Information Sheet
THE COLLECTION
200 Years of Art: Classic Works, Discoveries and New Positions
Content
Exhibition Facts ……………………………………………………………………………..3
Press Text ……………………………………………………………………………………4
Exhibition Booklet Texts……………………………………………………………………..5
Press Images………………………………………………………………………………..14
Exhibition Facts
Exhibition TitleTHE COLLECTION
200 Years of Art: Classic Works, Discoveries and New Positions
Exhibition VenueLENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 11 galleries on the upper floor
CuratorsStella Rollig, Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller, Brigitte Reutner, Nina Kirsch
as well as the artists EVA & ADELE, Maria Bussmann, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Gerwald Rockenschaub and Nasan Tur
ExhibitsMore than 200 exhibits from the LENTOS Collection
Exhibition BookletThere is an exhibition booklet available with information on the rooms set aside for artists and curators. Its purpose is to facilitate the visitors’ individual approach to the artworks.
ContactErnst-Koref-Promenade 1, 4020 Linz, Tel. +43(0)732/7070-3600; ,
Opening HoursTue–Sun 10am to 6pm, Thur 10am to 9pm, Mon closed
(except 1 April and 20 May)
Admission€ 8; concessions € 6 / € 4,50
Press ContactNina Kirsch, T +43(0)732.7070.3603,
Press Text
What is awaiting you is no less than a leisurely stroll through the history of art and all the pleasures of a reunion with old favourites combined with making the acquaintance of exciting new works.
The City of Linz’s purchase of its first one hundred works of art in 1953 laid the foundation for a museum of modern art, the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, the precursor of today’s LENTOS. Since then the museum’s holdings have been augmented on a regular basis by the addition of outstanding works of contemporary art plus works of the more distant past to round off the collection. The LENTOS has now a treasure chamber at its disposal brimming with paintings (around 1,700), sculptures, graphic works (some 12,000) and 1,200 or so photographic pieces.
Reviving its highly successful, seminal project Stirring it up from 2007, the LENTOS has invited artists to develop their own takes on selected works from the Collection and has set aside five rooms for this purpose. The artists take their own work as the point of departure for their selection. The result will be rooms vibrant with art, a network of visible relationships and a series of rendezvous governed by elective affinity.
The following artists will be taking part: EVA ADELE, Maria Bussmann, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, Gerwald Rockenschaub and Nasan Tur.
Of the smaller cabinets each will feature a specific theme, including rarely shown portfolios and priceless donations; outstanding paintings from 1880 to the present day;
masterpieces from the Gurlitt Collection, ranging from Gustav Klimt to Oskar Kokoschka and Lovis Corinth; rare 18th century drawings; and photographs dating from the infancy of that art.
Under the titleToo good to hide, a series of exhibitions featuring a new set of works every month showcases the hidden treasures of the graphics depot.
The exhibition is a survey of two hundred years of art history that includes, among many others, works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herbert Bayer, Maria Lassnig, Alex Katz, Keith Haring and Mathilde ter Heijne. While most are already well known, others have only been recently discovered or are hotly tipped for tomorrow.
Exhibition Booklet Texts
Eleven rooms have been set aside for artists and curators.
Trawling the Collection: The LENTOS has invited contemporary artists todevelop their own takes on selected works from the Collection and has setaside five rooms for this purpose. The artists take their own work as the pointof departure for their selection.
The artists responsible for this project areEVA & ADELE, Maria Bussmann, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová,Gerwald Rockenschaub and Nasan Tur.
The small cabinets are reserved for special aspects of the Collection. Theseinclude outstanding paintings from 1880 to the present day, rare 18thcentury drawings; photographs dating from the infancy of that art; Pop Art;and Constructivist tendencies.
Room 1
The Origins of the Collection
The persecuted avant-garde
In November 1946, the Berlin art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt (1888–1965) loanedhis private art collection to the City of Linz and put his enthusiasm and hisexpertise at the disposal of an exciting new project: the Neue Galerie der StadtLinz. The first exhibition, dedicated to Alfred Kubin, took place in June 1947. In1951 came Gurlitt’s Kokoschka exhibition, hailed as nothing short of sensational.
