Academic literature on the topic 'Alte Pinakothek (Munich, Germany)'

In the first half of the 19th century in literature on art the term ‘Old Masters’ was disseminated (Alte Meister, maître ancienns, etc.), this in relation to the concept of New Masters. However, contrary to the widespread view, it did not result from the name institutionalization of public museums (in Munich the name Alte Pinakothek was given in 1853, while in Dresden the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister was given its name only after 1956). Both names, however, feature in collection catalogues, books, articles, press reports, as well as tourist guides. The term ‘Old Masters’ with reference to the artists of the modern era appeared in the late 17th century among the circles of English connoisseurs, amateur experts in art (John Evelyn, 1696). Meanwhile, the Great Tradition: from Filippo Villani and Alberti to Bellori, Baldinucci, and even Winckelmann, implied the use of the category of ‘Old Masters’ (antico, vecchio) in reference to ancient: Greek-Roman artists. There existed this general conceptual opposition: old (identified with ancient) v. new (the modern era). An attempt is made to answer when this tradition was broken with, when and from what sources the concept (and subsequently the term) ‘Old Masters’ to define artists later than ancient was formed; namely the artists who are today referred to as mediaeval and modern (13th–18th c.). It was not a single moment in history, but a long intermittent process, leading to 18th- century connoisseurs and scholars who formalized early-modern collecting, antiquarian market, and museology. The discerning and naming of the category in-between ancient masters (those referred to appropriately as ‘old’) and contemporary or recent (‘new’) artists resulted from the attempts made to systemize and categorize the chronology of art history for the needs of new collector- and connoisseurship in the second half of the 16th and in the 17th century. The old continuum of history of art was disrupted by Giorgio Vasari (Vite, 1550, 1568) who created the category of ‘non-ancient old’, ‘our old masters’, or ‘old-new’ masters (vecchi e non antichi, vecchi maestri nostri, i nostri vecchi, i vecchi moderni). The intuition of this ‘in-between’ the vecchi moderni and maestri moderni can be found in some writers-connoisseurs in the early 17th (e.g. Giulio Mancini). The Vasarian category of the ‘old modern’ is most fully reflected in the compartmentalizing of history conducted by Carel van Mander (Het Schilder-Boeck, 1604), who divided painters into: 1) oude (oude antijcke), ancient, antique, 2) oude modern, namely old modern; 3) modern; very modern, living currently. The oude modern constitute a sequence of artists beginning with the Van Eyck brothers to Marten de Vosa, preceding the era of ‘the famous living Netherlandish painters’. The in-between status of ‘old modern’ was the topic of discourse among the academic circles, formulated by Jean de La Bruyère (1688; the principle of moving the caesura between antiquité and modernité), Charles Perrault (1687–1697: category of le notre siècle preceded by le siècle passé, namely the grand masters of the Renaissance), and Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi writing from the position of an academic studioso for connoisseurs and collectors (Abecedario pittorico, 1704, 1719, 1733, 1753; the antichimoderni category as distinct from the i viventi). Together with Christian von Mechel (1781, 1783) the new understanding of ‘old modernity’ enters the scholarly domain of museology and the devising of displays in royal and ducal galleries opened to the public, undergoing the division into national categories (schools) and chronological ones in history of art becoming more a science (hence the alte niederländische/deutsche Meister or Schule). While planning and describing painterly schools at the Vienna Belvedere Gallery, the learned historian and expert creates a tripartite division of history, already without any reference to antiquity, and with a meaningful shift in eras: Alte, Neuere, and lebende Meister, namely ‘Old Masters’ (14th–16th/17th c.), ‘New Masters’ (Late 17th c. and the first half of the 18th c.), and contemporary ‘living artists’. The Alte Meister ceases to define ancient artists, while at the same time the unequivocally intensifying hegemony of antique attitudes in collecting and museology leads almost to an ardent defence of the right to collect only ‘new’ masters, namely those active recently or contemporarily. It is undertaken with fervour by Ludwig Christian von Hagedorn in his correspondence with his brother (1748), reflecting the Enlightenment cult of modernité, crucial for the mental culture of pre-Revolution France, and also having impact on the German region. As much as the new terminology became well rooted in the German-speaking regions (also in terminology applied in auction catalogues in 1719–1800, and obviously in the 19th century for good) and English-speaking ones (where the term ‘Old Masters’ was also used in press in reference to the collections of the National Gallery formed in 1824), in the French circles of the 18th century the traditional division into the ‘old’, namely ancient, and ‘new’, namely modern, was maintained (e.g. Recueil d’Estampes by Pierre Crozat), and in the early 19th century, adopted were the terms used in writings in relation to the Academy Salon (from 1791 located at Louvre’s Salon Carré) which was the venue for alternating displays of old and contemporary art, this justified in view of political and nationalistic legitimization of the oeuvre of the French through the connection with the tradition of the great masters of the past (Charles-Paul Landon, Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain). As for the German-speaking regions, what played a particular role in consolidating the term: alte Meister, was the increasing Enlightenment – Romantic Medievalism as well as the cult of the Germanic past, and with it a revaluation of old-German painting: altdeutsch. The revision of old-German art in Weimar and Dresden, particularly within the Kunstfreunde circles, took place: from the category of barbarism and Gothic ineptitude, to the apology of the Teutonic spirit and true religiousness of the German Middle Ages (partic. Johann Gottlob von Quandt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). In this respect what actually had an impact was the traditional terminology backup formed in the Renaissance Humanist Germanics (ethnogenetic studies in ancient Germanic peoples, their customs, and language), which introduced the understanding of ancient times different from classical-ancient or Biblical-Christian into German historiography, and prepared grounds for the altdeutsche Geschichte and altdeutsche Kunst/Meister concepts. A different source area must have been provided by the Reformation and its iconoclasm, as well as the reaction to it, both on the Catholic, post-Tridentine side, and moderate Lutheran: in the form of paintings, often regarded by the people as ‘holy’ and ‘miraculous’; these were frequently ancient presentations, either Italo-Byzantine icons or works respected for their old age. Their ‘antiquity’ value raised by their defenders as symbols of the precedence of Christian cult at a given place contributed to the development of the concept of ‘ancient’ and ‘old’ painters in the 17th–18th century.

