Archive

Never Apart.
Frames and Pictures by the
Brücke Artists

16. November 2019 to 
15. March 2020

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mädchen in Southwester, 1912/20, Privat Collection Switzerland

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Village Corner, 1910, Brücke-Museum, Karl und Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Stiftung © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Colorful Dance, 1933, Sammlung E. W. Kornfeld

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © Brücke-Museum

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller with Pipe, 1913, Brücke-Museum

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © 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

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © Brücke-Museum

1 of 9
←
→

“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).

You can watch the accompanying film with Werner Murrer by Sebastian Eschenbach, Sammler und Jäger Filmproduktion GmbH, here.

External content
I agree that contents of the Brücke-Museum may be displayed to me via the external provider youtu.be. This means that personal data will be transferred to third party platforms. Brücke-Museum has no influence on this. You can read more about this in our privacy policy.

Artists

Programme

See all

Publications

2020–2022

Never Apart
Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists (2020)

Exhibition Catalogue
Eds.: Werner Murrer, Lisa Marei Schmidt & Daniel J. Schreiber
Texts: Richard Ford, Detlef Göschel, Wolfgang Henze, Olaf Lemke, Eva Mendgen, Werner Murrer, Bernd Müller, Tanja Pirsig-Marshall, Gerd Presler, Christiane Remm, Tessa Rosebrock, Marianne Saal, Elisabeth Schlesinger, Lisa Marei Schmidt, Daniel J. Schreiber, Katrina Schulz, Aya Soika, Maria Tischner and Kirsten Voigt
Publ.: Koenig Books

A part of the exhibition catalogue is also available online thanks to WERNER MURRER RAHMEN.

456 pages
300 colour images
German
ISBN 9 783960 987284
€ 49,95
On sale at the museum, shipping only upon prepayment, price excludes postage

Order

2020–2022

Never Apart
Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists (2020)

Information/Downloads

Game of Cards for Kids

The set of cards can guide kids through the exhibition. They are free to draw, tell stories, and express their ideas and observations. Some activities can also be done at home or at school.

Download

Game of Cards for Kids

Press

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