Visual Art Feb 5, 2009 at 4:00 am

Rewriting Art History at the Frye

By Franz von Stuck. courtesy Frye Art Museum

Comments

1
Great review, and well researched.
2
Really nice, Jen. I wish I could be there.
3
Eh. Just a single closely related example:

LACMA: http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mweb/…

"In the 1980s, LACMA established the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. This comprehensive collection includes approximately seven thousand works on paper and a library of more than four thousand volumes, many containing original graphics, which were key to the accomplishments of the Expressionists."

Get the Rifkind collection books if you can.

And catch up, Jen. Again, your overdramatization ("Rewriting...") is ... ugh.

4
Eh. Just a single closely related example:

LACMA: http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mweb/…

"In the 1980s, LACMA established the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German
Expressionist Studies. This comprehensive collection includes approximately
seven thousand works on paper and a library of more than four thousand
volumes, many containing original graphics, which were key to the
accomplishments of the Expressionists."

Get the Rifkind collection books if you can.

And catch up, Jen. Again, your overdramatization ("Rewriting...") is ... ugh.
5
Dvnms: Your comments are always amazing and truly helpful. Can you please be specific about my overdramatization? Expressionism is plenty beloved. The Munich Secession, not so much, unless I'm really missing something. Please to inform?
6
Such clean lines! Sezessions and gruppes and werkbunds and arbeitsrates proliferate. Artists abandon one, join another, break from one, attempt to destroy another. It's messy. Secessions themselves become aesthetically biased, making them akin to the academies earlier. They're commonly described as elitist, commercial, and cosmopolitan. Dealers, looking for trends in other countries (yes, even in France), are sometimes deeply involved in the programming.

Put it this way: Max Liebermann, Wilhelm Leibl, Max Slevogt, Eugen Spiro, Ludwig von Hofmann, Thomas Theodor Heine, Hans Thoma, and Wilhelm TrĂĽbner, who are all in this show, are all in the Rifkind collection as well. But that collection is tagged "expressionist": what to do?!

If you can't hear the overdramatization of using "Rewriting Art History" to describe a show
that is micro-historical in nature (a single fissure), what to do.
7
The broader exhibition on the same subject held last year in Munich included American-German artsit Carl Marr who was painting professor at the Munich Academy and later became the director of that international intsitution. This story can not be fully understood without understanding that organization during that time frame. For better or worse, it was in many ways near the core of this transitional period. To learn more about Marr go to the art museum web page www.wisconsinart.org

Tom

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.