munich as an almost mythical center of the arts. Born to a lower-middle-class family, he was trained at the Academy of Fine Arts; after 1870, he became a celebrated portraitist and honed his image as an urbane artist and

virtuoso of his craft. As an outward reflection of his great artistic The Lenbachhaus and financial success, he carefully crafted his public persona: next to his private residence, he built a magnificent studio that 18 was open to the public; visitors would find him standing at the 19 easel dressed in an elegant suit. Lenbach was regarded as the leading German portraitist of his era. An unending procession of prominent members of society came to have their portraits painted. His technique was inspired by Old Masters such as Rubens, Titian, and Veronese, but he was not above availing himself of the new medium of photography as well. Painting in his signature style, he created portraits of the pope, of emperors and kings, of elegant ladies and eminent politicians and businessmen. His conception of art defined the public face and image of the high society as well as the rising upper middle classes of the late nineteenth century. His wedding to Magdalena Countess Moltke and his second marriage to Lolo von Hornstein were important tokens of his social advancement. His family, and especially his daughters Marion and Gabriele, whom he captured in sophisticated portraits that circulated in large numbers of reproductions, became public figures. Lenbach’s large circle of friends included the painters and Friedrich August von Kaulbach, and his wife Cosima, his teacher Carl Theodor von Piloty, the writer and Nobel Prize winner Paul Heyse, and the sculptors Lorenz Gedon and . With his carefully groomed lifestyle, Lenbach himself came to epitomize the idea of the prince of painters, a position many of his Munich colleagues likewise aspired to. On the other hand, he took a very critical view of the innovations in art that began to appear toward the turn of the century, and so he also Franz von Lenbach paradigmatically embodied what the artists of the and Otto Prince Bismarck subsequently the Blue Rider wanted to break free from. 1895 Franz von Lenbach’s Villa The Lenbachhaus

20 21

Between 1887 and 1890, Franz Lenbach had a spacious villa erected in the immediate vicinity of Königsplatz square; the building was designed in collaboration with Gabriel von Seidl, then Munich’s most renowned architect. The first part of the ensemble to be built was the studio building, the southern wing of the complex as it stands today, which rose vis-à-vis the Propylaea, a symbolic city gate — outside the city laid out by Ludwig I, but directly on the ceremonial route leading from the royal residence to . The prominent location was also very close to the major state art collections; the and the royal exhibition building (now home to the State Collection of Antiques) on Königsplatz are just a stone’s throw away, and the Alte and are within easy walking distance. Count Schack, Lenbach’s greatest supporter, resided a short way down the road toward Nymphenburg, and Richard Wagner’s villa stood across the street. The choice of this site for his home underlined Lenbach’s representational aspirations. In keeping with the significance of the location, the studio wing was designed with columns adorning the street-side façade; pilasters were deemed sufficient for the garden façade. The studio, that is to say, addressed the public in a representative gesture. After the studio wing was complete, Lenbach built the top bottom Garden and Villa and studio residential wing, whose design was inspired by Tuscan villas; studio wing wing the grand staircase leading up to the main entrance and the ca. 1900 ca. 1900 fountain basin quote Roman architectural motifs. The villa had Historic Rooms in to be inserted between two existing structures, the residence of the sculptor Anton Heinrich Hess and the home of the Schäfer the Lenbachhaus family. It was initially connected to the studio wing only by false façades. Max Kolb designed the gardens and the fountains

structuring their layout that framed the ensemble as a whole. The Lenbachhaus Drawing on a variety of architectural models and adding decorative set pieces, Lenbach thus created a suitable setting 22 for a representative social life in the style of the prosperous 23 late-nineteenth century Gründerzeit. With its grand staircase, columns, loggias, curved and arched forms, terracotta vessels on pedestals, and inset stucco reliefs, the entire complex forms a harmonious union of heterogeneous elements and attests to a painterly eye for effect. In the era of , architecture and the art of designing lavish festivities renewed their former alliance one last time, now under the aegis of the bourgeoisie rather than the court. Lenbach was accordingly also one of If the exteriors of Lenbach’s villa articulated his aspirations, its Munich’s most sought-after creators of decorations for these interiors were no less magnificent. Residential and representative parties, which drew large public audiences. rooms as well as the studio and gallery wing were lavishly decorated in various historic styles. The interior designs documented the resident’s comprehensive cultural knowledge and connoisseurship as well as his success as an artist. The ample original furnishings “Yesterday, I saw the National included valuable ancient sculptures, medieval paintings, rare Museum; it is dizzying in its size […] carpets and tapestries, and copies of objects such as antique reliefs when originals could not be had. To heighten the effect, My visit at Lenbach’s today the rooms were kept semi-dark so that everything was bathed was more pleasant; several new in an atmosphere of mystery. (Behind the scenes, Lenbach’s was pictures are on display, with a few one of the most modern homes in Munich: it had electric light portraits of his baby girl, who throughout and featured steam heating, a bathroom, and a photo is around two years old, being studio.) This magnificence gave outward expression to how Len- especially charming. Another bach’s time envisioned the life of a “prince of painters.” The villa magnificent work shows Marion. was a suitable representative setting also for guests of the highest The wonderful copies on the rank: when Prince Bismarck, whose public image had been walls remain the same.” shaped by the numerous portraits Lenbach had painted of him, visited the Bavarian capital in 1892, he received the ovations of Paul Klee, 1901 the people of Munich on the balcony of Lenbach’s home. After the buildings suffered major damage in 1944 and 1945, only the foyer and the representative rooms on the first floor of the central wing could be reconstructed; work was completed in 1952. The original colors of the entrance hall were restored in 1994; in 1996, curators, relying on old photographs, recreated the

representative rooms with the original furniture and art objects. The Lenbachhaus The reconstructed historic rooms in the former residence are devoted to Lenbach’s art and the atmosphere he created in his 24 home. The presentation features an extensive selection of works 25 from his art collection, the villa’s original interiors, and Lenbach’s own paintings. In 1983, Gerhard Merz created a cycle of paintings for Lenbach’s representative rooms that engage with the “shocku- mentary” Mondo Cane (1962). The entire group pays homage to Yves Klein, as is most evident in the picture Monochromy- Ultramarine.

Gerhard Merz Mondo Cane in the historic rooms at the Lenbachhaus: Monochromy-Ultramarine 1983 Expanded Museum Architecture The Lenbachhaus

26 27

The Lenbachhaus ensemble is a complex structure, the product of additions to the original elements. In 1900, after Lenbach acquired the neighboring homes, an extension was built to connect the studio to the villa, but the outward character of the ensemble as whole remained unchanged. When the Lenbachhaus became the home of Munich’s municipal gallery in 1924, Hans Grässel built a two-storey extension along the northern edge of the existing complex; echoing Gabriel von Seidl’s architecture, the new wing complemented the artist’s villa and studio to create a harmonious three-wing ensemble. If this building is an exemplary piece of architectural adaptation on the outside, its interiors show Grässel’s allegiance to the New Objectivity movement with its preference for clear forms. In time for the museum’s inauguration in 1929, the entire ensemble, which had been white on the outside, was painted ochre to underline the architectural unity of the different parts. A bombing attack in July 1944 destroyed the Städtische Galerie almost completely. Reconstruction proceeded rapidly, but much of the damage was only provisionally repaired. As early as 1947, the first exhibitions were presented in the northern wing. Top Bottom The studio building, of which only the exterior walls remained The restored representative Two sculptures by rooms in the villa Erwin Wurm, 2008, in the foyer standing, was rebuilt between 1951 and 1953, followed by the 1996 of Lenbach’s villa skylight rooms in the northwestern corner. The extension in the southwestern corner of the Lenbachhaus, designed by the architects Heinrich Volbehr and Rudolf Thönessen, was inaugurated in conjunction with the Olympic Games in 1972. Without a logical and clearly laid-out connection to the existing buildings, it always remained an alien addition

to the Lenbachhaus’s three-wing ensemble, and in 2009, as the The Lenbachhaus complex was being prepared for the general renovation, it was demolished to make room for Foster + Partners’ new extension. 28 29

Rising visitor figures

Lenbach had already opened the doors of his private villa and especially of the studio to guests and selected members of the interested public. When the Städtische Galerie was established in the complex in 1929, it was expected that the museum would draw around 10,000 visitors annually. Starting in the 1970s, rising public interest in modern art and the museum’s dynamic exhibition program featuring international art gradually increased the number of visitors. Most recently, attendance figures averaged more than 200,000 visitors per year, with as many as 400,000 visitors in peak years. A crucial factor in this development has been the Kunstbau, a large exhibition space that opened in a void above the Königsplatz subway station in 1994. Between 2009 and 2013, the Lenbachhaus underwent a general renovation and a new extension was built based on the designs by Foster + Partners architects.

View of the villa, the Grässel wing and the garden ca. 1990 General Renovation and Construction of a New Wing by Foster + Partners The Lenbachhaus

30 31

After a Europe-wide competition, Foster + Partners architects had been selected to remedy structural defects and adapt the building to the changed needs of a contemporary museum. In 2006, the Munich city council officially commissioned the firm to implement the museum’s “general renovation and partial reconstruction.” The idea behind the architects’ designs was developed to meet several fundamental requirements: the historic three- wing complex was to retain its outward appearance; no changes were to be made to the garden, which is protected as a historic monument; and Lenbach’s historic rooms were to remain untouched. The original entrance to the villa through the gar- den and up the large staircase, however, had long ceased to be adequate to the needs of a contemporary museum with large numbers of visitors, and did not provide barrier-free access. Moreover, visitors faced a confusing maze of rooms immediately upon entering the building. Lenbachhaus The basic plan the architects drew up was to release the and Königsplatz with Propylaea historic villa from the surrounding ensemble; a new atrium that 2013 guides the visitor around Lenbach’s residence accentuates this architectonic core. The second central considera- and is nonetheless a distinctive and unmistakably contemporary tion was to reroute the main access to the building formal element. Brass-colored tubes are the defining feature of via the museum plaza facing the Propylaea; it is the completely new sections of the building; the section based from this side — from the Königsplatz subway on an underlying historic structure presents a series of concave station, from the central railway station, or across panels, whereas existing structures that have been integrated

Königsplatz — that most visitors approach the into the new building are clad in flat sheets of metal. The same The Lenbachhaus museum. This change highlights the southern material is used throughout. This design also brings out the fact façade of the historic studio wing and the cubic that the remodeling has allowed for the addition of a second 32 shape of the new extension; conversely, visitors floor on the western side of the ensemble, which was inserted 33 who have entered the museum enjoy a panoramic beneath the pitched roofs of the original structure at the level of view across the forecourt toward the Propylaea and the clerestory. Königsplatz. Both upper floors will now be used exclusively to house collection galleries; located at the same height across all sections of the building, they feature barrier-free access throughout. In The marriage of old and new the old Lenbachhaus, providing access for all our visitors to all galleries was impossible due to the numerous short flights of stairs, The new entranceway through a lobby that offers and the reconstruction has allowed us to achieve this important first glimpses of the garden leads the visitor into the goal. A guidance system helps visitors find the museum’s various atrium, which presents a striking view of Lenbach’s collections so that, rather than being compelled to follow a villa restored to its original appearance. The historic prescribed tour, they can decide for themselves what to see. building constitutes the museum’s core. Above the bel étage furnished by Lenbach, the building “Make it contains several rooms dedicated to the museum’s more educational and art outreach mission. The spacious domestic!” lobby provides centralized and intuitive access to the various collection and exhibition galleries Norman Foster located from the ground floor up to the newly created second floor, as well as to service facilities such as the lecture hall, the museum shop, and the café and restaurant. The new entrance connects the existing Lenbachhaus to the new wing designed by Foster + Partners, which relates harmoniously to Gabriel von Seidl’s building in terms of volume, color, and proportions. The façade design featuring brass- colored metal elements speaks its own language; it extends the existing structure in terms of color Dietmar Tanterl and New Lighting Concepts

Lighting is a crucial issue in a museum. A number of works in the The Lenbachhaus Lenbachhaus’s collections, including installations by Dan Flavin, Olafur Eliasson, Michel Majerus, Lucio Fontana, Angela Bulloch, 34 Cerith Wyn Evans, Keith Sonnier, and James Turrell, explore 35 light as an artistic medium. The Munich-based light artist Dietmar Tanterl (b. 1956) created a new light installation for the northern staircase. The work, entitled Red Wine Red (2008) , consists of eighteen tall and narrow lamps made of matte acrylic glass. Mounted on three sides of the staircase, they seem to float in front of the walls, an effect that lends them a vaguely sculptural quality. They greet the visitors from a variety of angles as they ascend or descend, inviting them to pause and slowing down traffic on the stairs. They also make the staircase feel wider. At regular intervals, the illumination in these slender structures switches between white light and a tripartite arrangement of red, white, and red, with the red hue remaining soft for a smooth transition to the white at the center. The overall quality shifts from cool light to a warmer tone. To emphasize the constant alternation, Tanterl has added six lamps of the same size on one of the walls that emit an unchanging white light. The title, a pun on the German for “red-white-red,” adds a note of gentle irony to the reference to ’s heraldic colors. Dietmar Tanterl, who is Austrian by birth but has lived in Munich since the 1970s, playfully addresses the subject of his national identity; the Austrian flag remains a subtle allusion. In planning the new exhibition spaces, we devoted particular attention to the quality of the illumination. The decision to employ innovative LED technology led to the development of special LED lamps for the galleries. The Lenbachhaus was able Dietmar Tanterl to draw on the expertise of Tanterl, who supervised the technical Red Wine Red 2008 realization by OSRAM, Bamberger und Partner engineers, and Gabriele Münter and the municipal building directorate. Johannes Eichner Foundation DAN FLAVIN The Lenbachhaus