The architect Hans Döllgast (1891–1974) has steadily gained in international recognition. His works of postwar reconstruction in Munich have been heralded as original contributions to modern architecture that resist historiographic classifications, such as modernist vs regionalist, avant garde vs traditionalist, or internationalist vs nationalist. Döllgast was also a revered pedagogue and prolific author, and his varied writings have yet to receive much scholarly attention. Döllgast’s books and essays present a significant body of sources that shed light on the complexity of architectural discourse in the formative years of modern architecture in Germany. This article considers Döllgast’s study of farmhouse ‘parlours’, entitled Alte und neue Bauernstuben (‘Old and New Farmhouse Parlours’) was first published in 1937. It was both his most popular book and the one that critics and historians have paid least attention to. Though it may appear antiquarian at first glance, it is in fact both critical and contemporary in spirit. Döllgast’s study sheds light upon his mature thinking about the relevance of the vernacular for the modern house. It also serves to question a general assumption in the existing literature that Döllgast only engaged with tenets of modern architecture after the war, having been a regionalist aloof from the discourse of the modern movement prior to the war. Scholars have shown that the loaded motif of the vernacular was never the sole preserve of anti-modernist conservatives and played a significant, if ambivalent, role within modernist discourse, from the late Wilhelmine period to postwar West Germany. While it reflects these wider trends, Alte und neue Bauernstuben also eschews alignment with the dominant strands of architectural discourse of its time by charting an independent-minded path in the context of imposed totalitarian uniformity. Döllgast’s text thus stands out in modern architectural discourse less for adducing the farmhouse as such, than for developing such a close, multifaceted reading of a particular vernacular interior, while alluding to more than elaborating its relevance for contemporary architecture. Ultimately, Döllgast’s study served him to develop a practical phenomenology of dwelling.

AbstractA painting entitled Le jeune Dessinateur (the young draughtsman), identified in 1932 by Hans Schneider as an early work by Jan Lievens and hung in the Louvre together with Rembrandt, should still, according to prevailing scholarly opinion, be attributed to the much younger Wallerent Vaillant on the basis of a reproduction engraving with his address. It was made after Vaillant and Michael Sweerts had come across the more than 30-year old Lievens painting in about 1660 which inspired them to make variants of their own in the style of their times - variants which Vaillant also published as engravings. This important consequence underlines the status of an unrecognised major work by the young Jan Lievens, a work which in terms of content and form has much to tell us about painting in Leiden around 1628. The curious iconography (the boy is not drawing, but studying drawings, in keeping with Schneider's understanding of the title, Knabe in Atelier (Boy in the Studio), is found only in Pieter Codde's work of that period. Codde owned many works by Leiden painters, prompting Abraham Bredius to suggest as early as 1888 that this Amsterdam painter worked in Leiden for a while. A studio prop in the form of a plaster cast of the infant Jesus from Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna casts a new light on Lievens' interest in the great exemplars of classical art, an interest which Constantijn Huygens failed to perceive when he visited the studio. Lievens had depicted the figure before, in oblique perspective ; it was evidently important for the training of his ability to render three-dimensionality. The group of studio plaster casts is related to a hitherto anonymous Leiden Still Life with Books dating from about 1628, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Discussed earlier in connection with Lievens, this still life is now assigned to Lievens himself, an attribution which is supported by additional arguments. The choice of motif and monochrome colouring has aspects in common with the Vanitas and still lifes with books painted by Jan Davidz. de Heem during the same period and endorsing, with new arguments, his connection with Lievens' and Rembrandt's circle. Lievens' Boy in the Studio, finally, is of significance for the interpretation of Rembrandt's Young Painter in the Studio in Boston, painted at the same time. The two pictures would appear to be linked by antithetical basic statements and art education.

