To Set up a Student Tour, Please Contact

To set up a student tour, please contact:

Mary Ann Perkins
412.578.2560

She will be better able to help you—don’t contact the group visits office first.

The following handouts are from Dr. Annah Krieg, an art history professor at Washington & Jefferson College and Ingeborg O’Mahony of Sewickley Academy. Carnegie Docent Hal Graff also accompanied the tour to show us what the Carnegie can provide us in terms of tour support. There are other German pieces in the museum not listed below. The Carnegie changes their exhibits fairly often, so it is best to check about the availability and location of specific pieces.

November 13, 2010

AATG Museum Tour

Dr. Annah Krieg

German Artists in the Carnegie Museum of Art

Note: These works are all found in the Scaife Galleries, which are numbered and progress chronologically.

Three areas of visual analysis:

· Form: how a painter paints (how a sculptor sculpts), areas of form to consider are – color, line, texture, composition (the organization), technique, realism vs. abstraction, idealism, etc.

· Content: what a painter paints or a sculptor sculpts, the subject matter of a work

· Context: no artist creates in a void. All art is a social artifact that can help us understand particular moments of history. Conversely, we need to understand what was going on socially, economically, religiously, politically that helps us analyze a work of art.

Gallery 1: Medieval

· St. Florian, 1490

o Polychrome wood sculptures of the Virgin and Child or saints were popular in southern Germany in the late Middle Ages. These very life-like images of saints were exactly the type of images criticized by Protestant Reformers as idolatrous and lacking any pedagogical function in the church.

Gallery 2: Renaissance

· Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, 1532

o Lucas Cranach the Elder was court painter to Frederick the Wise. Both men were staunch defenders of the Reformation. Frederick hid Martin Luther in the Wartburg Castle and Cranach was a close friend of Luther and completed portraits of the reformer and his family.

· Meissen Porcelain

o Meissen porcelain is the first hard paste porcelain produced in Europe. Developed in the 18th century by alchemists, the technology originated in China much earlier. Here we see a romanticized view of China in these examples; known as Orientalism, this naïve portrayal of the East in western art is common in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Gallery 3: 19th Century

· Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, An African, 1833

o Waldmüller was a 19th century Austrian painter. In his image of an African tribesman, we see another variant of Orientalism. Waldmüller portrays the African as an exotic non-European in the conventional 19th-century guise of the “noble savage.”

· Andreas Achenbach, An Italian Landscape, 1845

o Achenbach represents the school of German Romanticism, which favored sublime imagery of nature and rejected the cool neoclassicism of Enlightenment art.

Gallery 6: 19th Century

· Alois Priechenfried, Two Rabbis

o A minor German artist, active in the late 19th century. A Google search revealed very little about him. Possible Jewish, as this is not the only Jewish subject he painted. This image would be good to discuss with students as a reminder that the German Jewish community was very vibrant and diverse before its demise under National Socialism.

Gallery 8: 20th Century

· Paula Modersohn-Becker, Birches, no date

o One of the most important German women artists of the modern era, Modersohn-Becker worked in the Worpswede artist colony. Modersohn-Becker received informal training as an artist (women were not allowed to attend art academies) and created images of the northern German countryside and portraits of women and children.

· Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lighthouse at Fehmarn, 1912

o Kirchner was a founding member of Die Brücke, a group of German Expressionist painters, active ca. 1910. Unlike Impressionism which seeks to record spontaneous records of bourgeois leisure, the Expressionists turned inward to express emotion through a liberated use of color, aggressive brushwork, and skewed perspectives.

· Max Pechstein, The Red Turban, 1911

o Another founding member of Die Brücke, Pechstein’s work reveals how modernist artists also turned to non-European themes in their work. Known as primitivism, many Expressionists sought out these motifs as a way to critique Victorian morality and rigid European society.

· Georg Kolbe, sculpture

o Heavily influenced by Rodin (of The Thinker fame, great 19th century French sculptor), Kolbe worked in a modernist-realist style. Kolbe, along with Mies van der Rohe (Gallery 11), is an example of some of the avant-garde artists who initially sought to compromise with the National Socialist cultural policies and found ways to continue to work between 1933 and 1945.

