On view exhibition
Never Apart.
Frames and Pictures by the
Brücke Artists
15. March 2020
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marzella, 1909–1910, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Purchase 1967 (The Museum of Our Wishes)
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Woman's Head and Mask, 1912, Albertinum | Galerie Neue Meister, Gal.-Nr. 3925 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019. Photo: Herbert Boswank
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mädchen in Southwester, 1912/20, Privat Collection Switzerland
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Colorful Dance, 1933, Sammlung E. W. Kornfeld
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Village Corner, 1910, Brücke-Museum, Karl und Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Stiftung © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller with Pipe, 1913, Brücke-Museum
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Girl Combing Herself, 1919, Brücke-Museum © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019
Erich Heckel, Man at a Young Age (Self-Portrait), 1906, Brücke-Museum © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019
“I never display unframed pictures in exhibitions … if I do something, I do it as properly and as well as possible, otherwise I would rather not do it at all,” wrote Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1937, thus emphasising how crucial the picture frame was for him. The exhibition Never Apart highlights this bond and for the first time explores the special role and importance of the frame for the Brücke artists.
Indeed, Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff also designed unique frames for their paintings: they employed special profiles, added carved ornamentation, and painted them in colour – always with a view toward creating a compositional unit alongside the picture’s content. Schmidt-Rottluff’s elaborate carvings clearly demonstrate his sculptural understanding of the frame. In the case of Kirchner, the brush often left the canvas and coloured the wood in tones used for the image, thus blurring the line dividing the two.
Be it in exhibition catalogues, on postcards or on the Internet – images by Brücke artists have always tended to be presented without their frames. Yet precisely, a gaze beyond the pictorial field proper offers unique insights into the artists’ ideas and intentions. The exhibition presents an exploration of the Brücke to include the artistic design of the picture frames, which along the lines of the Gesamtkunstwerk, expands the very notion of the image itself. Thanks to countless loans from national and international institutions, as well as many originally framed paintings from the Brücke-Museum collection, Never Apart offers visitors an overview of this hitherto neglected field of artistic endeavour.
The exhibition is curated by Werner Murrer and presented in cooperation with Buchheim Museum in Bernried (28 March–5 July 2020).
Programme
- Public Guided Tour23 Nov
- Curator's Tour23 Nov
- Introduction for teachers25 Nov
- Public Guided Tour30 Nov
- Interactive Tour for Families1 Dec
- Exchange: School and Museum3 Dec
- Curator's Tour5 Dec
- Public Guided Tour7 Dec
- Public Guided Tour8 Dec
- Public Guided Tour14 Dec
- Re-visited I15 Dec
- Public Guided Tour21 Dec
- Public Guided Tour28 Dec
- Public Guided Tour4 Jan 2020
- Public Guided Tour5 Jan 2020
- Public Guided Tour11 Jan 2020
- Brücke After Hours16 Jan 2020
- Public Guided Tour18 Jan 2020
- Public Guided Tour25 Jan 2020
- On Site26 Jan 2020
- Frames in Focus26 Jan 2020
- Public Guided Tour1 Feb 2020
- Winter Holiday Workshop for Girls3 – 7 Feb 2020
- Public Guided Tour8 Feb 2020
- Public Guided Tour9 Feb 2020
- Public Guided Tour15 Feb 2020
- PLAY!16 Feb 2020
- Public Guided Tour22 Feb 2020
- Public Guided Tour23 Feb 2020
- Exhibition Tour23 Feb 2020
- Public Guided Tour29 Feb 2020
- Re-visited II29 Feb 2020
- Public Guided Tour1 Mar 2020
- Public Guided Tour7 Mar 2020
- Re-visited III7 Mar 2020
- Public Guided Tour14 Mar 2020
- Public Guided Tour15 Mar 2020
Staff
Werner Murrer, Curator
Lisa Marei Schmidt, Curator
Daniela Bystron, Curator of Outreach
Katrina Schulz, Assistant Curator
Nora Hogrefe, Assistant Curator of Outreach/lab.Bode