In 1953, the core holdings of the Neue Galerie and of today’s LENTOSKunstmuseum – 84 paintings and 33 graphic works – were acquired by the Cityof Linz from Wolfgang Gurlitt.
Many artists who are highly esteemed today, such as Lovis Corinth, Karl Hofer,Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Müller, were reviled as “degenerate”by the Nazis. From 1937 onwards, their works were removed from Germanmuseums and collections and sold via art dealers or auction houses. Artists whofell under the Nazi interdict remained marginalized and grossly underappreciatedwell into the 1950s.
Having the Gurlitt Collection as the core of its holdings is a mixed blessing forthe LENTOS. The works of art are splendid in themselves but there are certainassociated problems. Gurlitt continued to work as an art dealer throughout theNazi dictatorship, buying from persecuted Jewish collectors who were oftenselling under duress and at auctions where “degenerate” art was sold to financeNazi projects.
To this day Gurlitt’s role during the Nazi era is controversial. Those who areprepared to give him the benefit of the doubt regard him as an art lover whocame to the aid of distressed Jewish collectors, others see him as an opportunistwho exploited the loopholes of a fundamentally flawed regime.Research is continuing at the LENTOS
aimed at establishing provenance for allobjects in the Gurlitt Collection and at returning looted and doubtfully acquiredworks of art to their original owners or their legal heirs. Several works of art havebeen returned in this way since the LENTOS’s foundation in 2003.
The provenance of looted and doubtfully acquired works of art that passedthrough Wolfgang Gurlitt’s hands during World War II has repeatedly beenaddressed in exhibitions and has been publicised in the captions attached tosuch works in the museum and in several pertinent publications.
Room 2
Longing for Arcadia
...Even though my eyes will never see you again
a ghostly whisper will waft across to you:
‘I too set foot in Arcadia.’ (Johann Gottfried Herder)
Rome was a staging post for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on his journeythrough Italy; he arrived there on 1 November 1786. In a letter to Charlottevon Stein he mentions “palaces and ruins, gardens and wilderness, vistas andconfined areas, little houses, stables, triumphal arches and columns.”
In Tivoli, the poet took lessons in landscape painting with his fellowcountryman Jakob Philipp Hackert.Arcadia, originally a region in the Peloponnese, was transformed by the Romanpoet Vergil in his Eclogues (43–39 BC) into a utopian pastoral world, an ideal
typical landscape vibrant with desire but not exempt from death.
“Et in Arcadia ego” – the words with which Herder (and Goethe) triumphantlysignalled their arrival – are originally spoken by Death. In the 18th century thedeath motif was replaced by the less specific metaphor of ruins of the kindpainted by Goethe and Hackert.
Rudolf Schick’s graphic also depicts a dilapidated building in the park ofthe Villa Doria Pamphili in Rome. Romako, Menzel and Siewert lead us onto allegorical representations of Death. Anton Romako’s Autumn and Wintercontrasts the ideas of plenty and of transience. Adolf Menzel’s Chronos handsthe scythe to the angel of death. In Clara Siewert’s Maiden with Death theyoung woman is claimed by Death long before her time.
Too good to hide
Treasures from the graphics depot
More than 10,000 graphic works are carefully stored in the LENTOS’sdepots. The exhibition Too good to hide. Treasures from the graphics depotputs on show four to five especially valuable works at monthly intervals.
The presentation will be accompanied on the LENTOS website by anextensive commentary on the works themselves, the artists and the differenttechniques.
Graphic works include all kinds of works on paper, such as drawings,woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, linocuts and silkscreen prints. The showopens with a lithograph by Honoré Daumier from 1845 and wends its waythrough the 19th and 20th centuries to the early 21st century, featuring worksby Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alfred Kubin, Gustav Klimt, Käthe Kollwitz,Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erika Giovanna Klien, Klemens Brosch, HerbertBayer, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Vilma Eckl, Maria Lassnig, Alfred Hrdlicka,Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Bruno Gironcoli, Birgit Jürgenssen, EdgarHonetschläger, Ulrike Lienbacher and others.