36 37

For the inauguration of the Kunstbau in 1994, the American artist Dan Flavin (1933 – 96) designed the neon piece Untitled (For Ksenija), one of his last major light installations. In this extremely reduced and yet highly effective intervention, Flavin takes up the specific architectural situation at the Kunstbau, emphasizing the characteristic curvature of the elongated hall, which measures around 360 feet in length. Installed on the existing lighting tracks, the colorful fluorescent tubes suggest the subway running beneath the Kunstbau and impart a previously unimagined dynamic energy to the room. The colored neon light moreover generates intense chromatic reflections on the walls, floor, columns, and all other interior structural features. As the eye adapts to the scene, the illumination and the space are gradually fused in an indivisible union. Heiner and Philippa Friedrich donated this work to the Lenbachhaus in memory of their parents. It is one of the collection’s preeminent treasures and has been presented at regular intervals. In 1994, Dan Flavin also created a series of illuminated stelae on the museum plaza to mark a connection between the Kunstbau and the Lenbachhaus. Ten stelae, each composed of four yellow neon tubes, clearly light the way from one museum building to the other and back. As part of the general renovation of the Lenbachhaus, access to the museum has been rerouted to Dan Flavin the side of the complex facing Königsplatz, and so this aspect of Untitled the work is now even more clearly recognizable. 1994 KUNSTBAU The Lenbachhaus

38 39

The Kunstbau was inaugurated in 1994 with an installation conceived for the space by Dan Flavin. The subterranean gallery is located in the immediate vicinity of the Lenbachhaus in an originally unused space left void for technical reasons when the Königsplatz subway station was built. The architect Uwe Kiessler modified this mezzanine level to create a sober and spacious exhibition room based on a concept that is as simple as it is compelling: he structured the slightly curved long and narrow hall — forty-six feet wide and sixteen feet high, it is 360 feet from one end to the other — by inserting eighteen concrete columns along its long axis that divide it into two naves, matching the layout of the subway station below. The large room remained virtually unchanged; the ventilation system is hidden behind white curtain walls, and the floor was paved with a maple wood surface that adapts to the curvature of the footprint. An exposed track system mounted to the untreated concrete ceiling allows for highly adaptable light installations. Near the back end of the hall, an auditorium for film and video screenings was inserted Dan Flavin beneath the ceiling. Untitled (For Ksenija) In the Kunstbau, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus 1994 gift of Heiner and had gained a large open-plan space in its immediate vicinity that Philippa Friedrich, meets international standards. Since the 1990s, this exhibition New York, in memory of space has allowed the museum to accommodate the growing their parents, Erika and Harald Friedrich and space requirements of contemporary art and present an Dominique and John de increasing number of special exhibitions. Menil OLAFUR ELIASSON The Lenbachhaus

40 41

Olafur Eliasson Sun Instead of Rain 2003 KiCo Foundation A spiral-shaped vortex made of polished metal and colored glass reaches down from the atrium’s ceiling to just above the visitors’ heads. The steel and glass sculpture has a maximum diameter of around twenty-three feet and measures more than twenty- six feet in height. Almost 450 panes of glass were assembled

with great precision to make it. Wirbelwerk (Vortex) is the title The Lenbachhaus Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) has given to his work created in 2012. The basic idea behind it lies in its dynamic energy: a vortex is 42 a circular movement that sucks what it seizes down into the 43 depths before bringing it back up to the surface. The Coriolis effect, which deflects moving bodies in a rotating reference frame onto a spiral-shaped trajectory, has been known since the Enlightenment era around 1800. It is crucial to how physicists understand phenomena ranging from hurricanes to ocean currents, as well as the order of galaxies. Steeply sloped widening bands composed of triangular pieces of colored transparent glass are held in place by conically tapered polished metal tubes that emphasize the gyrating motion. Illuminated from inside, the radiant sculpture projects its shadows and flecks of colorful light on the surrounding walls. By using strong colors, Eliasson alludes to the visual universe of the paintings his work wants to lead up to while simultaneously reaching down from it. Natural phenomena and how they are perceived are a cen- tral interest in the work of Olafur Eliasson, a Danish artist who lives in Berlin. The expansive environment Sun Instead of Rain he created for the Lenbachhaus’s Kunstbau in 2003 builds on the light and color spectrum of atmospheric sunlight, allowing the visitor to quite literally feel its different emotional qualities.

Olafur Eliasson Wirbelwerk (Vortex) 2012 THOMAS DEMAND The Lenbachhaus

44 45

Thomas Demand LENBACHHAUS 2012

Approaching the Lenbachhaus, visitors are greeted from afar

by Thomas Demand’s letter sculpture LENBACHHAUS (2012), H which marks the new entrance. Far more than just a nametag,

the sculpture, which stands out from the façade by virtue of its T color, is composed of individual letters. Their bodies, set off from the façade by a few inches, grow out of an antiqua base, tapering toward the beholder to form a sans-serif typeface. The 19 two-tiered lettering of the metal sculpture is held together by 46 wedge-shaped crosspieces, creating a three-dimensional effect 47 and heightening the interplay of light and shadow. The slender lines of the unadorned metal letters are illuminated, so as night falls, the sculpture continues to highlight the new entrance to the CEN T URY museum. The antiqua typeface was borrowed from the design first used when the Lenbachhaus was founded in 1929; the sans-serif, meanwhile, matches the museum’s current typographic identity. The Berlin-based artist Thomas Demand (b. Munich, 1964) primarily works in three dimensions. He often builds life- sized colored-paper reconstructions of images that have become part of the collective memory, usually photographs of historic events or places. He then takes pictures to reproduce the sites he has recovered. The resulting photographs present a transformed image. For the opening of the new Lenbachhaus, Demand has reinstalled his Embassy (2007) — a crime scene documentary of the incident at the embassy of Niger in in 2001, which ultimately served the Bush government in its effort to legitimize the Iraq War — in a room dedicated to this work. INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION 19 TH CENTURY 19 th Century

49

Until the 1950s, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, which opened in 1929, primarily collected and presented nineteenth-century paintings from Munich and early twentieth-century . With the works of the villa’s former resident, Franz von Lenbach, this original focus constitutes the collection’s historic core. In the nineteenth century, the “” enjoyed international renown, attracting artists to the city whose works were prized by collectors around the world. The most important venue for the local bourgeoisie, which took a lively interest in this art, was the Münchener Kunstverein, founded in 1823, whose exhibitions primarily presented landscapes and genre paintings. As a municipal institution, the Lenbachhaus initially focused its collecting efforts on this more private and bourgeois art, in programmatic contradistinction to the Bavarian State Picture Collections, which built on the holdings of the Bavarian royal house and the work of the Academy of Fine Arts of Munich. A romantic conception of the landscape, a inspired by ’s work, enthusiasm for the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the influences of Belgian, Dutch, French, and English painters informed the development of the art produced in Munich. In the Lenbachhaus’s collections, eminent artists such as Wilhelm von Kobell, , Thomas Fearnley, Ernst Kaiser, Christian E. B. Morgenstern, , , and Eduard Schleich the Elder represent this period. The museum also has examples of the outstanding painterly craftsmanship of EARLY the Leibl circle (, , Wilhelm Trübner, and Hans Thoma), works by exponents of academic painting such as Carl Theodor von PORTRAITURE Piloty, Hans Makart, , and Albert von Keller, and portraits by

the so-called princes of painters, Franz von Lenbach and Friedrich August 19 th Century von Kaulbach.

50 New tendencies 51

With the establishment of the in 1892, new tendencies appeared on the scene; the group united a wide variety of styles between , , and avant-garde conceptions of the picture, as illustrated by paintings by Franz von Stuck, , , , and many others. These works mark the transition to the collection’s holdings of the art of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists‘ Association Munich) and the Blue Rider group. Over the years, the Lenbachhaus has frequently had the opportunity to add important individual works to its collection of nineteenth-century art, which has also been enlarged by substantial bequests. The collection is rounded out by permanent loans such as the holdings of the Munich Secession, the estate of Johann Georg von Dillis, which is held by the Historical Society of Upper , and the estate of the founder of Simplicissimus, Thomas Theodor Heine. In time for the museum’s reopening in 2013, the Lenbachhaus received the Christoph Heilmann Foundation’s holdings of paintings of the German romantics and the Barbizon school, adding an international dimension to the nineteenth-century collection as well.

Jan Polack Portrait of a Young Man 1490s Two genres are dominant — leitmotifs, one might say — in the Lenbachhaus’s

holdings of earlier art: portraits and landscapes. The preeminent early modern 19 th Century painting is Jan Polack’s Portrait of a Young Man, which was created in the 1490s. The artist’s name suggests Polish roots; around 1500, his was the most famous and busiest workshop in Munich. 52 In the fifteenth century, the number of portraits being produced grew 53 as more and more princes and bourgeois clients commissioned paintings in which their faces were the central objects of attention. In Europe north of the Alps, the verism of Early Netherlandish painting, which emerged around 1430, laid the foundations for the rise of portraiture as one of the most important functions of painting. Artists now learned to capture the individual’s unique physical features as well as record the sitter’s rank and social station. The collection includes numerous depictions of members of the nobility as well as bourgeois sitters from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among them are works by George Desmarées, which exemplify the international style known as rococo, and Johann Georg Edlinger, the leading painter of characteristic faces in late-eighteenth-century Munich, as well as Maria Electrine von Freyberg’s delightful portrait of a child, her niece Natalie Stuntz. In Joseph Hauber’s Portrait of the Scheichenpflueg Family (1811), the positions, dress, and postures of the sitters indicate that the client is a member of the wealthy upper middle class. The picture shows a moment — the father Joseph Hauber The Scheichenpflueg Familiy 1811 is reading a letter to his wife and children — that enables the painter to capture the individual features of the family members. The distinctness of the contours and the lively colors — in particular, the vigorous reds — recall works of French portraitists such as Jacques-Louis David. In their artless simplicity, the father and daughter embody an ideal articulated by the thinkers of the time around 1800, which was marked by profound transformations: the human being unshackled by convention. In the portraiture of the , an emphatically bourgeois culture, the subjects are limned in detail-oriented and often carefully contrived compositions. The works in the Lenbachhaus’s collections — by Joseph Karl Stieler, Franz Sales Lochbihler, Heinrich Maria Hess, Moritz Kellerhoven, and , among others — include conspicuously many self- portraits and likenesses of artist friends. EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY 19 th Century

54 55

Ernst Kaiser View of Munich from Oberföhring 1839 “We have the most magnificent sceneries and so thoroughly romantic land- scapes in Bavaria that I am confident: the greatest artists, if they had ever seen them, would be delighted to exercise their talent here.” Lorenz Westenrieder, Bavarian Enlightenment writer and historian, 1782 19 th Century

In the late eighteenth century, when Munich artists first sought to capture actual natural scenes in painting, this innovation was accompanied by the discovery of the Bavarian landscape. Influenced by the Enlightenment ideas 56 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, their eyes newly open to the picturesque beauties 57 of the pre-Alpine uplands, painters ventured out of the city and into the countryside. Instead of composing ideal landscapes emulating the examples of Claude Lorrain or Jacob van Ruisdael, they went to find their own motifs. Their audiences followed the artists: excursions into the countryside around Munich became increasingly popular. The first generation of Munich landscape painters included Johann Georg von Dillis, Wilhelm von Kobell, Max Joseph Wagenbauer, Johannes Jakob Dorner the Younger, and Simon Warnberger. The impressions of nature they captured in sketches created en plein air ushered in a new conception of the landscape free from the constraints of academic convention. Setting colorful groups of rural or bourgeois figures in scenes beneath wide skies, painters like Wilhelm von Kobell established a distinctive style of landscape painting associated with Munich. Carl Rottmann, who was a world-famous artist in his time, Ernst Fries, and Ernst Kaiser, as well as northerners like Christian E. B. Morgenstern, Christian Ezdorf, and Thomas Fearnley followed Kobell. Landscape painting was originally one of the disciplines taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1808. The professorship was first held by Dillis, who was succeeded by Kobell in 1814. In 1826, the history painter successfully advocated abolishing the chair. In the meantime, the Münchener Kunstverein, a private association of art lovers and one of the first and most important institutions of its kind in , had been founded Wilhelm von Kobell On Gaisalm 1828 in 1823; as a counterweight to the Academy and the court’s arts policies, it now provided an important platform to the city’s landscape painters. In the 1830s, Heinrich Bürkel, who gained his renown through the club’s exhibitions, shipped his landscapes, which show a life of peaceful harmony between man and his environment, to similar associations throughout Germany, becoming the author of the increasingly clichéd image that defined Upper Bavaria’s agricultural landscape in the minds of large audiences. JOHANN GEORG VON DILLIS 19 th Century

