Painting collection
Incorporated in the exhibition of international sculpture is a select collection of German painting, ranging from the turn of the 20th century through to the 1960s. The works currently making up the collection represent all areas of importance, and were acquired between 1945 and 1970 by the director at the time, Gerhard Händler.
August Macke, Zwei Schwestern, 1911
The collection is noteworthy for the high quality of its individual works, all of them bearing witness to artistic development from Expressionism through to the Informal movement. The masterpieces include paintings by members of the Die Brücke movement, namely artists Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein and Mueller, as well as Emil Nolde, who was affiliated to them. Paintings by Jawlensky, Kokoschka, Campendonk, Macke, Rohlfs, the "Sturm" artists Molzahn and Ring round out the expressionism of the "Brücke" association.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Sternbalance, 1956
The works that make up the next group, which initially derived its productive impetus from Cubism, were all linked by constructive trends. Schlemmer, Dexel, Feininger and Muche represent among other things "Bauhaus"; Max Beckmann's "Rugby Players" and Max Ernsts' "The Temptation of St. Anthony" are considered today to be outstanding individual examples of Expressionism, New Objectivity and Surrealism.
Max Ernst, Die Versuchung des Heiligen Antonius, 1945
Following the end of WW II the art of the "Informal" emerged as an international artistic phenomenon. Many German artists considered abstract painting to be a liberation from, and the only valid alternative to, realistic art, which had been used as an instrument and perverted by Fascist ideologies and had acquired a new dogma through Socialist Realism. Even today the powerful, often anarchic desire for expression and the feeling of liberation after dictatorship and war can be felt in the works of Baumeister, Nay, Schumacher, Götz, Hoehme and Schultze. The struggle for new forms and new functions for art reveals itself to be a process of creating pictures from gestures or material, which towards the end of the 1950s imbued art with a new objective character. The borderline between art and objects and sculpture began to become blurred.