Artikelbeginn:[English title and abstract below] In der Theatergeschichte wurde von Aristoteles bis Brecht immer wieder angenommen, dass ein Bühnengeschehen das Publikum beeinflussen kann. Entsprechend nahe liegt der Gedanke, das Theater als Erziehungsinstrument einzusetzen, wie es z. B. im Jesuitentheater der Renaissance oder den didaktischen Dramen der Aufklärung der Fall war. Stand bei Ersteren die Vermittlung der christlichen Heilslehre im Mittelpunkt, können Letztere als »Einübung in gesellschaftliche Verhaltensnormen« (Schedler 1974, S. 23) verstanden werden. Auch das emanzipatorische Kindertheater der 1960er Jahre verfolgt erzieherische Ziele, obgleich diese sich signifikant von den oben genannten unterscheiden. Hier sollen Kinder nicht lernen, indem neue Ängste erzeugt, »sondern alte benannt [und] sprachlich faßbar« gemacht werden (Reisner 1983, S. 116). When Grimm and GRIPS Were Still FoesEmancipatory Children’s Theatre and the SCHAUBURG Theatre in MunichThe 1968 movement changed children’s theatre in Germany – including the SCHAUBURG Theatre in Munich. When Norbert J. Mayer became the new manager in 1969, he no longer staged fairy tales like those by the Brothers Grimm. Instead he put on new and different kinds of plays that reflected children’s everyday lives, such as those created by the GRIPS theatre or by Helmut Walbert. He also worked with educationists and psychologists and involved young people in various ways, for example by inviting them to rehearsals and discussing their ideas about the theatre. This kind of theatre was called ›emancipatory‹ and it aimed to help children to develop self-confidence and political awareness. The plays of the so-called ›emancipatory theatre‹ had a lasting influence on children’s theatre not only in Munich but also throughout Germany.

AbstractThe focus of this chapter is the reinstallation of Thomas Hirschhorn’s room installation Doppelgarage (2002) in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, in 2016. Those responsible (curator and conservator) decided on a reconstruction using only conservation documentation—without the artist’s participation. This decision had several immediate consequences: the artist reacted adversely to it, while it also exposed an apparent contradiction in current conservation theory, including the risk of losing “knowing-how” (as distinct from “knowing-that”) about the reconstruction process, and led to unexpected changes in the roles of the actors involved. As the one who served as conservator managing the reconstruction in 2016, I use this opportunity to examine my actions and to embed them in the current theoretical discussion on conserving installation art. If the conservator’s feelings do not tend to be an object of professional contemplation, I explore and describe them here as indicators of potential problems in the reconstruction Hirschhorn’s work. Specifically, I argue that reflection on those issues contributes to bridging important gaps between theoretical frameworks of conservation and the methods selected for this project.

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.” Thomas Mann’s 1924 words on war, memory, and art also distils his emblematic encounter with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.1 Transported from Colmar to Munich in October 1917, exhibited from 1918–19 at the Munich Alte Pinakothek, as this article explores, it became the focus of an extraordinary moment of German national crisis and expiation widely imaged, projected, reported, and seen by countless visitors including Mann. My concerns are two-fold. First, to explore responses in word and image stimulated by the Altarpiece’s display and extensive photographic imaging in the contexts of a significant cultural shift toward engagement with the potency of medieval art, and its mediation of practices of “uncanny” memory. Entwined with an acute sense of present trauma, this activates what Hans Belting calls the borderlines between memory and image; devotion and distance2—pivoting in 1918–19 on the Altarpiece’s power as an afterlife, restaged to make present what appears absent: a medieval turbulence as a contemporary imaging and consciousness of pain. Second is to consider how this process becomes amplified in the aftermath of the war, in particular, via its writing as an unheimlich past in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, echoed in Marc Bloch’s invocation of a material memory of power, malady and sacred touch in his Les Rois thaumaturges, both 1924. Thus the conclusions suggest the recurrent, yet overlooked artistic figure of pre-modern memory within this constellation as pivotal to an imaginary of the unimaginable of what is seen and unseen.

At Christmas time, the narrator visits the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and stands before a triptych by Jan Joest van Kalkar, contemplating why this particular Nativity brings midwife Lovie Shelton to mind.