Johann Georg von Dillis (1759 – 1841) was one of the most distinguished 58 German artists of the period around 1800. He absorbed the traditions of 59 classical landscape art and transformed them into a new and “realistic” landscape painting of the sort that gradually gained acceptance in the nineteenth century. As a professor of landscape painting at the Academy, arts official, and artistic advisor to three monarchs, Dillis played a major role in Munich culture; he traveled widely throughout Europe and exchanged ideas with eminent contemporaries in Rome, Florence, , , , and . His extensive and eminent estate, which is now held by the Historical Society of Upper Bavaria, has been on permanent loan to the Lenbachhaus since 1996. Though it includes only a handful of finished works, it comprises around 8,000 drawings and 40 sketchbooks that offer insight into the private Johann Georg von Dillis life and creative output of the artist, who served the Bavarian court in a range Clouds with the Theatine Church 1821 of functions. The drawings and oil sketches are the fruits of the busy art organizer’s scant leisure: Dillis rarely had the opportunity to execute oil paintings, a time- consuming process, and so oil studies, watercolors, and drawings increasingly became his media of choice. Working “in the great outdoors,” he believed, was the best training for the landscape painter. Dillis thus became a pioneer of en plein air painting in Munich. He jotted down impressions and motifs from the world around him that fascinated him — similar in this regard to , a later artist who is reported to have said that “all drawing is good, but drawing everything is better.” One important division of his oeuvre consists of the sketches he produced as he traveled. Many of them show scenes in and , but Dillis also drew incessantly in Munich and the countryside south of the city. Even outlying parts of town with their unprepossessing street corners and people drew his interest. In the last years of his life, as Dillis was increasingly unable to go on extended hikes, the view of Munich’s Prinz-Carl- Garten from his window became his most important motif. This was also where he created many of his now famous cloud studies. CHRISTOPH HEILMANN FOUNDATION 19 th Century

60 61

In 2012, the Christoph Heilmann Foundation, Munich, and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus agreed on a close collaboration framework that includes the donation of around one hundred works held by the foundation to the Lenbachhaus. An initial selection is on display as part of the new presen- tation of the collection. After 1800, Munich was unrivaled in Germany as a hub of abundant and unfettered innovations in landscape painting; the city’s artists inspired others throughout Germany and beyond and generated ideas that would eventually contribute to the rise of modernism. The works of Munich landscape artists Gustave Courbet constitute an important part of the Lenbachhaus’s holdings of earlier paintings. Black Rocks at the The permanent integration of the Christoph Heilmann Foundation into the Beach of Trouville Lenbachhaus’s collection adds an important new highlight to the museum. The 1865 Christoph Heilmann juxtaposition of the two collection complexes reveals manifold interrelations Foundation between them, promoting a deeper understanding of the evolution of nineteenth-century landscape painting as illustrated by eminent works. In addition to the Munich school, the presentation now also features characteristic examples of the art of the Dresden Romantics and the Berlin and Gustave Courbet, for example, who is now represented in the Lenbachhaus’s Düsseldorf schools; a particularly important aspect of the new exhibition is that exhibition with a major work, first showed his art in Munich in 1851. The it highlights for the first time the ties between the art produced in Munich and international art exposition organized by Eduard Schleich the Elder at Munich’s the work of the Barbizon painters in France. The groundbreaking ways in Glass Palace 1869 made history, featuring many of the Barbizon painters; which these artists approached a modern conception of nature drew attention Courbet and Camille Corot received medals in honor of their achievements. in Munich as early as the mid-century; individual painters soon began traveling Important artists included in the Lenbachhaus’s collection such as Schleich to Paris and Barbizon. The international art expositions and world’s fairs held and Carl Spitzweg were profoundly influenced by the Barbizon school. The after 1850 likewise raised awareness of modern tendencies in art and helped rich holdings of the Christoph Heilmann Foundation now allow for a com- disseminate inspiring developments across national borders. parative perspective on this fascinating instance of artistic exchange. SPITZWEG And SCHLEICH 19 th Century

62 Eduard Schleich the Elder (1812 – 74), an important pioneer of en plein air 63 painting in Germany, was an autodidact who honed his talent with nature studies he produced in the Bavarian Alps. He first met Carl Spitzweg (1808 – 85), a pharmacist by training who similarly taught himself to paint, in the mid-1830s, when both frequented the circle of artists such as Thomas Fearnly, Heinrich Crola, and Christian E. B. Morgenstern who rejected aca- demic convention. Together, they copied the Old Masters and roamed Bavaria and Tyrol looking for new motifs. The evolution of their art took a decisive turn in 1851, when they traveled to Paris, where they became acquainted with the Barbizon school’s paintings; they went on to visit the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in and encountered the work of and Richard Parkes Bonington. These discoveries led both to a new form of “intimate landscape painting” that would become a characteristic style of Munich art in the second half of the nineteenth century. The friendship between the two artists was so close that they assisted Carl Spitzweg Childhood Friends ca. 1855 or 1862 / 63 each other in completing their pictures. It is reported, for example, that Schleich helped Spitzweg with painting his skies, while Spitzweg inserted figures into Schleich’s landscapes. In many of Spitzweg’s landscapes, the human accessories are tiny; almost the entire pictorial space is reserved for nature. What made Spitzweg famous, however, were his pictures in small formats: scenes of everyday life in the Biedermeier era, portraits of oddballs and old fogeys, romantic incidents. The Childhood Friends shows two unequal friends — one returning from his travels to distant lands, the other stepping over the threshold of a home he has barely left — meeting as though on a stage. As in many of his pictures, Spitzweg skillfully characterizes his figures in a style primarily associated with English and French caricaturists: lifelong monomaniacal devotion to a particular pursuit manifests itself as a deformation of the human being’s outward appearance, producing a grotesque and yet endearing original. THE LEIBL CIRCLE 19 th Century

64 65 The so-called Leibl circle around the painter Wilhelm Leibl (1844 – 1900) was a loose association of artists, most of whom became friends during their time at the Munich Academy in the mid-1860s. Among its members were Wilhelm Trübner, Carl Schuch, , Ludwig Eibl, Albert Lang, Theodor Alt, Fritz Schider, Rudolf Hirth du Frênes, and, briefly, Hans Thoma and Karl Haider. With the exceptions of Wilhelm Trübner and Hans Thoma, who eventually chose a very different path, these artists did not aspire to academic offices and never reached positions of privilege in society. After 1873, Leibl withdrew from the Munich art world to the countryside; with the painter Johann Sperl, he lived in Berbling and Bad Aibling, both in Upper Bavaria. Wilhelm Leibl Others, like Carl Schuch, spent much of their time away from Munich, in Italy, Veterinarian Reindl in the Arbor ca. 1890 for example. The painters of the Leibl circle emphasized the “purely painterly” register, dismissing concern with content as “literary.” Another target of their opposition was the technical virtuosity prized in the Munich art world. Cool atmospheres prevail in the pictures of the Leibl circle, although dark hues often set the tone; the textures, which suggest woven fabric, result from the artists’ use of broad brushes. To keep painting “honest,” they worked “alla prima,” applying the paint in several layers, as was conventional, but wet-on- wet, which made fixing mistakes by painting over them impossible. The collaboration between the circle’s painters was closest in the early 1870, when various groups also shared studios. Then its members struck out on their own. Schuch, for instance, evolved a very distinctive style in later years that was based on an exceptionally pastose application of paint. Trübner, meanwhile, more than once turned to , a genre the circle had roundly rejected, after 1876. Leibl’s work took on aspects of Impressionism in the

Carl Schuch, 1890s, a development his Veterinarian Reindl in the Arbor illustrates with par- Still Life with Leeks ca. 1886/88 ticular clarity. ACADEMIC PAINTING IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 19 th Century

66 67

In 1854, the Glaspalast or Glass Palace, an opulent exhibition hall, opened its doors, and Munich increasingly attracted artists not just from Bavaria, but from all over Germany and neighboring countries. The city beckoned with an efficient art market and a renowned academy where artists such as Carl Theodor von Piloty, Wilhelm Diez, and Franz von Stuck taught. Most notable Gabriel von Max German artists of the second half of the nineteenth century either trained in The Vivisector 1883 Munich or lived here for extended periods of time. This group includes the On permanent loan from the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung so-called princes of painters, Franz von Lenbach and Friedrich August von Kaulbach, but also artists like Wilhelm Leibl, Wilhelm Trübner, and Hans Thoma as well as the members of the Munich Secession, among them Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt, and Fritz von Uhde. In 1874, Carl Theodor von Piloty succeeded as the director of the Munich Academy and became a highly influential figure. In keeping with the bourgeois roots of the Lenbachhaus’s collection, the art of Kaulbach had represented a classicist school that emphasized the importance Munich’s academic painters is exemplified in the museum’s holdings not by of delineation; Piloty, meanwhile, had spent time in and France in representative paintings in large formats but primarily by smaller genre and 1852 and studied the modern tendencies of a painterly variant of history history paintings, portraits, and free studies. A particular focus in this division painting that integrated elements of genre painting as well. Famous for large- of the collection is the work of Gabriel von Max, an exceptional figure on the format history paintings with pathos-laden theatrical scenes, he paved the way Munich scene. In 1883, when he had been professor of history painting for five for the prevailing styles of German art in the prosperous final decades of the years, he relinquished the position — an unprecedented step — because he century. Lenbach, Franz von Defregger, Hans Makart, Wilhelm von Diez, wanted to devote his energies to his own painting rather than his students. Eduard von Grützner, Gabriel von Max, and many others were Piloty’s Moreover, his research interests in the fields of spiritualism and Darwinism students. took up a steadily growing part of his time. CORINTH aND SLEVOGT 19 th Century

68 69

Lovis Corinth Self Portrait with Skeleton 1896

Max Slevogt Danae 1895 Self Portrait with Skeleton, created in 1896, shows the artist at the age of thirty-eight. The picture is the first in a series of self portraits Corinth would A native of East Prussia, Lovis Corinth (1858 – 1925) studied at the Munich usually paint on July 21, his birthday, a habit he maintained without interruption Academy from 1876 to 1880; after honing his skills in Antwerp, Paris, Berlin, from 1900 to his death. Corinth does not present himself in the act of painting, and Königsberg, he returned to the Bavarian capital. In 1892, he was a instead turning to face the beholder with a stern and morose gaze, his body a founding member of the Munich Secession. He moved to Berlin in 1900 and massive physical presence. A skeleton hanging behind his back seems to look became president of the local Secession. In 1903, he married his student, the over his shoulder. A standard piece of furniture in nineteenth-century artists’ painter Charlotte Berend. After 1918, he spent as much time as possible in studios, it is here also an allusion to the traditional memento mori. Urfeld on Lake Walchen in Upper Bavaria. Max Slevogt (1868 – 1932), the second great German Naturalist and Corinth was one of the most versatile German painters around the turn Impressionist after Corinth, lived in Munich for most of the time between of the century. The evolution of his art begins with a richly figured and almost 1885 and 1897 before settling in Neukastel, Rhenish Palatinate. His Danae crude Naturalism and passes through an Impressionist phase to mature into a was removed from the exhibition of the Munich Secession in 1899 because the form of in which mythological themes recede as the portrait, organizers feared that the realist depiction of a non-classical female body in a the landscape, and the still life gradually become the dominant genres. scene from classical mythology might cause a scandal. THE MUNICH SECESSION 19 th Century

70 71

When Wassily Kandinsky, coming from Moscow, arrived in Munich in 1896, Franz von Lenbach was the preeminent figure on the city’s arts scene; as the president of the Münchner Künstlergenossenschaft (Munich Artists’ Asso- ciation) and in other functions, he exerted a commanding influence until his death in 1904. The opposition to Lenbach’s predominance found expression in the establishment of the Munich Secession, which was founded in 1892 in direct response to the exhibition policies of the Künstlergenossenschaft. It was the first time that young artists in the German-speaking world made their dissociation from the larger mainstream arts scene official. The purpose of the new society was to promote an exhibition practice that would give equal consideration to art produced in Munich and the works of foreign artists solely on the basis of uniform criteria of artistic quality. The Secessionists sought to counteract the growing provincialism of the huge exhibitions held at the Lovis Corinth The Pianist Conrad Ansorge 1903 Glaspalast, but they did not champion a specific program of their own. Still, despite their explicit stylistic pluralism, they were united by their desire to On permanent loan from the Munich Secession overcome the prevailing historicism and develop a new artistic language; their art gradually coalesced around a flat and bright style. The Secession was thus instrumental to paving the way for modernism in the visual arts. The Secession set up its own gallery in 1906, endowing it with a collection intended to illustrate the history of the society and its contribution to the arts in selected works. The paintings and sculptures of the Munich Secession’s collection have been on permanent loan to the Lenbachhaus since 1976. FRANZ VON STUCK AND THE MUNICH ‘JUGENDSTIL’ 19 th Century

72 73 In the late nineteenth century, Munich became an early center of the international style generally known in the English-speaking world as Art Nouveau. Jugendstil, the German name of this innovative movement of artistic renewal, which soon breathed fresh life into all domains of visual life, derives from the magazine Jugend (Youth), which was founded in Munich in 1896. Eminent painters, artisans, and architects such as Thomas Theodor Heine, Leo Putz, Carl Strathmann, August Endell, Hermann Obrist, and Richard Riemerschmid contributed to Jugend. Their doyen was Franz von Stuck, who was an influential teacher at the Munich Academy for more than two decades; Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were briefly among his students as well. Franz von Stuck (1863 – 1928) emulated the model of Lenbach, his senior by a generation, but under more modern auspices. He created symbolist paintings, often based on motifs from mythology, that captured the spirit of the fin de siècle and showed affinities with the work of the Secessionists; he also socialized with dancers and actors and painted their portraits. The shift from historicism to a revival of and the Jugendstil is evident in the magnificent residence and studio he build himself; synthesizing the arts, the ensemble defined the image of the fashionable prince of painters in turn-of- Franz von Stuck Salome 1906 the-century Munich. His painting Salome shows a femme fatale striking fear into the hearts of men. It is influenced by performances of contemporary Purchased with funds of the Bayerische Vereinsbank on dancers who shocked the public morals of the time with scanty dresses and occasion of its 100th anniversary explicit eroticism; they were inspired in turn by the 1904 Munich premiere of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. In 1896, the same year that the journal Jugend that gave Jugendstil its name was founded, the painter, graphic artist, and writer Thomas Theodor Heine and the publisher Albert Langen launched the political satire weekly Simplicissimus. Heine’s extensive estate has been at the Lenbachhaus since the 1950s. T HE RIDER 74 75 L UE B

