Expressionism Revisited
Panel III: Schlaglichter auf aktuelle Forschung (DE & EN)

The panel puts a spotlight on shifts in perspective, the embrace of cultural studies approaches, and the deconstruction of popular narratives that have injected significant dynamism into international expressionism research in recent years. Through critical examination of previously unknown sources, analysis of newly gathered data on provenance and collection history, and exploration of the cultural policy framework within Western museum institutions, the presentations traverse a broad spectrum. They range from reevaluating the artistic assimilation of non-European cultural heritage in the works of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to examining the reception of German expressionism in the United States and France.

Host: Dr. Andrea Meyer (Technische Universität Berlin)

Dr. Andrea Meyer is a research associate at the Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies at TU Berlin since 2003. She is a member of the research consortium Museums and Society - Mapping the Social as well as the international network Making Museum Professionals, 1850-the present. Her research focuses on museum history and the visual arts of modernity. Currently, she is engaged in the research project Reverse Collection History, which explores the artistic reception of cultural artifacts from the former colony of Cameroon in Germany.

Dr. Sol Izquierdo de la Viña (Technische Universität Berlin): Entangled Images of India: A Transcultural Perspective on Kirchner’s Appropriation (EN)

The circulation of stories, images, and cultural assets from South Asia, which had a strong impact on art and society in Germany at the turn of the 20th century, created a stereotyped imaginary of India. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was fascinated by two ancient Indian artworks in particular, the play Śakuntalā and the Buddhist murals of Ajanta. While in Dresden these works corresponded to orientalist Western desires, in Kolkata they served the pro-independence movement to recover a vernacular tradition previously censored by colonial institutions. Paying attention to both local contexts, Sol Izquierdo de la Viña challenges the Eurocentric narrative of art history and rehearses a decentered cartography of modernisms entangled processes.

Dr. Sol Izquierdo de la Viña is a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Berlin, where she is conducting research on the Austrian-Jewish artist Lene Schneider-Kainer. She obtained her PhD in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2021. Her dissertation, which was awarded the Enrique Fuentes Quintana Prize for Humanities, examined Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s reception of Indian art from a transcultural and postcolonial perspective. She recently co-curated the exhibition Whose Expression? The Brücke Artists and Colonialism at the Brücke-Museum Berlin.

Matthias Gegner (Kirchner Museum Davos): Ambiguitäten untersuchen und aushalten – Karl Schmidt-Rottluffs Stillleben und seine Künstlersammlung (DE)

During his lifetime, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff not only amassed a comprehensive collection of ethnological artifacts and natural specimens, but also incorporated these objects into his numerous still lifes. Drawing on critical research perspectives of recent years, a systematic analysis of extensive primary sources unveils the inherent personal and artistic ambiguities of the expressionist, while also providing a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted painted representations of these collected objects in his artworks.

Matthias Gegner is assistant curator at the Kirchner Museum Davos. He previously studied museology and art history with a focus on art technology in Berlin. He was awarded the title of top graduate and received a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. In addition to his studies, he actively participated as a student assistant in several university research projects. In 2022, he completed his studies with a thesis on the painterly representation of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s artist collection.

Dr. Max Koss und Fabio Mariani (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg): Actual Time of Arrival: The Acquisition of Expressionist Art by United States Museums (EN)

The paper analyzes the arrival of Expressionist art in American museums using a data-driven methodology. Questioning the narrative of a belated arrival of Expressionism in museums in the United States, the paper focuses on identifying temporal and geographical trends that suggest a more nuanced history of Expressionist reception in America.

Dr. Max Koss is a Research Associate at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Max holds an MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (BSc). Their research interests are periodical studies, material histories of modern art, and the social and economic history of art. Max’s most recent publication, together with Lynn Rother and Fabio Mariani, is Hidden Value: Provenance as a Source for Economic and Social History (Economic History Yearbook, 2023).

Fabio Mariani is Digital Humanities Research Associate at Leuphana University Lüneburg, where he is also a PhD candidate on Vague, Incomplete, Subjective, and Uncertain Information in Digital Art History. Fabio’s current research focuses on semantic web technologies applied to complex art historical information through the use of AI. His most recent publication, together with Lynn Rother and Max Koss, is Hidden Value: Provenance as a Source for Economic and Social History (Economic History Yearbook, 2023).

Michael Rauch (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne): Multiple Expressionismen: Taxonomie als Problem der Kunsthistoriografie? (DE)

Within the French context of reception and exhibition, German Expressionism proves to be a hermeneutical problem in the “short 20th century.” Faced with obsolete ideologies and a new world order, the question arises whether the exhibition Le fauvisme ou ‘l’épreuve du feu’ (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 1999/2000) subjects Expressionism or Fauvism to a geographical redefinition as a pan-European phenomenon, from Paris to Munich, Budapest to Berlin, and Moscow.

Michael Rauch studied art history and communication sciences in Munich, Paris, and Venice. He worked for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Leopold Museum in Vienna, and most recently at the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK Paris). Currently, he is writing a doctoral thesis on the reception of German Expressionism in France from a postmodern perspective. A DAAD scholarship enabled him to review unedited source materials in numerous archives and conduct extensive interviews with artists and curators.

This is a closed event with a limited number of participants. The event will be digitally broadcast live.
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