28.03
– 24.06.2013
This exhibition,
comprising over two hundred works, offers a reflection on the main
themes that structured German thinking from 1800 to 1939. It places
artworks and their artists—including Caspar David Friedrich, Paul
Klee, Philipp Otto Runge and Otto Dix—in the intellectual context
of their time, and confronts them with the writings of great
thinkers, chief among whom is Goethe.
German history from the
late 18th century to the eve of World War II is marked by the
difficulty of establishing political unity at a time when the concept
of a Europe of nations was gaining hold. A multi-faith country
characterized by geographical discontinuity, the instability of its
borders and different or even antagonistic political and cultural
contexts, Germany needed to establish the underlying unity of all
Germans, from Bavaria to the Baltic, from the Rhineland to Prussia.
The concept of
Kultur,
inherited from Enlightenment thought, seemed most likely to
constitute the breeding ground from which a modern German tradition
could emerge. The Napoleonic occupation fostered awareness of this
unity and provided the political background for the beginnings of
Romanticism, at the start of our timeline—while at its end, the
rise of Nazism highlighted the tragic dimension of this concept,
without managing to destroy it. The exhibition analyzes the role of
the fine arts, from Romanticism to New Objectivity, in this period of
great artistic innovation that sought to invent a new German
tradition.