Richard Riemerschmid Cloud Ghosts I 1897

Carl Strathmann The Tree in Paradise with Snake um 1900 INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION THE BLUE RIDER The Blue Rider

77

The Lenbachhaus has the world’s largest collection of art of the Blauer Reiter (The Blue Rider), one of the most important groups of avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century. The core of this treasure consists of the generous endowment by the painter Gabriele Münter, who was Wassily Kandinsky’s companion until 1914. On occasion of her eightieth birthday in 1957, she bequeathed more than a thousand works by Blue Rider artists to the Lenbachhaus, among them ninety oil paintings by Kandinsky as well as around 330 watercolors and drawings, his sketchbooks, reverse glass paintings, and his printed oeuvre. The bequest also included more than twenty-five paintings and numerous works on paper by Münter herself and works by other eminent artists such as Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee, Alexej Jawlensky, and Marianne von Werefkin. This extraordinary donation made the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus a world-class museum. In 1965, the singular ensemble of the Gabriele Münter Foundation was augmented by a second important endowment. Inspired by Münter’s example, the heirs of Bernhard Koehler donated chief works by Franz Marc and August Macke. Bernhard Koehler Sr., a wealthy Berlin-based industrialist, had been the uncle of Macke’s wife; he had not only bought numerous works produced by the artists of the circle starting in 1910, but also lent financial support to its exhibitions and the publication of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter. Four years after Gabriele Münter’s death, in 1966, the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, which holds considerable archival materials concerning the art of the Blue Rider and supports the Lenbachhaus’s collection by sponsoring acquisitions and giving permanent loans, became operative. In 1971, the Lenbachhaus also acquired the Kubin archive of the Hamburg-based The Blue Rider collector Kurt Otte, which includes works by as well as the artist’s extensive correspondence with avant-garde writers and artists. With the artists’ association Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden and 78 Berlin, the Blue Rider circle in Munich is part of the most important movement 79 for renewal in twentieth-century German art. In contrast with the figurative Expressionism of the Brücke artists, the Blue Rider group, starting in 1908, developed a distinctive radiantly colorful, expressive, and partly abstract formal vocabulary; unified by the artists’ shared belief in a “spiritual” dimension of art, it accommodated diverse forms of expression. Founded in 1911, the Blue Rider was accordingly a cooperative undertaking founded on the principle of diversity and sustained by the artist’s unique personalities. In this openness lay its , which is as compelling and contemporary now as it was then.

First exhibition of the Blue Rider, 1911/12, Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser, Munich, room 2, left to right: Gabriele Münter, Still Life (left); August Macke, Indians on Horseback (top); Robert Delaunay, Saint-Séverin No. 1 (bottom); David Burljuk, Horses (above the door); Franz Marc, Landscape with Horses and Rainbow (top); Wassily Kandinsky, With Sun and Improvisation 22 (right). Photograph: Gabriele Münter, Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation The Blue Rider

80 81

Members of the Blue Rider group on the balcony of Kandinsky’s apartment at Ainmillerstraße 36, Munich, 1911/12. Left to right: Maria Marc, Franz Marc, Bernhard Koehler Sr., Wassily Kandinsky (seated), , Thomas von Hartmann. Photograph: Gabriele Münter, Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation WASSILY KANDINSKY, GABRIELE MÜNTER, ALEXEJ JAWLENSKY— EARLY

PAINTINGS The Blue Rider

82 83

Wassily Kandinsky read law and economics before moving to Munich in 1896, when he was thirty years old, to study painting. He began with a four-year course of training at Anton Ažbe’s private painting school. In 1900, he became Franz von Stuck’s student at the Academy for one year; in 1901, he joined other progressively minded members of the Schwabing scene to found the artists’ association Phalanx, which held exhibitions and operated an art school. In early 1902, Gabriele Münter enrolled in his class. The two became a couple one year later; in 1904, out of consideration for Anya Shemiakina, to whom Kandinsky was still married, the two adopted an itinerant lifestyle that took them to Holland, Tunis, Dresden, and Rapallo, among other places; in 1906 – 7, they spent a year in Paris. During those years, Münter and Kandinsky primarily created small-format nature studies in a post-Impressionist style, using the palette knife and working en plein air. Kandinsky also produced an entirely separate second oeuvre of works featuring nostalgic Old Russian motifs, Wassily Kandinsky Kallmünz – Gabriele Münter Painting II 1903 mosaic-like colorful pictures into which he also integrated aspects of Sym- bolism and Jugendstil, among other influences. In 1908, Kandinsky and Münter returned to Munich and resolved to stay. Alexej Jawlensky had met the painter Marianne von Werefkin at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, and she became his companion of many years. In 1896, the couple moved to Munich, where they were introduced to Kandinsky. They rented two spacious adjoining apartments on Schwabing’s Giselastraße that quickly became known as the “Salon of the Giselists,” where many progressively minded artists and visiting Russian colleagues gathered. Between 1903 and 1907, they went on several extended trips to France, where they were profoundly impressed by the paintings of , , and . The Blue Rider

84 85

Wassily Kandinsky Colorful Life 1907

On permanent loan from BayernLB MURNAU AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE BLUE RIDER The Blue Rider

86 87

In the summer of 1908, Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter as well as Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin left Munich for the countryside at Murnau, where the two artists’ couples developed a novel expressive style of painting. The event marks the beginning of the art history of the Blue Rider. Murnau’s picturesque situation on a hill above a moor beyond which the Alps abruptly rise as a towering range, the intense light, and the colorfully painted houses of the village enthralled the artists. Inspired also by the most recent French painting — the works of Henri Matisse and the Fauves — the four friends experienced a sudden boost of creative energy. They captured views of the village and the surrounding countryside, painting spontaneously and as though intoxicated by the explosion of color before their eyes. The Alexej Jawlensky resulting pictures are distinguished by patches of unmixed luminous color set Landscape near Murnau 1909 down flatly and side by side, compositions organized by two-dimensional structures, and a simplification of forms that verges on abstraction from the natural object being depicted. The artists returned to Murnau to work in 1909. They now also discovered the local popular reverse glass painting and religious folk art. Especially the works on glass with their glowing colors, simple black contours, and the “primitive” quality of the depiction proved an important source of inspiration. Kandinsky and Münter began collecting such objects and furnishing their home in Murnau with them. During the next several years, the so-called Russians’ House would become an epicenter of innovation in art. The Blue Rider

88 89

Wassily Kandinsky Wassily Kandinsky Railroad at Murnau 1909 Murnau – Grüngasse 1909 The Blue Rider

90 91

Gabriele Münter Jawlensky and Werefkin 1909 The Blue Rider

92 93

Gabriele Münter View of the Moor at Murnau 1908

Wassily Kandinsky Murnau – Castle and Church 1910 THE ‘NEUE KÜNSTLERVEREINIGUNG MÜNCHEN’ AND THE BREAKAWAY OF THE BLUE RIDER The Blue Rider

94 95

After the fruitful summer Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky, and Werefkin spent painting in Murnau in 1908, the discussions about art among the circle of progressively minded artist friends who met regularly in Jawlensky and Werefkin’s salon in Schwabing grew more heated. In January 1909, they decided to found an association they called the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (short NKVM, New Artists‘ Association Munich). Besides Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Münter, and Werefkin, its founding members included Adolf Erbslöh, , and Alfred Kubin as well as Paul Baum, Wladimir Bechtejeff, Erma Bossi, Mossej Kogan, and the dancer Alexander Sacharoff. Until 1911, the NKVM held annual exhibitions at Galerie Thannhauser, Munich, although the reviews in the press were scathing. On occasion of the Erma Bossi group’s second show, in 1910, Franz Marc publicly took their side, which led to Circus 1909 his personal acquaintance with them, and he became a member of the club as Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation well. Kandinsky and Marc soon formed closer ties and increasingly found themselves at odds with the group’s moderate members. In 1911, they made plans to publish an art almanac that would bear the title Der Blaue Reiter, or The Blue Rider. The tensions within the NKVM proved irreconcilable in December 1911, when the jury of the group’s third exhibition rejected an almost completely abstract painting by Kandinsky. He, Marc, and Münter resigned from the NKVM and quickly organized their own show, remembered today as the legendary first exhibition of the ‘Blauer Reiter.’ The new society now united the artistic energies of this important innovative movement within German Expressionism; the remaining NKVM, meanwhile, dissolved within a year. THE ‘BLAUER REITER’— ALMANAC AND EXHIBITIONS The Blue Rider

96 97

After resigning from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, Kandinsky, Marc, and Münter presented the first exhibition of the Blue Rider at Galerie Thannhauser, Munich, in December 1911. The show featured around fifty works by the organizers and likeminded artist friends: by Albert Bloch, David and Wladimir Burljuk, Heinrich Campendonk, Robert Delaunay, , Eugen von Kahler, Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Jean Bloé Niestlé, , and Arnold Schönberg. The extensive second Blue Rider exhibition was on display at Hans Goltz’s gallery from February to April 1912; it consisted solely of works on paper and included contributions by Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin as well. After lengthy planning, the almanac Der Blaue Reiter came out in May 1912. In numerous plates, the book presented works of art from different eras and genres — Old Masters, avant-garde works, and “primitive,” including non-European, art — side by side. With this selection, it vividly illustrated an anti-academic, open- minded, international, and tolerant vision. Painters, composers, and critics from different nations wrote contributions in which they articulated the goals of this new art. Kandinsky’s and Marc’s statements, in particular, express their shared belief in the “spiritual in art,” and it is this distinctly philosophical element that sets the Blue Rider apart from other movements within Expressionism. These were the primary activities of the group, which may be more properly described as a loose circle of artists with a pluralistic profile. Wassily Kandinsky Jawlensky and Werefkin, who had not initially joined the breakaway faction Final draft for the jacket cover of the almanac ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ 1911 leaving the NKVM, contributed works to the subsequent touring exhibitions of the Blue Rider starting in 1912; the Berlin-based gallery operator took a leading role in organizing these shows, which introduced audiences throughout Central Europe and Scandinavia to the Blue Rider. WASSILY KANDINSKY The Blue Rider

98 99

Wassily Kandinsky Impression III (Concert) 1911 The Blue Rider

100 101

In the final years before the World War I, Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) evolved an expressive abstract style in painting that would become his epoch- making contribution to twentieth-century art. From 1909 on, he divided his larger pictures into three categories he called Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions. Impressions was his term for “direct sensations received from ‘outward Wassily Kandinsky Romantic Landscape 1911 nature’”; in 1911, Kandinsky painted a total of six Impressions, which appear largely nonrepresentational even though they were inspired by impressions of nature outside of him. In fact, the Impressions may render not just visual, but also acoustic sensations: Impression III (Concert) is one of the earliest and most striking examples of modern art’s endeavor to fuse color and sound in a synaesthetic experience. In the Improvisations, which frame sensations received from “inward nature,” the artist visualizes inner visions, ideations, and imaginations. With these works, Kandinsky genuinely expanded the boundaries of visual art and broke new ground with regard to what it could represent. Between 1909 and 1914, he created more than thirty-five Improvisations, most of which similarly bear associative subtitles and offer an especially clear illustration of his personal path to abstraction: to Kandinsky’s mind, abstraction meant a sustained effort to conceal and encode representational content while in order to convey spiritual ideas in physical form by unfolding their “inner harmony.”

Wassily Kandinsky The Compositions — over a lifetime, he created no more than ten of St. George III 1911 these pictures, seven of them between 1909 and 1913 — were what he thought of as the supreme category of painting, fusing rational conception, imagination, and intuition. In formal terms, we may observe in all his pictures the conclusive liberation of color from the depiction of objects and its unrestrained sweeping The Blue Rider

102 103

Wassily Kandinsky Red Spot 1921

Purchased with funds from Hypo-Bank AG

Wassily Kandinsky Improvisation 19 1911

bloom in an anti-perspectival space, while the line gains independence as a accepted a position Walter Gropius offered him at the and returned symbolic vestige of the representational register. Kandinsky’s Compositions VI to Germany with his second wife, Nina Andreyevskaya. In , Paul Klee and VII are devoted to the themes of the Flood and the Last Judgment; they was among his colleagues, and after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, the must be seen in the context of the atmosphere of fervent eschatological two became neighbors. When the Nazis closed the school in 1933, Kandinsky expectation on the eve of World War I. emigrated to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1944, creating a late After the outbreak of the war, in late 1914, Kandinsky separated from oeuvre in which he translated the constructive solidity of the formal vocabulary Gabriele Münter, leaving her in , and returned to his native Russia. of his art from the Bauhaus years into a universe of organic microstructures in In Moscow, he was active in several revolutionary artists’ councils; in 1921, he luminous colors such as pink, turquoise, silver, and gold. FRANZ MARC The Blue Rider

104 105

Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) was the only native son of Munich in the Blue Rider circle. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts until 1903, he left the city for several years to work in seclusion in southern Bavaria, living first at Staffelalm near Kochel and then, from 1909 on, in Sindelsdorf. The focus on his favorite motif, the depiction of animals, appears early on in his oeuvre. Two trips to Paris acquainted him with recent tendencies in French art. In 1910, he met August Macke, who taught him the significance of pure color; this encounter and, more importantly, the one with Wassily Kandinsky in 1911 helped him find his personal style. Marc became Kandinsky’s closest artistic associate and a founding member of the Blue Rider group. His Expressionist mature work, too, is almost entirely devoted to the depiction of animals, which he imbued with great symbolic charisma. In his quest for introspection and spiritual catharsis through art, he found in the creatures he painted an inviolate purity. In the few years between 1911 and 1914, Franz Marc created an eminent oeuvre whose formal range was enriched by the encounter with Robert Delaunay, whom he visited in Paris with August Macke in 1912; he drew inspiration from Delaunay’s colorful Orphic as well as the rhythmical fragmentations of the Italian Futurists. In 1914, he also produced several abstract compositions, although these works never deny their roots in the organic world. When the Great War broke out in 1914, Marc was drafted and sent to the French front; he was killed near Verdun in 1916.