The presentation of Carola Dertnig’s collage Dance Report – L. A. Reportin February 2014 will mark the end of a year of exciting discoveries in theLENTOS’s graphics depot.
Room 3
EVA & ADELE
Two
“Literally everyone” knows EVA & ADELE, the extravagant Berlin artist duo,who have been putting on star performances at countless major events of theinternational art scene since 1991: dazzling, irresistible, they are impossibleto overlook. With their slogans “Coming out of the future” and “Wherever weare is museum”, EVA & ADELE stand for self-invention and self-stylization,live acts and living works of art.
Two is an exhibition room conceived by EVA & ADELE. It is peopled byimaginatively paired off artists engaged in lively dialogues. Old and newclassical artists enter into combinations vibrant with unpredictable potential.There are surprising correspondences and echoes as well as demonic faceswith their message of suffering by Paul Kranzler, Othmar Zechyr and PirminBlum; wooden heads serve as ritual helmets. Klimt’s unfinished Portraitof a Lady with its cool, mask-like aura is all the more enigmatic since weknow nothing about the sitter. Her male counterpart, Richard Hamilton’sFinn MacCool, is like a talking book compared to her. The Irish giant, aCeltic warrior, puts in a guest appearance between mysterious line drawingsby Maria Lassnig. A luminous interior surrounded by many-coloured linesmorphs into a body. Do we have a monster here? EVA & ADELE, charmingcreatures sporting a universal globe, hover on their
wings in the sitting room,the garden, the townhouse.
The 25-part Family Portrait, a composition of colour photographs acquiredby the LENTOS Friends in 2013 is shown for the first time. In it,EVA & ADELE appear in the company of collectors and friends as a lithe yetenergetic pair of glittering winged creatures.Stringency and wit, the abstract symbolic language of the selectedsculptures, the puzzling plethora of photographs, paintings, drawings andportraits, and the recurring likenesses of EVA & ADELE demonstrate affinityand harmony as well as disparity and individuality.
Room 4
Stone and Bone
In the distant past, it was customary to swear oaths at pagan stone altars orat a Christian altar containing a saint’s sacred bone fragments to confirm thetruth of a statement. This is the source of the German phrase Stein und Beinschwören, swearing black and blue. Stein und Bein in our context meansappreciating the different qualities of perception that may be attributed tophotographic motifs. Are they dead or alive?
Pictorial documentation versus photography as art
William Henry Fox Talbot began experimenting with photographic platesas early as 1834. One of his pictures, entitled Gothic Portal, is among theoldest photographs in the collection of the LENTOS. The photo Roger Fentonshot in 1856 of Sebastopol belongs to a series on the Crimean War and isone of the earliest documents of war reportage in history. The invention ofthe cheap and easily transportable Kodak roll film camera in 1888 openedup entirely new possibilities for photographers. Photography now competed
with painting on a more and more level playing field. ‘Pictorialists’ such asOscar Gustav Reijlander and Julia Margaret Cameron saw photography aboveall as art.
The photojournalism of the 1950s and 1960s aimed at creating documentsof contemporary history. Erich Lessing and Inge Morath worked for theworld’s most prestigious photographic agency, MAGNUM, which in turnserved magazines such as Life, Vue and Stern. VALIE EXPORT’s filmSelf-portrait with head combines both stone and bone, and here thediscussion on the depiction of reality comes full circle.
Room 5
Beacons for posterity
What do Erika Roessing, Kolo Moser, Andjé, Birgit Jürgenssen, Alex Katz andDorothee Golz have in common? They are all artists whose presence in thecollections of the LENTOS is owed to generous donors.