Gallery 11: 20th Century

· Mies van der Rohe, Chair, 1927-1930

o One of the pioneers of modern architecture, Mies created this chair for his apartment building as part of the famous Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, an international showcase of sleek, unadorned, glass/concrete/steel modern architecture.

· Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, 1935-36

o Originally an Expressionist who escaped pornography charges in Austria by fleeing to Berlin in the 1910s, Kokoschka portrays the first president of Czechoslovakia (shortly before his death and the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938) with the same energetic brushwork and vivid color as his Expressionist colleagues.

Gallery 13: 20th-21st Century

· Anselm Kiefer, Midgard, 1980-1985

o Like Polke and Baselitz, Kiefer is part of the German generation born during or immediately after World War II. Kiefer is a representative of the Neoexpressionist movement in Germany, in which artists sought to revive to the themes of self-exploration and aggressive handling of the medium of the Expressionists. In particular, Kiefer explores cultural identity, posing questions about the legacy of German guilt in the face of the Holocaust and exploring the roots of current social and political ideologies through references to ancient myth, religious lore, and historical fact.

· Georg Baselitz, The Mocking, 1984

o Similar to Kiefer, Baselitz also explores Germany troubled history combining a Neoexpressionist aesthetic (gestural brushwork, thick application of pigment) here with Christian imagery. The upside-down figures are disorienting for the viewer and allow Baselitz more freedom in his aesthetic choices and produce a more emotional reaction from the viewer.

· Sigmar Polke, Watchtower II, 1984-1985

o Polke’s family fled East Germany in 1953. In his painting, the watchtower is the symbol of Germany’s troubled past, evocative of both NS concentration camps and the Berlin Wall.

· Neo Rauch, Rückkehr, 2004

o A generation younger than the Neoexpressionists, Rauch trained and worked in East Germany. His work is influenced by Surrealism and the Socialist Realism that was omnipresent in the GDR and deals with themes of alienation in a post-industrial world.

Carnegie Museum Tour

Ingeborg O’Mahony (Sewickley Academy German)

Purpose: My initial thoughts about this tour were primarily to offer my students glimpses of Germanic culture through different periods of art and architecture. (Of course, our tour would then culminate with a culinary trip to the Hofbräuhaus in the South Side.) I had been to the Carnegie Museum before and remembered that it displayed a few pieces of German and Austrian art, but as to the specifics, I was unsure. I called the Museum and asked for help from the docents, but they themselves had never led a tour group with this kind of focus before. As vague as I was, they were very helpful in finding numerous works, which spanned a large time period in German history. Furthermore, in actually taking the tour with my student group, my kids really got a lot more out of the works than expected, and many of the artworks really reflect the historical time periods – and artistic movements – which helped to shape and display Germany (and Austria) both historically and culturally. In other words, this tour was much more successful than I had imagined.

Time Periods: - Prehistory to Late Antiquity

(no known pieces of art found at the Carnegie Museum)

- Middle Ages

o Holy Roman Empire

o The gothic style was introduced to Germany and Germans used it much more – and much later - than the rest of Europe.

o The oldest examples of art at the Carnegie Museum come from the late Middle Ages.

- Renaissance painting

o Sculpture

§ 15th and 16th centuries

§ Religious Reformation – Split between the Catholic and Protestant Churches

§ Albrecht Dürer listed as a big name (changed the face of German art)

§ “The Danube School” - landscapes

- 17th to 19th centuries

o Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism

o Goethe was a contemporary – his literature was influential.

o Schiller

o Naturalism and Biedermeier

o The Munich School and Berlin Succession imitated the Impressionist Movement

o

- 20th Century

o Post-Impressionist and Expressionist Art very much influenced by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh

o “Die Brücke“ and „Der Blaue Reiter“ (1905-ca. 1913)

o Weimar period

o Art in the Third Reich

§ There is little which is represented in the Museum, given the fact that many reputable artists were banned during the Third Reich. Most of the art, which was accepted, was – frankly – pedestrian and unexpressive.

- Post World War II art

o Most notable about the works in this period is the tendency to come to grips with the rebuilding of Germany or the commentary of the division of the two Germanys. Most of this art appears much more abstract yet symbolic.

- Current/Modern Art

o Very conceptual, very abstract. It is difficult to spot a single overriding trend in these pieces.