“I try to heighten my sensitivity to the organic rhythm inherent in all Franz Marc Blue Horse I 1911 things, try to hone a pantheistic empathetic sense for the quivering and trickling blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air […] I see no more felicitous means to ‘animalize’ art than the depiction of beasts. That is why I resort to the genre.” Franz Marc, 1910 The Blue Rider

106 107

Franz Marc Birds 1914

Joint property of the Federal Republic of Germany

Franz Marc Tiger 1912

Franz Marc Deer in the Woods II 1912 GABRIELE MÜNTER The Blue Rider

108 109

Gabriele Münter (1877 – 1962) had started capturing the people around her in portrait sketches at the young age of fourteen. After a brief course of studies at a drawing school in Düsseldorf, she lived in the United States from 1898 to 1900, where relatives frequently sat for her. With her documentary approach, she was interested in photography as well, so Münter more and more often also wielded the camera. In the spring of 1901, she came to Munich to study art, and in 1902, she enrolled in Wassily Kandinsky’s newly established Phalanx art school; in 1903, the two became romantic as well as artistic partners. Because Kandinsky was still married, the couple traveled for several years; they spent almost an entire year in Paris and did not definitively return to Munich until 1908. Almost right away, they discovered Murnau, which would prove their favorite place to paint. In 1909, Gabriele Münter bought a home in Murnau. The time they spent there together was among the most fertile periods of her oeuvre. By 1914, Münter’s particular strengths as an artist — her ability to simplify and her talent for accurate and striking delineation — were in full bloom. Reduction of form and clear color contrasts are also the hallmarks of the portraits of her artist friends, with which she became a sort of chronicler of the Blue Rider group. The mysterious still lifes she created around 1911 feature the products of religious artisan craftwork and reverse glass paintings she and Kandinsky collected. After the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky returned to Russia; she met him one last time in Stockholm in the winter of Gabriele Münter 1915 – 16. After spending several years in Scandinavia and then moving Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin 1909 between places in Germany, Münter returned to her home in Murnau in 1930 with her second life partner, Johannes Eichner; she would live and work there until her death in 1962. The Blue Rider

110 111

Gabriele Münter Still Life with St. George 1911

Gabriele Münter Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table 1912 GABRIELE MÜNTER AND JOHANNES EICHNER FOUNDATION The Blue Rider

112 113

The Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation became operative in top 1966, four years after Gabriele Münter’s death. Gabriele Münter and Johannes Alexej Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Eichner (1886 – 1958), the artist’s life partner, established the foundation in Andreas Jawlensky, their wills. Münter had met Eichner, an art historian and philosopher, in Berlin and Gabriele Münter on a village street in 1927. He recognized the painter’s talent and studied and wrote about her art in Murnau, ca. 1909 as well as Kandinsky’s. The Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation Photograph: Wassily preserves and manages the artist’s large estate, which comprises not only works Kandinsky. Gabriele Münter of art and documents but also her home in Murnau. and Johannes Eichner Johannes Eichner and Hans Konrad Roethel, who would later become Foundation director of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, met in 1952 and became close friends. In 1956, Roethel was first permitted to see the complete collection of Kandinsky’s and Münter’s pictures, which the artist had stored in the basement of her house in Murnau to protect them from the Nazis. One bottom year later, in 1957, Münter, on occasion of her eightieth birthday, most Gabriele Münter at the age of eighty, Murnau, generously donated significant parts of this collection to the Städtische Galerie 1957 im Lenbachhaus in Munich. Photograph: Gabriele The Foundation supports research projects designed to promote a von Arnim. Gabriele Münter and deeper understanding of Münter’s and Kandinsky’s art; the results are presen- Johannes Eichner ted in publications and exhibitions. Its seat is at the Lenbachhaus, and so the Foundation two institutions have collaborated closely and fruitfully on many scholarly projects and exhibitions. The Foundation has also given works of art from its collection to the Lenbachhaus on permanent loan. One important goal of the Foundation’s scholarship program is to prepare a catalogue raisonné of Gabriele Münter’s pictures that will document The Blue Rider all oil paintings created by the artist with information about their provenance, exhibition history, and the relevant literature.

114 115 Münter’s house

In accordance with Münter’s wishes, her house has been made accessible to the public in its entirety as a memorial dedicated to her and Kandinsky’s art. After renovations in 1998 – 99, it now appears exactly as it did between 1909 and 1914. Richly appointed and decorated with paintings, works of graphic art, and reverse glass paintings by Kandinsky and Münter and popular art from their collection as well as the artists’ own hand-painted furniture, the house vividly conveys the atmosphere that prevailed here before World War I.

Münter’s house in Murnau 2010 ALEXEJ JAWLENSKY The Blue Rider

116 117

After six years of training at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Alexej Jawlensky (1864 – 1941), then thirty-three years old, moved to Munich with his companion Marianne von Werefkin in 1896. The two became acquainted with several artists from the circle around the future Blue Rider. Until 1907, Jawlensky also familiarized himself with the art of the French avant-garde, traveling from Munich to France on several occasion. Influenced by van Gogh, Gauguin, and Matisse, he developed a personal style that became the foundation for his subsequent oeuvre. During the time he spent in Murnau with Kandinsky, Münter, and Werefkin starting in 1908, he in turn profoundly influenced the expressive style of these artists. Aspects of color and formal composition are central to Jawlensky’s art; iconographical and narrative reference, by contrast, plays only a marginal role. Very early on, he focused on three genres — the portraits, the still life, and the landscape — and eschewed the anecdotal register. His foremost goal was to reduce the picture to its essence; describing this simplified visual language, he spoke of a “synthesis” of the impression of nature and his inner vision. Between 1911 and 1913, he devoted his time to a group of expressive heads, which Alexej Jawlensky Portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sacharoff 1909 anticipated the principle of the series that would later generally guide his practice. When the war broke out, Jawlensky left Germany, at first for Saint- Prex on Lake ; in 1918, he moved to Ascona, where the serial and increasingly abstract landscapes of Saint-Prex gave way to two groups of works known as the Mystical Heads and the Faces of Saints. In 1921, Jawlensky ended the relationship with Werefkin, married the mother of his son, Helene Nesnakomoff, and moved to Wiesbaden. Until his death, he mostly devoted himself to depictions of the human countenance that ultimately evolved into the Meditations, spiritualized likenesses that, with their rigorously abstracted formal vocabulary, might almost be icons. MARIANNE VON WEREFKIN The Blue Rider

Marianne von Werefkin (1860 – 1938) was a native of Russia, where, in 1886, 118 she became a student of the famous realist and protagonist of the group known 119 as the Wanderers, Ilya Repin. At an early age, she attracted a great deal of attention with her portraits, painted in an intensely atmospheric Naturalist style. She started working with Alexej Jawlensky in 1891, and in 1896, the two moved to Munich, where Werefkin gave up painting for almost ten years in order to devote herself to nurturing Jawlensky’s talents, although she also put much energy into studies on painterly technique and discussions of art theory. It was only toward the end of the almost yearlong grand tour of France she undertook with Jawlensky, in 1907, that Werefkin returned to painting. Her work now presented an idiosyncratic synthesis of the influence of with inspirations she drew from , the Nabis, and . The summer she spent working with Jawlensky and their friends in Murnau in 1908 and the productive collaboration in the Neue Künstler- vereinigung München gave rise to an oeuvre whose great theme is the precariousness of human existence at the mercy of invisible forces in nature as well as the nature within us. Almost all her pictures show figures, sometimes in additive arrangement; Werefkin was the only artist in the orbit of the Blue Rider whose work made direct reference to the world of human labor and factory work. In her compositions, landscapes likewise become frameworks full of tension, stages on which human fate plays out. After the Great War began, Werefkin and Jawlensky moved to Switzerland; their relationship finally ended in 1921, when they were in Ascona. Living in very difficult material circumstances, but sheltered by the Monte Verità artists’ colony, Werefkin worked there until her death in 1938.

Marianne von Werefkin “One life is far too little for all the things I feel within myself, and I Self Portrait I ca. 1910 invent other lives within and outside myself for them. A whirling crowd of invented beings surrounds me and prevents me from seeing reality. Color bites at my heart.” Marianne von Werefkin AUGUST MACKE The Blue Rider

120 121

After studying at the Düsseldorf Academy, August Macke (1887 – 1914) first traveled to Paris in 1907, where the encounter with Impressionism encouraged him to follow his penchant for sensual and brightly colorful renditions of reality. In 1909, at the young age of twenty-two, he married Elisabeth Gerhardt, the niece of the wealthy Berlin industrialist Bernhard Koehler; the couple initially lived on Lake Tegern for a year. In 1910, he met Franz Marc in Munich, and the two became close friends. Macke returned to Bonn in 1911, but thanks to his ties with Marc, he was a member of the inner circle of the Blue Rider, contributing to the almanac and participating in all exhibitions held by the group, even though he took a fairly critical view of the mystical and “spiritual” aspects of Kandinsky’s and Marc’s art: to his mind, painting was a creative transformation of nature, which he remade afresh in the picture out of units of luminous color. The thematic spectrum of his paintings always remained linked to his objects: portraits, still lifes, but also motifs of contemporary urban life such as people promenading at the zoo or window- shopping. In 1913, Macke moved to the shore of Lake Thun, Switzerland, for eight months. In April 1914, he, Paul Klee, and Louis Moilliet undertook their legendary trip to Tunis, from which he returned with a large number of

August Macke watercolors. After the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted for military Turkish Café 1914 service; he was killed on the French front only weeks later. The Blue Rider

122 123

August Macke Promenade 1913

August Macke Milliner‘s Shop 1913

August Macke Zoological Garden I 1912 KUBIN ARCHIVE The Blue Rider

124 125

Alfred Kubin (1877 – 1959), a native of Bohemia, had already completed a three-year training program in photography and an aborted stint in military service when he moved to Munich to study art in 1898. He was briefly enrolled at the Academy; ’s cycle of etchings Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove inspired visions of black-and-white images in him from which he derived the peculiar expressive vocabulary of his nightmarish-fantastic early work. His art quickly attracted the attention of writers in Schwabing’s Bohemian circles like Max Dauthendey and Otto Julius Biermann; the Hans von Weber portfolio with phototypes of his provocative pen-and-ink drawings, published in 1903, brought him wider renown. In 1904, Wassily Kandinsky invited him to contribute to the ninth exhibition of the artists’ association Phalanx. In 1906, Kubin left the city for the seclusion of Zwickledt, a tiny village in Upper Austria, where, until 1908, his art went through a phase of fundamental reorientation; his novel Die andere Seite (The Other Side) came out in 1909 with illustrations by the author. That same year, he joined the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, although he remained at Zwickledt, and took part in the group’s first two exhibitions. In December 1911, he became a member of the newly founded Blue Rider group and contributed to its second exhibition. In the second half of his life, Kubin created an extensive oeuvre as a book illustrator and designer of numerous portfolios, among other genres. The Lenbachhaus acquired the Kubin archive built by the Hamburg- based collector Dr. Kurt Otte in 1971. In addition to many works by Alfred Alfred Kubin Kubin, the archive comprises his considerable correspondence with writers The Male Sphinxum and artists of the avant-garde. ca. 1903 PAUL KLEE The Blue Rider

126 127

Paul Klee (1879 – 1940), the son of a German father and a Swiss mother — both parents were musicians — grew up in Berne and came to Munich in 1898 to study art. In 1900, he briefly attended Franz von Stuck’s class at the Academy. After traveling to Italy and France and spending several years back in Berne, he finally settled in Munich in 1906, where he initially limited himself to graphic art in various techniques; the intellectual sensibility of his early work adumbrates the distinctive qualities of his later oeuvre. In the fall of 1911, he was introduced to Kandinsky, his neighbor in Schwabing, who immediately recognized his talent. Klee then participated in the second exhibition of the Blue Rider in the spring of 1912. That same year, he went to Paris to visit Robert Delaunay, whose most recent Window paintings impressed him profoundly with their colorful abstraction. The breakthrough experience that led him to work in color, however, came with the trip to Tunis Klee undertook with Macke and Moilliet in April 1914. After World War I, Klee — like Kandinsky — taught at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar, later in Dessau. During his Bauhaus years, he mastered what he described as the pursuit of his art: to reveal the mysterious intermediate realm Paul Klee Rose Garden 1920 44 between real appearances and the essence of things. With subtle pictorial architectures blending organic and inorganic elements, with rhythmic Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, purchased in 1980 with support structures into which he integrated emblematic signs, he created new visual from Münchener RückversicherungsAG and Allianz-Versicherungs- worlds. After a brief tenure as a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy, Klee gesellschaft was ousted by the Nazis and banned from teaching in 1933. He left Germany and returned to Switzerland. As his life was increasingly overshadowed by illness, he produced a considerable late oeuvre in which angels, often shown in mere sketches consisting of no more than a few lines, became a central theme. NEW T IVI T Y 128 129 BJEC O

