German Landscapes at the SANG
by Lisa Schmidt
Currently showing at the S.A. National Gallery in Cape Town is A century of Landscapes - Landschaften eines Jahrhunderts. With such an all-encompassing title, what is one to expect?
Sponsored by the Deutsche Bank (German Bank) collection, A Century of Landscapes shows works done on paper together with paintings by German artists. Surprisingly there is no photography presented. One would have expected to find a big scale landscape by Andreas Gursky or Elger Esser, two major figures of the contemporary German photography scene. Completely organized in Germany, the show is properly planned and the art pieces are well chosen. There is a beautiful catalogue available, with a translated English booklet.
The DB collection, which was started in 1977, covers the last hundred years of German art, with a strong emphasis on contemporary art. It is known that the bank owns the biggest company collection of modern art worldwide. The DB also started a cooperation with the Guggenheim, which led to the Deutsche (Bank) Guggenheim (Museum) in Berlin and since 2000 also sponsors - under the title Moments - works in the public sphere.
Coming from Germany, I thought it interesting to find myself in the middle of
'heimatlichen Ansichten'- images from home- at the very southern tip of the African continent. But I liked it. I responded very differently to the pictures than I would have in Germany. Here these paintings and prints are a representation of my cultural background and they comfort me in the way of the familiar, but also I can be more distant than I would be at home.
Landscape painting has always been a German genre; nature and especially the creative interaction with the forest are deeply rooted in the cultural history of the country. Throughout the course of art history in Germany the preoccupation with landscape is reflected. Examples of high quality paintings of different time epochs are to be found in the show.
The genre of landscapes works as a reflection of the time in which they were created. With two world wars, monarchy, fascism and democracy, separation and reunification marking only "highpoints" of the historical background of the paintings on exhibition, the last century has been extremely challenging for the country - and its artists.
Changing times can be seen even in the use of the artists' materials: an oil painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1921) differs from a modern computer print by Martin Honert (1994), or on a more complex level as the representation of one's era.
The exhibition is divided into landscapes: in mountains, meadows, rivers and the sea. The idea is that the visitor can walk through these landscapes and discover their personal favorite painting/place. But the exhibition provides not only a survey of landscapes, but also a reflection on the past hundred years of the history of art, and on different art epochs, like impressionism, expressionism or postmodernism.
It is nice that the show is not hung chronologically, because the visitor gets the chance to compare one work to another directly. Blinky Palermo's small personal vacation sketch painted on cross-hatched paper with water color and pencil (Zeebrügge, 1964), hangs in direct proximity of a sea-piece of Max Beckmann. Strand mit Booten an der Riviera (1938) with its cool clear composition is a classical Beckmann - about half of all his landscapes involve the sea - and is a strong contrast to Palermo. Only the subject links these two pictures and initiates a comparison.
Sigmar Polke's picture Untitled (canoeist) invites an extended scrutiny. Done in 1978, it shows in graphic lines a canoeist, which the artist (today, his work fetches even higher prices than Gerhard Richter) copied from a magazine. The picture consists of a collage of many layers of different colors and materials. On the impressionistic surface of the water, apparently randomly cut scraps of paper overlay the motif. The canoeist is thus on a journey beset with many obstacles, perhaps unable to see his way forward. In many of his works, Polke seems interested in the representation of movement and change.
One of the youngest represented artists is Peter Rösel (born 1966). His work is often concerned with the use of materials. In the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Museum of Modern Art) in Frankfurt, R�sel created a room-sized installation of a waterlily pond. Under closer inspection one realized that the waterlilies were created out of the green German police uniforms. A Century of Landscapes shows his small, classical-style oil landscapes painted on to the sides of flattened beer cans. This work brings together two essential German characteristics: a love of landscape and beer. Unlike the use of found material in African art, where artists often cannot afford artshop materials, in Germany this use reflects more of an environmental aspect (the littering of our nature). Today, representations of landscape are often used commercially in advertising to sell products, such as cheese, washing powder or beer in order to create a new arcadia, a return to an idealized world.
There is a lot to discover in this exhibition and as Hayden Proud, a curator of the SA National Galley put it, "This has provided the first opportunity to have a Kirchner, Macke or Beckmann shown at the Gallery." And this chance should not be missed. A German visitor might not find anything new in this small exhibition, nothing avant-garde. But an African guest receives a good overview of German landscapes and art in general.
Lisa Schmidt is an art history major at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
South African National Gallery, Government Avenue, Company Gardens, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 465 1628
Fax: (021) 461 0045
Email: ebedford@iziko.org.za
Website: www.museums.org.za/sang
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