WHICH MODERNISM? INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Sprengel Museum Hannover
6.5. – 17.9.23
The point of departure for the exhibition is LES MAITRES POPULAIRES DE LA RÉALITÉ, the first major overview of “naïve” painting, which was shown concurrently with the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris and subsequently in Zurich, London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In separate chapters, the present exhibition explores the interrelationships between six artists on show there with the exponents of the classical avant-gardes. The selection of works by Henri Rousseau, Camille Bombois and Séraphine Louis together with those by Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall, among others, permits a new reading of modern art.
The exhibition draws largely on works of the Zander Collection besides the collections of the Sprengel Museum Hannover and the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz.
Curated by Reinhard Spieler and Manja Wilkens; Co-curator is Alexander Leinemann.
“Which Modernism? Insiders and ‘Outsiders of the Avant-Garde” is an exhibition of the Sprengel Museum Hannover (6.5. to 17.9.23) and the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (22.10.23 to 14.1.24).
Sprengel Museum Hannover
Kurt-Schwitters-Platz
30169 Hannover
BOOK RELEASE
26 ARTISTS Works from the Zander Collection
André Bauchant | Erich Bödeker | Camille Bombois | Adolf Dietrich | Louis Ducasse | Emerik Feješ | Willem van Genk | Madge Gill | Margarethe Held | Morris Hirshfield | Paul Humphrey | Johann Korec | Augustin Lesage | Séraphine Louis | Henri Rousseau | Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern| Sava Sekulić | Bill Traylor | Adalbert Trillhaase | Oswald Tschirtner | Mirko Virius | Louis Vivin | Alfred Wallis | Scottie Wilson | Adolf Wölfli | Carlo Zinelli
26 ARTISTS. WORKS FROM THE ZANDER COLLECTION
Presenting works, biographies and chronologies of exhibitions, the publication showcases a number of artists in the Zander Collection that have recently drawn particular attention from the art world. In this way, it probes the question: Who is an artist—and who actually decides? Charlotte Zander (1930–2014) was a devoted collector of works by artists without academic training such as Margarethe Held, Morris Hirshfield, Séraphine Louis, Henri Rousseau and Adolf Wölfli. The selection of works for the book is based on the new presentation of the collection at Schloss Bönnigheim in 2016–2017 curated by Susanne Pfeffer.
26 Artists. Works from the Zander Collection
Edited by Susanne Zander, texts by Susanne Pfeffer, Moritz Scheper
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne 2023
ISBN 978 3 7533 0381 9
Naive Realism | From Rousseau to Grandma Moses
at Museum MORE, Gorssel
25.3. – 25.6.23
André Bauchant | Camille Bombois | Emile Branchard | Pedro Cervántez | Adolf Dietrich | Miep Dehé | Jean Ève | Victor Joseph Gatto | Morris Hirshfield | Sipke Houtman | Thorvald Arnst Hoyer | Josephine Joy | John Kane | Lawrence Lebduska | Séraphine Louis | Sal Meijer | Grandma Moses | Nikifor | Dominique Peyronnet | Horace Pippin | Henri Rousseau | René Rimbert | Aloys Sauter | Abraham Smalt | Adalbert Trillhaase |Louis Vivin
Uninhibited, imaginative and touchingly uncomplicated. This appears to be the irresistible appeal of naive realism. But this seemingly straightforward surface conceals a rich artistic spectrum. And its unschooled makers were on the cusp of modern art. Museum MORE is uniting 80 paintings by renowned and less well-known naive realists from the United States and Europe. A unique transatlantic assembly of distinctive artworks and captivating life stories. Inspired by the pioneering exhibition Masters of Popular Painting at New York’s Museum of Modern Art 85 years ago, Museum MORE is reuniting works by many artists featured in the original exhibition. Naive Realism | From Rousseau to Grandma Moses features remarkable art by self-taught artists including Henri Rousseau, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis, Nikifor, Grandma Moses, John Kane, Horace Pippin and Morris Hirshfield.
The Zander Collection is pleased to lend several works by André Bauchant, Adolf Dietrich, Morris Hirshfield, John Kane, Aloys Sauter and Séraphine Louis to the exhibition.
Museum MORE
Hoofdstraat 28
7213 CW Gorssel
GAME OF NO GAMES
Instructions for Walking in High Spirits
Symposium 11.2.23
Symposium
Games of No Games
Instructions for Walking in High Spirits
Reflections on the use of the term Outsider Art
Saturday, 11.2.23, 10:30 am – 4:30 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein
with Lisa Arndt, Nikola Dietrich, Andreas Fischer, Amelie Gappa, Charlotte Laubard, Kito Nedo, Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Susanne Pfeffer, Falk Wolf and Susanne Zander
The symposium aims to explore the question of whether there is a need today for categorisations through terms such as Outsider Art. Is a definition possible at all, or is the term not rather arbitrary and oriented more towards social ideas of norms than towards the artistic work?
The symposium is part of the programme accompanying the exhibition Game of No Games at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, which presents historical and contemporary works by artists who have received little attention throughout art history. Their participation in society and the art world has been limited – as a result of conservatorships, disenfranchisement, or discrimination, to name a few.