Paul Klee Föhn Wind in Franz Marc´s Garden 1915 102 INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION NEW OBJECTIVITY New Objectivity

131

The dominant movement in the Lenbachhaus’s collection of art from the period after World War I is the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity, which is paradigmatic of the art and art politics of the 1920s and 1930s. The era’s abrupt changes and unresolved conflicts are illustrated by exemplary works such as ’s Portrait of (1918), ’s Portrait of (ca. 1926), ’s Surgery (1929), Josef Scharl’s Fallen Soldier (1932), and Franz Radziwill’s The U-Boat War/ Total War /Lost Ground (ca. 1938/39 – 60). Unlike names such as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) or Die Brücke (The Bridge), the label New Objectivity was not chosen by a group of artists to express their shared artistic undertaking; it instead describes a characteristic quality art historians and critics recognized in contemporary painting. The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Mannheimer Kunsthalle, and publicized in the title of an exhibition he held there in 1925. It was meant to designate the common denominator of various programmatic tendencies in German art after the Great War. The artists of the New Objectivity were united in their effort to return to a sober and realistic ren- dition of reality; for most of them, that implied taking a critical view of the Expressionism of the prewar years. Schlichter’s portrait of his friend Bertolt Brecht shows an icon of the 1920s. The angular shapes and cool colors lend the model an air of standoffishness and restrained energy. The poet, a lover of cigars and fast cars — automobile parts appear in the backdrop — is presented as a technology enthusiast, a mo- dern man. New Objectivity

Social critique and idyll 132 133 The representatives of the New Objectivity in the Lenbachhaus’s collections may be roughly divided into two camps: on the one hand, artists such as Rudolf Schlichter, Christian Schad, Karl Hubbuch, Christoph Voll, and Willi Geiger tend to articulate a critical view of social realities; on the other hand, Munich painters like Georg Schrimpf and Alexander Kanoldt, influenced by the Italian artists in the orbit of the magazine Valori Plastici (Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico), eschew social criticism and often depict distinctively idyllic scenes. Josef Scharl’s Fallen Soldier and Franz Radziwill’s The U-Boat War/Total War/ Lost Earth address the events of World War I with a view to the artists’ own present-day reality. The multi-part title of Radziwill’s picture suggests the vicissitudes of the history of its creation, reflecting the artist’s shifting artistic and political convictions and the troubled relationship between the artists of the New Objectivity and Nazi cultural policies.

Christian Schad Operation 1929 New Objectivity

134 135

Georg Schrimpf Oskar Maria Graf 1918

Purchased with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder in 1991

Rudolf Schlichter Bertolt Brecht um 1926 “The New Objectivity is the general tendency that currently prevails in Germany, a tendency of cynicism and resignation as hopes have been New Objectivity dashed. This cynicism and

136 resignation constitute the 137 negative side of the New Objectivity; its positive side is the enthusiasm for objectivity, the desire to treat things dispassionately, as they are, without trying to find some ideal meaning in them.”

Gustav Hartlaub 1925

Alexander Kanoldt Still Life with Cactus 1923 New Objectivity

138 139

Franz Radziwill The U-Boat War/Total War/Lost Ground ca. 1938 / 39 — 1960

Purchased with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder in 2008 seph B euys 140 141 Jo

Josef Scharl The Fallen Soldier 1932 INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION JOSEPH BEUYS Joseph Beuys

143

In February 1976, Joseph Beuys (1921 – 86) realized the environment zeige deine Wunde (show your wound) at the Kunstforum in Munich. The acquisition of the work for the Lenbachhaus in 1979 occasioned a public debate over the value of contemporary art. The purchase was seen as a provocative act, but also as an effort on the part of the museum to open up a new dimension for its collection. For the first time, the Lenbachhaus bought a significant work of art whose author’s life and work bore no particular relation to Munich. In January 1980, Beuys installed the environment in Franz Lenbach’s former studio wing. He observed that “in this concert of objects, it is not I who speak; the things have their own inner language. Comprehending it is something everyone has to do for himself or herself.” Show your wound hauntingly explores the subject of death. The challenge posed by the title confronts the beholders with their vulnerable spot: the finitude of existence. At the center of the environment stands a pair of stretchers used to transport corpses, which Beuys salvaged from a coroner’s office. Lamps shedding a dim light are mounted above their head ends. Beneath the stretchers are two open tin vats filled with fat, with a thermometer and a test tube containing a blackbird’s skull resting on each; next to the vats stand preserving jars covered with gauze. Two rural tools, implements from the pre-Alpine uplands that originally served to strip the bark from trees, lean against the wall, cushioned by two white panels. Across the room, two double- pronged forks that were used to tamp rail track ballast — the shreds of cloth are remnants of this employment — are set against the wall, resting on small slates scratched with incomplete circles. Two framed copies of the newspaper Joseph Beuys

144 145

Joseph Beuys zeige deine Wunde (show your wound) 1974/ 75 La Lotta Continua, still in their mail wrappers, which are addressed to Beuys, are hung on the wall. The installation is completed by two school blackboards mounted on the short wall of the room bearing the chalk inscription “zeige deine Wunde.” With the odd doubling of every detail, the work accounts for the duality of life and death, individual and society, present and past, actual Joseph Beuys reality and history. In 2012, the Lenbachhaus strengthened its investment in the oeuvre of Joseph Beuys considerably by acquiring the environment vor dem Aufbruch 146 aus Lager I (before departing from camp I), 1970/80) from the collection of 147 Lothar Schirmer. The work examines the process of artistic creation in a portrait of the human being as an active, creative, and artistic being. A school blackboard is once again a central element of the installation, though this time it bears not a peremptory demand along the lines of show your wound but instead a complex diagram in which Beuys, laying out his idea of the expanded concept of art, illustrates the process leading from matter to figure or form. An evolving line, beginning with a squiggle and passing through a loop to conclude with a prism, is annotated with three fundamental elements of the artist’s theory of sculpture: “indefinite,” “movement,” and “form/definite.” Beneath

Joseph Beuys these terms appear the three concepts of “will,” “soul/feeling,” and “thinking.” Schaf (Sheep) 1949 Corresponding materials are set out on the table: a mass of fat on a modeling plate as matter without order and, separated from it, a tetrahedral block of fat Gift of Lothar Schirmer as definite sculptural form. A knife rests between them, its tip pointing, like the needle of a compass, the way from shapelessness to defined shape. The two environments by Joseph Beuys, which have been set up in adjacent rooms at the Lenbachhaus, constitute a new focus in the museum’s collection, enhanced by Lothar Schirmer’s donation of his eminent collection of sculptures by the artist to the Lenbachhaus. This set of seventeen works created between 1949 and 1970 enables the museum to illustrate all stages in Beuys’s oeuvre in the plastic arts with exemplary pieces. Oven and Bathtub, Gramophone and Hare’s Grave, Lavender Filter, Fish and Mouse Hutch represent the range of Beuys’s sculptural invention between 1948 and 1972, before he turned to extensive environments in large formats starting around 1970. “It would seem almost a miracle that the Lenbachhaus is able to present such an outstanding collection of three-dimensional Joseph Beuys art and sculpture by Joseph Beuys for its reopening. We owe this

148 exceptional good fortune 149 to the generosity of the Beuys collector Lothar Schirmer.”

Helmut Friedel 2013

Joseph Beuys Badewanne (Bathtub) 1960

Gift of Lothar Schirmer Joseph Beuys

150 151

Joseph Beuys vor dem Aufbruch aus Lager I (before departing from camp I) 1970/80

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, in joint property with the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, and the Landesstelle nichtstaatlicher Museen in Bayern, and purchased with financial support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Förderverein Lenbachhaus e. V., private donations. The acquisition was made possible by the generosity of Lothar Schirmer T AR 1945

152 153 T ER AF

Joseph Beuys Gelose Object 1968

Gift of Lothar Schirmer INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION ART AFTER 1945 Art After 1945

155

Since the early 1970s, the Lenbachhaus has mounted exhibitions introducing audiences to central tendencies in international contemporary art; , Arnulf Rainer, Cy Twombly, Piero Manzoni, and others have had solo shows at the museum. In its collections, however, this exhibition practice was reflected only in occasional acquisitions of contemporary art, for example, by Öyvind Fahlström, Sigmar Polke, and Arnulf Rainer. Only with the purchase of Joseph Beuys’s environment show your wound (1974 / 75) in 1979 did the Lenbachhaus lay the foundation for an open-minded acquisitions program. An important feature of the collection the Lenbachhaus has built in the intervening decades is the focus on a small number of artists; the museum has closely followed and supported the evolution of their oeuvre and now possesses one of the most extensive and interesting collections of works by Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Isa Genzken, Maria Lassnig, Erwin Wurm, , Angela Bulloch, and others. After 1945, artists consciously pursued abstraction, a central unfinished project of their modernist predecessors, as is evident in the Lenbachhaus’s collection with its emphasis on nonrepresentational and abstract art in groups of works, for instance, by Rupprecht Geiger, Hans Hofmann, Günter Fruhtrunk, situation they found at the Lenbachhaus and the Kunstbau or arranged their Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Sean Scully, Sarah Morris, and Katharina Grosse. own rooms. These artists’ rooms are an important unique feature of the Another focus of the museum’s efforts has been on photography; as early Lenbachhaus’s collection. as the 1970s and 1980s, the Lenbachhaus’s acquisitions emphasized genuinely

artistic engagements with this medium, building on the lively interest Lenbach, Art After 1945 Münter, and Kandinsky had shown in photography. The first purchases in this Art created in Munich field were photographic and video works by Friederike Pezold and Arnulf Rainer’s overpaintings of photographs. The collection as it stands today, Despite the international orientation of its collection, the Lenbachhaus 156 however, ranges widely, from Walker Evans’s classical documentary continually dedicates significant efforts to supporting art created in Munich. 157 photographs to extensions of the medium in the work of Thomas Demand and An important group of people whose work we follow are the teachers as well others and interior design installations by Wolfgang Tillmans. as graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts. The museum’s holdings accordingly also add up to a representative cross-section of the history of the Munich Academy. Starting in the nineteenth century, many of its professors are New media represented in our holdings. In the “Art after 1945” division, this group includes Heinz Butz, Eduardo Paolozzi, Sean Scully, Stephan Huber, Gerhard New media such as the environment and video, performance, and land art were Merz, Olaf Metzel, Günther Förg, and Nicolaus Lang. integral to the Lenbachhaus’s collection-building efforts from the outset. Looking beyond the academy, the museum frequently acquires works by Because the museum started exhibiting video art very early on, it now has a artists of all generations who permanently or temporarily produce art in collection that allows visitors study the medium’s history from the beginnings to Munich or who launched their careers here. Most recently, this includes works the present; exemplary works by Abramovi´c /Ulay, Gerry Schum, and Valie by Michaela Melián, Justin Almquist, Michael Sailstorfer, Franka Kaßner, EXPORT illustrate its pioneering days, while Ulrike Rosenbach, Marcel Johannes Evers, Hedwig Eberle, Bo Christian Larsson, and Emanuel Seitz. Odenbach, Klaus vom Bruch, and Gary Hill represent the art of the 1980s. Since the late 1990s, the Lenbachhaus’s acquisitions program has been Works by David Claerbout and James Coleman exemplify the expansions of supported by the KiCo Foundation, which collects contemporary art and early photography into installation art in the 1990s, and Sarah Morris, Willie Doherty, on sought to build lasting collaborations with public museums. The and Haris Epaminonda created some of the most recent art included in this Förderverein Lenbachhaus e. V., the association of the museum’s friends, has division of the museum’s holdings. likewise helped us acquire eminent additions to the collection. , represented by works from the movement’s beginnings in the twentieth century to the present, is another focus of the collection. In this field, too, the Lenbachhaus decided to concentrate on a small number of exemplary artists: works by Mel Bochner, Roman Opalka, On Kawara, and Hanne Darboven illustrate the classical phase of the movement, while recent works by Liam Gillick, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Ceal Floyer stand for its contemporary expanded forms. Several artists — Joseph Beuys, Rupprecht Geiger, Gerhard Richter, Maurizio Nannucci, Pablo Bronstein, , Gerhard Merz, Dan Flavin, Olafur Eliasson, , Dietmar Tanterl, Wolfgang Tillmans, and James Turrell — have engaged directly with the spatial and architectural HANS HOFMANN Art After 1945

158 159

Hans Hofmann (1880 – 1966) was an influential teacher to generations of students, first in Munich and, after 1932, in the U.S., most importantly in New York and Provincetown. His creative output was informed by European modernism — Hofmann had studied and worked in Paris before World War I — and, from the early 1940s onward, tended toward increasingly abstract compositions. He played a major role in the rise of American Abstract Hans Hofmann The Conjurer 1959 Expressionism even though he was a generation older than most of the movement’s protagonists. His abstract oeuvre revolves around two different painterly conceptions: a free gestural style on the one hand and rectangles edged by rigid linear bounds on the other. In The Conjurer (1959), the canvas itself develops a sculptural reality in its own right. The artist combines the immediate and spontaneous gesture of pouring paint with deliberately placed color fields, making a solitary rigorous rectangle in a grating green hue press in upon the masses of color. The dynamic play of forms and colors gives rise to movements and counter-movements; rhythmical interrelations engender a chromatic substance of vital power. RUPPRECHT GEIGER Art After 1945