When the LENTOS’s predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded, privateinitiative already played a crucial role. It was the commitment to the causeof a new museum for Linz on the part of Wolfgang Gurlitt, the Berlin artdealer, that triggered a first wave of donations in 1952, and this wasfollowed by similar acts of public-minded largess. Donors, benefactors andsupporters, the people whose generosity enables museums to close gaps intheir collections and add to their holdings, usually prefer to avoid excessive
limelight. Now we feel called upon to thank them in public.Our tenth anniversary, slender budgets and mushrooming prices in the artmarket have combined to make patronage and sponsorship an even moreimportant factor than it was in the past. The LENTOS has been extremelyfortunate in attracting from its first beginnings such committed patrons
as Mag. Maria and Mag. Gerald Fischer-Colbrie, Norli and Dr. HellmutCzerny, Greta and Dr. Gert Humer and the Verein der LENTOS Freunde, theAssociation of Friends of the LENTOS, who have added substantively to theholdings of the Museum.
What makes private individuals disposed to help a museum accomplish itsmission? It is usually an individual’s love of art combined with generosityand the will to perform a service to the general public – to erect beaconsfor posterity. Establishing and cultivating contacts with potential patronsis one of the most privileged and rewarding aspects of life in a museum.What has enabled our holdings to keep on growing is largely donations by
contemporary artists, by financial institutions such as banks and insurancecompanies, and by corporations and private individuals, made ideally on the basis of a consensus with museum directors and heads of collections. Thelatest donations include those of Uta Scherb and Gerald Fischer-Colbrie,both friends and loyal companions of the LENTOS of many years standing.
Room 6
Maria Bussmann
Of Birds and Rats
Of Birds and Rats – this could be the title of a short story or a guided gallerytour. Whatever it is, it plays out in summer and under a southern sky, on thefrayed edge of a multi-million metropolis, where residential developments and fields overlap, where streets end in turning areas or cul-de-sacs, wherecivilization and nature – tamed to a greater or lesser extent – meet for arendezvous and piles of debris and car wrecks are overgrown with weeds.It is in a place such as this that you might meet Lois and FranziskaWeinberger collecting ruderals – basically plants growing on waste ground or
amid rubbish – or where you might catch yourself trying to sample Gironcoli’sears of wheat – if only they were not 1.6 metres tall and made of aluminium.
But perhaps the walker is content to read the future in the flight of birds orto count the rat holes in the ground? The movement is one from up above todown below and vice versa, alternating between beauty and ugliness, lightand shadow. Culture and its translations. (Maria Bussmann)Maria Bussmann is a New York and Vienna based artist with a degree inPhilosophy. The theme she has been developing over the years is the linkbetween drawing and philosophy. She is active as a curator (MAK) and as ateacher of art theory.
Room 7
Geometry Meets Poetry
After World War II, abstractionism dominated painting. Taking up impulsesfrom Europe and re-interpreting them, the United States took the lead.Alongside Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction, a chiefly Parisbasedmovement, Geometric Abstraction ranked high in the international artscene.
Pure colours as an expression of “pure perception“ are to be found in theavant-garde art of Piet Mondrian and the Bauhaus artists LászloMoholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Herbert Bayer. Withhis geometric shapes the founder of Suprematism, Kasimir Malevich, hadradically divorced colour from objects as early as 1915.
Neatly arranged structures, internal clarity and logical consistency shapethis art style, which was developed further both in Europe and in the UnitedStates. Dutch Constructivism led in the 1960s to the development of Op Art,which concentrates on the use of optical illusions.
Squares, circles, ellipses, triangles and rectangles are construed andarranged in stringent order on paper or canvas. Ordering principles includethe reduction to contrasting black and white as in the work of Hildegard andHarold Joos; mathematical organization according to the principles of thecolour circle, as practised by Herbert Bayer, Josef Albers and Andrew Molles;or compositions along the lines of complementary colours, pioneered byartists such as Nino di Salvatore. Helmuth Gsöllpointner and Donald Juddare among the sculptors who realized three-dimensional geometric shapes.Geometry can be more than order and stringency. It can revolve, move,transport. It can evoke weightlessness, spatiality and movement.