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstrasse 6, 50667 Köln
The Painters of the Sacred Heart
at the Böttcherstrasse Museums, Bremen
3.12.22 – 12.3.23
André Bauchant | Camille Bombois | Séraphine Louis | Henri Rousseau | Louis Vivin
The Painters of the Sacred Heart is on view at Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen, from December 3, 2022 until March 12, 2023. Curated by Udo Kittelmann and organized with Dr. Henrike Hans.
The exhibition is a collaboration with Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, the Böttcherstraße Museums, Bremen and the Zander Collection.
Exhibition catalogue:
Die Maler des Heiligen Herzens I The Painters of the Sacred Heart
André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis, Henri Rousseau, Louis Vivin
Texts by Udo Kittelmann, Frank Schmidt, Henrike Hans, Annabel Ruckdeschel
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022
GAME OF NO GAMES
Anleitung zu beschwingtem Gehen (Instructions for Walking in High Spirits)
13.11.22 – 5.3.23
Adelhyd van Bender | Klaus Beyer | Lee Godie | Helga Sophia Goetze | Margarethe Held | Dietrich Orth | Albert Leo Peil | Rabe perplexum | William Scott | Wendy Vainity | August Walla
Curated by Nikola Dietrich and Susanne Zander
Opening: Saturday, 12.11.22, 7 pm
This exhibition presents historical and contemporary works by artists who have received little attention throughout art history. Their participation in society and the art world has been limited—as a result of conservatorships, disenfranchisement, or discrimination, to name a few. This is closely associated with the lack of stable institutional footholds or larger (art) networks and support systems. Conventional categorizations, such as Outsider Art or Art Brut, along with the concurrent emphasis on their alleged distinguishing characteristics—which have so far often been read as narratives on the spontaneous vs. planned, innate vs. learned, naïve vs. sophisticated, or even primitive vs. modern—are currently considered outdated and must be critically challenged. Accordingly, this exhibition intends to encourage a different understanding concerning established ways of thinking in the art world, as well as consolidate an approach to exhibiting and representing different artistic practices that is more readily assimilated.
Through their works, the artists on view at the Kölnischer Kunstverein immerse themselves in self-alienating role-playing games. They can thus take on different identities and undergo a kind of metamorphosis—to the point of becoming animals. “I’m a frigging hunter, but I know that it causes trouble… I have to mask it [what is troublesome] so that I can continue to exist in society at all,” the artist Rabe perplexum declared (in Experimente, Der unbekannte Künstler, 1987). In both her works and life, she adopted a raven persona.
Our aim is not to place the exhibited artists and their artistic practices in the margins of society, nor to portray them as artists that unveil repressed realities or develop suppressed longings behind their apparent detachment from the world. Rather, this exhibition explores how they deliberately work with their dependencies. Adelhyd van Bender, for instance, designed a large and complex body of work that breaks the world into mathematical formulas. Intertwining these with biographical details in associative chains, his practice builds a new order. As a model for his drawings, which were copied and revised several times, he often used letters addressed to him from official authorities, which testified to his constant struggle against the prolongation of his conservatorship.
These artists have often positioned themselves within society, precisely in the non-places of art and interstitial spaces where a larger public could be found, so as to relate to this community and criticize it with a matter-of-factness that is peculiar to each of them. By leaving behind social conventions, norms, and dominant traditions, as well as undermining social or gender performances, these artists have frequently been met with a lack of understanding. This was certainly the case for Helga Goetze, who broke away from a conventional way of life in the 1970s and later advocated free love, sex, and female pleasure almost daily in front of the Memorial Church in Berlin.
The radical potential of the works gathered here resides in the fact that they insist on unfulfilled socio-political promises and, as Dietrich Orth hints at in one of his works that gives the exhibition its title, provide instructions and suggestions for a better, fairer way of treating one another. They manifest a profound longing directed toward the future—something that can also be understood as a critique of the present.
The Painters of the Sacred Heart at Museum Frieder Burda
16.7. – 20.11.22
André Bauchant | Camille Bombois | Séraphine Louis | Henri Rousseau | Louis Vivin
Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, presents The Painters of the Sacred Heart. The exhibition, curated by Udo Kittelmann, is on view from July 16 until November 20, 2022.
With the exception of Henri Rousseau, whose work found influential supporters early on, the complex oeuvres of the five artists in the exhibition are still largely unknown to wider audiences. Over the decades, they have been branded “naïfs,” identified as exponents of a nascent modern primitivism, and finally labeled “outsider artists.” The new exhibition now places their output in a different context, framing them as early critics of modernism.
Primarily based on selected works from the collection of Charlotte Zander, who unerringly pursued her personal vision, collecting art beyond the systematically organized canon, the exhibition presents the works of these outstanding and widely underappreciated artists, the “Painters of the Sacred Heart,” in unprecedented breadth.
The exhibition was organized in cooperation with Museen Böttcherstraße, Bremen, where it will subsequently be on view from December 3, 2022, until March 12, 2023.
The following catalogue is released in conjunction with the exhibition:
Die Maler des Heiligen Herzens / The Painters of the Sacred Heart
André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis, Henri Rousseau, Louis Vivin
Writings by Udo Kittelmann, Frank Schmidt, Henrike Hans, Annabel Ruckdeschel
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022