160 161

The paintings Rupprecht Geiger (1908 – 2009) produced in the 1950s are characterized by the tension between irregularly shaped abstract geometric forms and the light-dark gradients of the color fields, which recall the artist’s early watercolor landscapes, inviting the beholder to imagine he is looking into the depth of a natural scene. That is true, for instance, of the painting Rotbild (Red Picture), created in 1961. In 1949, Geiger, a founding member of the group ZEN 49, writes: “Form must become even simpler and yet filled with ardent love for color as a physical substance.” He accordingly devotes himself to pure color and heightened Rupprecht Geiger chromatic effects. In the 1950s, he is one of the first artists in Germany to use Red Picture 1961 fluorescent paints. Because such colors are not found in nature, he regards them as abstract. In Geiger’s eyes, the color red is possessed of the greatest power; he says that red is life, energy, potency, authority, love, warmth, strength. GÜNTER FRUHTRUNK Art After 1945

162 163

Günter Fruhtrunk Iterations 1973/ 76

Committed to abstraction, the works of Günter Fruhtrunk (1923 – 82) operate of Kazimir Malevich and the Constructivists, but also of Jean Arp and Fernand with precise geometric forms that compose black, white, and luminously Léger, falls squarely outside the widely established abstract styles in postwar colorful fields. The formal scaffold of his pictures often consists of parallel art. As a conceptual painter, he is an absolute maverick. bands of varying width; the slanted lines seem to burst the rectangular bounds In the 1970s, he was one of the first artists to show their work at the of the painting. The highly contrastive collisions between the shapes and colors Lenbachhaus and contribute to the museum’s fledgling collection of positions the artist chooses may create an effect of spatial depth or dynamic movement; in contemporary art. Fruhtrunk was among Munich’s preeminent painters certain constellations of color and shape moreover heighten the luminosity of from the 1960s to the early 1980s and influenced an entire generation of artists individual colors. Fruhtrunk’s geometric painting, which shows the influence as a teacher at the Academy. ELLSWORTH Sol KELLY LeWitt Art After 1945

164 165

Ellsworth Kelly The Room: Red Panel with Curve 1991 Green Panel with Curve 1992

Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923) assembled the four individual paintings of the Documenta Room (1991/92) for his presentation in a room at documenta IX, Kassel. Each picture has its own complex form: the shapes of the canvases, which avoid right angles and, in some instances, straight edges, are based on circular segments; each panel is evenly painted in a monochrome color. Kelly developed his pictorial language in close engagement with the traditions of modernism. From the outset, he sought to devise not a gestural-expressive but instead a constructive approach to painting that would relate to the space around the work. His colored shapes derive from geometric structures the artist perceives in reality. Through its specific shape and placement, the painted canvas activates the white wall, which serves as its ground, generating a subliminal momentum. By grouping panels in different colors and shapes in Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings #1077 and #1076 2003 one room, Kelly moreover explores interrelations between the color fields that transcend the individual pictures and fill the walls between with dynamic KiCo Collection energy as well. ‘GRUPPE SPUR’

Gruppe SPUR was founded in 1958 by , , Lothar Art After 1945 Fischer, and Hans Peter Zimmer. In exhibitions and actions, they rebelled against the provincialism of the Munich art world. They were supported by the Danish painter , who took notice of the young artists, then students 166 at the Munich Academy, when he first came to Munich around the turn of the 167 year 1957 – 58 and introduced them to the ideas of the Situationist International. Jorn also put them in touch with the avant-garde gallery of Otto van de Loo, who would prove an important sponsor of the group’s art, mounting several shows with works of Gruppe SPUR. Another artist in its orbit was the painter Uwe Lausen, whom Jorn placed with the central council of the Situationist International. The most important demands raised by Gruppe SPUR concerned changes in art and cultural policy; they defied the conservative spirit of the Academy, insisted on the freedom of the arts, and emphasized the individual as Gruppe SPUR The SPUR-Bau (architectural model) 1963 a source of renewal. They championed an experimental approach to painting, rejecting the abstract style known as Informel and instead reinstating figural depiction as the centerpiece of their artistic endeavor. They were experimental most importantly in their choice of painterly means; for example, they integrated materials other than paint into their pictures. The so-called SPUR Structure was a collaborative creation for the 1963 Paris Biennale; the theme was Nouveau Espace. did most of the work building the architecture model; Heimrad Prem devised the artistic concept. The SPUR-Bau is a wildly imaginative project for the development of a visionary architecture. An irrational construction informed by the artists’ organic-sculptural approach, it was not intended to serve any specific purpose. After celebrating several successes in the early 1960s, Gruppe SPUR was Asger Jorn soon superseded by new tendencies. Its spontaneous style of painting energized Modification, Two Penguins 1962 by emotions contrasted sharply with the new Pop Art, which reflected the power of consumerism and advertising. In 1965, the groups SPUR and WIR united to form the new Gruppe Geflecht. From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, these three artists’ associations as well as the Kollektiv Herzogstraße, founded in 1975 by several SPUR artists, played a crucial role in the evolution of art in Munich. SIGMAR POLKE Art After 1945

168 169

Sigmar Polke (1941 – 2010), Gerhard Richter, and Konrad Lueg launched their project of “Capitalist realism,” in contradistinction to “socialist realism,” in Düsseldorf in 1963. They ironically advertised the vision of a “life with Pop.” Polke drew his extensive repertoire of motifs and characters from visuals in advertising and travel brochures as well as kitschy postcards and cinema advertising. In the 1960s, the movement and American Pop art were Sigmar Polke major inspirations. Besides canvases, Polke also used blankets, decorative Hollywood 1971 textiles, and transparent synthetic fabrics as support media, on which he worked with oil paints, synthetic resins, and dispersion or spray paints and lacquers. He transformed widely circulating media images into a genre of painting that remains faithful to the traditional medium of the picture, but he was eager to experiment when it came to choosing his supplies and embraced contradictions that arose between a material and a work’s subject. In Hollywood (1971), for example, the patterned design of the colorful striped mattress fabric defamiliarizes the heads of three American movie stars from the 1920s or 1930s. GERHARD RICHTER

The extensive oeuvre Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has created over more than Art After 1945 five decades is exemplified in the Lenbachhaus’s collection by a large and representative work, his Atlas, which traces the artist’s entire career and constitutes a compendium of his visual ideas. The Atlas comprises photographs, 170 newspaper clippings, sketches, and collages, offering the viewer rich insight 171 into Richter’s creative approach. Comparable to a gigantic scrapbook, the Atlas brings together a wide range of different sources and techniques, illustrating the conceptual quality of Richter’s art. In 2013, the artist, who has worked on the Atlas since 1962, will complete it by adding the final plates. The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus acquired the Atlas in 1996; in the intervening years, Richter has continually amended it with new plates. It is now among the most significant works of contemporary art in the collection as well as the basis of Gerhard Richter’s position at the Lenbachhaus; his art is also represented by other central works such as abstract paintings from the collection of the KiCo Foundation, the sculpture 4 Standing Panes (2002, acquired by the Förderverein Lenbachhaus e. V.), and Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo (1971 /1984). Richter created the two heads facing each other at eye level — set on cubic stelae, they keep their own eyes closed — in 1971 as part of a conceptual room his friend and fellow artist (1943 – 77) had recently designed at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich: all vertical surfaces in the Gerhard Richter Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo 1971/1984 exhibition space were painted in “Munich yellow,” with the exception of orthogonal edges running along the floor and ceiling and around the doors and windows, which were set off by white bands. A powerfully simple structure of line and color, Palermo’s room initially presented itself to the gallery’s visitors as a bare space of aesthetic experience; for its second installation at the branch of Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Richter’s two sculptures were integrated into the room and set to face each other frontally along its long axis. The works are painted bronze casts of Richter’s and Palermo’s faces installed on tall granite bases and coated with gray oil paint. Gerhard Richter set up the room as it appears today at the Lenbachhaus in 1984 in accordance with the concept the two artists developed together; he also supervised its reinstallation on occasion of opening of the redesigned museum in 2013. Art After 1945

172 173

Gerhard Richter STRIP 2012

KiCo Collection KICO FOUNDATION Art After 1945

174 175

The KiCo Foundation was established in December 2009 by a husband and wife who started collecting young contemporary art fifteen years ago and from the outset sought to build lasting collaborative relationships with public museums. Their goal has been to acquire works not in order to store them in a private collection, but to provide them to a museum as a permanent loan and ensure that they will be presented to the public on a regular basis. The collectors have worked closely with the Kunstmuseum Bonn since the mid- 1990s; in the late 1990s, they initiated a collaboration with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, as well. The selection of works to be considered and final decisions concerning purchases are made in direct dialogue with the directors and curators of the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Lenbachhaus and always also with a view to sensible and viable additions to the collections held by both institutions. In its selection of contemporary positions, the KiCo Collection focuses on art that engages with the dissolution of physical presence into light and color. In addition to purchasing individual works, the Foundation also acquires complete groups of works or conceptions for entire rooms designed to provide in-depth insight into an artist’s oeuvre. In this regard, the collectors’ intentions are in concord with the plans both museums have for their collections. The KiCo Foundation lends crucial support to the Lenbachhaus as well Thomas Demand Embassy I as the Kunstmuseum Bonn that will allow both institutions to pursue their 2007 distinctive collection policies in the future. KiCo Foundation Sarah Morris Art After 1945

176 177

Sarah Morris Los Angeles (Filmstill) 2004

KiCo Collection MARIA LASSNIG Art After 1945

178 179

For more than six decades, Maria Lassnig (b. 1919) has created paintings and drawings that explore the perception and representation of inner bodily sensations. The artist’s distinctive face with the high cheekbones and prominent nose is like a leitmotif that appears again and again in her oeuvre: she meets her own likeness, beholds her reflection and finds herself doubled, presents herself holding a gun, an hourglass in which the sand is trickling down, a frog, a guinea pig. As early as the 1940s, the artist, who was born in Carinthia, used the programmatic label “body consciousness drawings” to describe her pictures. She subsequently spent time in Paris on several occasions and came into contact with Surrealism and the Informel. Yet even the nonrepresentational geometric pictures that made her the leading representative of postwar abstraction in her native Austria were based on subjective emotional impressions. In the late 1960s, Lassnig moved to New York, where her conception of her motifs became much more realist. Offered a position at the University of Applied Arts, Lassnig returned to Vienna in 1980, the year she and Valie EXPORT represented Austria at the . She also Maria Lassnig participated in the 1982 and 1997 . In recent years, numerous The Hourglass 2001 institutions in various countries have devoted exhibitions to the oeuvre of this KiCo Collection artist, who celebrated her ninetieth birthday last September.

“It is certain: I do not paint and draw the ‘object’ that is the body — I paint sensations of the body.” Maria Lassnig, 1999 Anselm Arnulf Kiefer Rainer Art After 1945

180 181

Anselm Kiefer Paths of World Wisdom: Hermann’s Battle 1978/80

Arnulf Rainer Black Cross 1956 HANNE DARBOVEN Art After 1945

182 183

Hanne Darboven (1941 – 2009) developed the principle underlying her art in the framework of 1960s New York minimal and conceptual art. Her chief Hanne Darboven For Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1982 /83 work, Schreibzeit (Writing Time), which she created starting in 1975, represents an individual form of historiography and a rational and documentary artistic language: Darboven recorded current issues in history and politics in the form of numeric codes, verbal texts, diagrams, and photographs. The work For Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982 – 83) was created after the director’s death. Beheld from a distance, the installation of 90 black frames, each containing a pair of pages on a preprinted red background, forms a colorful and evenly patterned panorama. Monotonous columns of photographs show the portrait of an unidentified German soldier in World War II. From up close, the beholder recognizes many further details: in 106 wordless poems, Darboven registers the days of the years of Fassbinder’s death and birth, sorting the dates and adding up cross totals. Variations appear in the photographs (including, for instance, a still of Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla in the filmThe Marriage of Maria Braun), notes (with remarks about the 1982 change of government in Bonn, when Schmidt was ousted by Kohl), writings, letters, numbers, dates. Darboven’s notations are legible but extremely encoded, and only initiates can fully decrypt them. ROMAN ON OPALKA KAWARA Art After 1945

184 185

On Kawara 14. NOV. 68 1968 Roman Opalka 1965/1 – ∞, Detail 4 848 050 – 4 866 284 (detail) 1965 –

In 1965, Roman Opalka (1931 – 2011) decided that he would devote his entire work as an artist to the realization of a single work of art. He radically limited himself to a project he faithfully pursued until his death: putting brush on On Kawara (b. 1933) is a Japanese representative of conceptual art who now canvas, he started counting. On a black canvas, he painted the numbers 1, 2, lives in New York and works in a wide array of media. When he resorts to 3, and so on in white paint, beginning in the top left corner and proceeding painting, he paints the date of the picture’s creation in acrylic on canvas. The in the familiar reading direction until he had reached the bottom right corner. resulting Date Paintings form a series that begins in 1966 and continues to this As he worked, he counted out loud and recorded his voice on tape. Then he day. It makes sense that the pictures bear the title Today — or sometimes, de- continued on the next canvas, but now mixed in one percent of white paint pending on the country in which they were produced, Aujourd’hui, Heute, or with the black primer. Opalka’s term for the individual canvas from this infinite even, say, Hodiau˘ . On Kawara paints the day’s date on small canvases; the digits project entitled 1965/1 – ∞ is “detail.” Over the years, the ground became ligh- and letters appear in white on a monochrome ground. Rather than using temp- ter from canvas to canvas as the white numbers mounted — in the paintings lates, the artist paints each grapheme by hand in a process that may take eight in the Lenbachhaus’s collection, created in the 1990s, he had long passed the or nine hours. Each picture thus claims the physical and mental substance of four-million mark — and were gradually engulfed by the light ground. When the day of its creation. No individual expression is intended, although slight traveling, Opalka continued to count on so-called “travel cards.” Last but not variations in the shapes of the digits and letters have appeared over the years. least, he also recorded the passage of time in photographs, taking a picture of Time is both the date and the individual day On Kawara spends on a work; but himself, wearing the same clothes and striking the same pose, every day after time also and most importantly becomes manifest in the forever uniform series work. of Date Paintings completed to date. RICHARD SERRA Art After 1945

186 187

Richard Serra Gate 1987 Richard Serra (b. 1939) created Gate for his exhibition 7 Spaces – 7 Sculptures, held at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in 1987 – 88. Composed of two double elements, it relates directly to the architectonic situation of the exhibi- tion space as the artist found it. He calls sculptures of this sort “site-specific”: their effect depends on their being installed in the spaces for which they were conceived. This work revolves around the room’s central pillar, which has been extended by adding two horizontal transoms lifted to beneath the ceiling and two vertical supports. The steel parts, which together weigh around 14 metric tons, are not welded together or mounted to the ceiling or the pillar. With its four aligned openings, Gate redefines the entire room; the simple principle of its construction is readily apparent to the beholder. The work illustrates a consideration Serra expressed as follows: “I think that sculpture … has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the space and places where it is created in this sense.” Andy Katharina Warhol Sieverding Art After 1945

188 189

Katharina Sieverding Visual Studies 4 2004

Andy Warhol Lenin 1986 Katharina ISA Grosse GENZKEN Art After 1945

190 191

Isa Genzken, Leonardo‘s Cat 2006

KiCo Collection

Katharina Grosse Untitled (2010/ 1035L) 2010, The multifaceted oeuvre of Isa Genzken (b. 1948) comprises sculptures, pain- tings, photographs, drawings and collages, and films and videos. Taking up the KiCo Collection minimalist and conceptual strands in twentieth-century art, her art launches a critical reflection on the aesthetic conventions of the everyday world around her. Since the 1970s, she has developed a dazzling visual vocabulary out of non- artistic materials that made a vital contribution to the evolution of sculpture. WOLFGANG TILLMANS Art After 1945

192 193

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) is interested in the structures that are at work in the world around us, and his art is an insistent inquiry into reality and the Room with works by Isa Genzken and Wolfgang Tillmans at the individual’s place in the community, the economy, and nature. Tillmans pho- Lenbachhaus 2013 tographs people, objects, situations, and places he encounters. His pictures reveal both what is individual about a phenomenon and its general features, showing a unique motif without making its identifiable rendition their primary point. The abstract pictures, by contrast, are created in the darkroom without The artist sees architecture, urban planning, and the products of the culture the use of a camera as the artist tests the possibilities of his photographic mate- industry and mass manufacturing as immediate expressions of social develop- rials. In these works, the ongoing quest for meaning and technique in the face ments. Her sculptures similarly draw close connections between architecture of works of art becomes an object of reflection in turn. Wolfgang Tillmans’s and the human being. In the mid-1980s, she started to conceive architectural formats range from monumental framed prints to smaller pictures he simply objects that are not scale models of real spaces but an interrogation of the basic sticks on the wall. While working on his photographs, the artist also builds concepts of architecture such as “space,” “wall,” or “window.” Her New Buil- what he calls his “truth study center,” for which he lays out existing images dings series articulates Genzken’s fascination with America’s richly appointed and texts, such as excerpts from books and magazines as well as postcards, on skyscrapers. The works also allude to the plunging and truncated lines of cons- a table together with his own photographs. As he sorts and groups the material tructivism and the high-rise architecture of the Bauhaus. Genzken’s New Buil- into overlapping piles, a complex reality comes into view that reveals gaps and dings are made of semitransparent glass, mirrors, foil, duct tape, and silicone. blanks. This approach allows Tillmans to scrutinize reality without claiming The glass panels were originally samples of industrially manufactured façades. absolute truth for his insights. Art After 1945

194 195

Wolfgang Tillmans Beside the River , II 2008

KiCo Foundation MONICA BONVICINI Art After 1945

196 197

Monica Bonvicini Monica Bonvicini (b. 1965) is interested in the functional determinations of Never Again 2005

social spaces with their respective specific psychological, social, and gender- KiCo Foundation specific conventions. Her works, which speak a language informed by the disil- lusioning lessons of institutional critique, treat themes such as the constructive deconstruction of minimalism or the latent affinities between the aesthetic object and fetishes of our everyday world. Her oeuvre raises the question of the subtle mechanisms of power that manifest themselves in architecture and modes of behavior and action. Places and objects must not naïvely be seen as neutral values: they are social constructions that reflect relations of power. For the installation Never Again (2005), Bonvicini set up a scaffold in the brightly lit gallery from which so-called sex swings are suspended by zinc- plated chains. The arrangement’s effect on the beholder is ambivalent — its aggressive obviousness suggests a dark secret, but it also arouses curiosity, beckoning the visitor to participate, although the swings are unsuitable to their original function of accommodating sexual activity. ANGELA BULLOCH Art After 1945

198 199

A central theme in the oeuvre of Angela Bulloch (b. 1966) is the examination and synaesthetic transformation of digital acoustic and visual information. One concrete medium in which she implements this project is the pixel box, a cubic unit equipped with a modular illumination system with the basic colors red, green, and blue that can be programmed like a 16-million-color screen. The pixel, short for “picture element,” is the smallest unit images on digital screens are made up of. The rectangular shape of the pixel box, meanwhile, recalls artistic solutions in Minimal art, as in works by Dan Flavin or Donald Judd, and that movement’s exploration of geometry, reductive design, and multicolor composition.

Angela Bulloch A prototypical example is Z Point (2001/2004), a light-and-sound instal- Group of Seven (One Absent Friend) 2005 lation comprising forty-eight pixel boxes that makes reference to Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970). In Yuko, Group of Seven (One Absent KiCo Foundation Friend) (2005), Bulloch combines the objective form of the pixel box with a subjective narrative. Some of the boxes pulse in bright colors, while others serve as screens for video projections, as does the wall. The title identifies the most important elements: the Japanese performance artist Yuko Kaseki and six pixel modules, one of which one is purportedly missing — the absent friend. CERITH WYN EVANS Art After 1945

200 201

Cerith Wyn Evans (b. 1958) combines chandeliers from different eras with textual excerpts or pieces of music. The source is transformed into Morse sig- nals and sent as a series of pulses to the chandelier, which responds with long and short flashes of light and darkness. So letters are translated into Morse signals, and Morse signals, into light signals. A flat screen documents the pro- cess of encryption. Evans’s works draw on a repertoire of highly diverse texts, including let- ters, poems, novellas, conversations, works of science fiction, journal articles, and scientific, philosophical, and linguistic treatises. He explores the bounda- Cerith Wyn Evans ›La Monnaie Vivante‹ by Pierre Klossowski (1970) 2006 ries of verbal transmission, generating eccentric gaps of communication. With his chandeliers, he creates an atmosphere of luxury and theatricality, in delibe- on permanent loan from the Förderverein Lenbachhaus e. V. rate contravention of the minimalist and reduced aesthetic of much contem- porary art. In ‘La Monnaie Vivante’ by Pierre Klossowski (1970), a Murano chandelier made by Luce Italia flashes in synch with an excerpt from a book by the French philosopher, writer, and artist Pierre Klossowski. Born in 1905, Klossowski was the painter Balthus’s older brother. THE FÖRDERVEREIN LENBACHHAUS E. V. AND ITS COLLECTION Art After 1945

202 203

The Förderverein Lenbachhaus e. V., the society of the friends of the Len- bachhaus, has lent most valuable support to the museum in a wide variety of ways, including by providing financial assistance to the gallery’s efforts to en- large its collection. After Deutsche Bank AG endowed a foundation to benefit the Lenbachhaus in 1992, the Förderverein Lenbachhaus e. V. was founded in 1993 with the goal of fostering identification with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus among Munich’s citizens and businesses. The foundation and the Förderverein have set themselves the mission of improving the museum’s presentation facilities and to support the acquisition of additions to the coll- ection. In particular, they have provided generous financial assistance for the installation of innovative LED-based lighting technology at the New Lenbach- haus. The Förderverein’s art collection, which is on permanent loan to the Lenbachhaus and enriches the museum’s own holdings, focuses on internati- onal contemporary art and works that explore the theme of light. The Förder- verein also provides grants for the realization of exhibitions and the production of publications. Last but not least, individual members of the Förderverein have lent particularly generous assistance to the Lenbachhaus’s services for our young visitors, defraying the expenses associated with opening the muse- Keith Sonnier Untitled 1968 um to student groups outside the regular hours and sponsoring art education programs especially designed for children. on permanent loan from the Förderverein Lenbachhaus e. V. 204 205 Further readings Image rights

Das Lenbachhaus Buch, Das Gedächtnis öffnet seine Tore. © for the works reproduced by Holzherr, p. 12/13: Angela Neuke, p. 30: The Lenbachhaus Book. Geschichte, Archi- Die Kunst der Gegenwart im Lenbachhaus, Monica Bonvicini, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Rainer Viertlböck, p. 78 and 113: Wassily tektur, Sammlungen, History, Architecture, edited by Helmut Friedel und Ulrich Wil- Darboven, Thomas Demand, Lothar Kandinsky (Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Collections, herausgegeben von/edited by mes, bearbeitet by Irene Netta, Ostfildern- Fischer, Dan Flavin, Günter Fruhtrunk, Eichner-Stiftung), S. 80: Gabriele Münter Helmut Friedel und/and Matthias Mühling. Ruit 1999 Rupprecht Geiger, Katharina Grosse, (Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner- Mit Texten von/Texts by Helmut Friedel, Hans Hofmann, Asger Jorn, Wassily Kan- Stiftung), p. 113: Gabriele von Arnim, p. 146: Ken Powell, Matthias Mühling, Annegret Vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Neuen dinsky, Alfred Kubin, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Lempertz, Köln (Courtesy Schirmer /Mosel, Hoberg und/and Hubertus von Amelunxen, Sachlichkeit. Merz, Gabriele Münter, Roman Opalka, München), 149: Mario Gastinger, München, Munich 2013 Die Gemälde im Lenbachhaus München, Sigmar Polke, Heimrad Prem, Franz p. 152: Walter Haberland (Courtesy Schir- edited by Helmut Friedel, bearbeitet by Bar- Radziwill, Richard Riemerschmid, Richard mer/Mosel, München), p. 175: Thomas The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, bara Eschenburg, catalog by Karin Althaus, Serra, Katharina Sieverding, Keith Sonnier, Demand, p. 176: Parallax, p. 198: Matthias Munich, Karin Dotzer, Jonna Gaertner and Irene Helmut Sturm, Erwin Wurm, HP Zimmer: Hermann edited by Helmut Friedel and Netta, Munich 2009 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2013 as well as Annegret Hoberg, Munich, London, the artists and their legal successors. New York 2013 © 2013 for the works reproduced by Joseph Joseph Beuys im Lenbachhaus. Beuys: Nachlass Joseph Beuys, Düsseldorf Schenkung Lothar Schirmer, with texts by and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Joseph Beuys, Helmut Friedel and Lothar Schirmer, Munich 2013 © 2013 for the works reproduced by Alfred Kubin: Eberhard Spangenberg/VG An der Isar. Beside the River Isar. Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gegenwartskunst im Neuen Lenbachhaus aus den Sammlungen der Städtischen Galerie © 2013 for the works reproduced by Chris- und der KiCo Stiftung, Contemporary Art in tian Schad: Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaf- the New Lenbachhaus from the collections of fenburg and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn the Lenbachhaus and the KiCo Foundation, herausgegeben von/edited by Helmut Friedel © 2013 for the works reproduced by Rudolf und/and Matthias Mühling, Schlichter: Viola Roehr-von Alvensleben, Munich 2013 München

Natur als Kunst. © 2013 for the works reproduced by Andy Frühe Landschaftsmalerei des 19. Jahrhun- Warhol: Andy Warhol Foundation for the derts in Deutschland und Frankreich aus Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), der Sammlung der Christoph Heilmann New York Stiftung, edited by the Christoph Heilmann Stiftung München, bearbeitet by Claudia Photo credits Denk, Christoph Heilmann, Erika Rödiger- All photographs © Lenbachhaus (Simone Diruf and Andreas Strobl, Gänsheimer, Ernst Jank) with the exception Heidelberg 2013 of: cover, p. 2, 4, 14, 144, 150: Florian Publishing information

This catalogue is published in conjunction with the reopening of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich in May 2013

Editors: Helmut Friedel, Matthias Mühling Editorial coordination and catalogue editing: Karin Althaus Translated from the German by Gerrit Jackson Copy editing: Susanne Böller, Katrin Dillkofer, Elisabeth Giers, Annegret Hoberg, Ursula Keltz, Lisa Kern Image rights: Katrin Dillkofer, Elisabeth Giers Tenderings: Siegfried Häusler, Yvonne Mölle, Anahita Martirosjan, Sonja Schamberger Graphic design and typesetting: Caroline Villis for Herburg Weiland Munich Lithography, printing and binding: G. Peschke Druckerei GmbH, Munich Type: Lenbach Grotesk, New Caledonia Paper: Munken polar 300 g/m2, Claro Bulk 135 g/m2

ISBN 978-3-88645-177-7

Printed in Germany

Jacket cover illustration and frontispiece: Photographs of the new Lenbachhaus by Florian Holzherr 2013

© Lenbachhaus Munich 2013