"Art is not just the frosting on the cake... but the yeast in the dough" by Ulrike H
At the same time, he is putting his credo "less is more" into action. Gaßner plans to cut down the number of exhibitions each year from 24 to 12. Quality not quantity is the issue in today's mass media bombardment of fast-cut, moving images. "The museum as a power station, art itself as a source for life energy," is Mr. Gaßner's vision of the museum in the future. Earlier in his career, Gaßner was successful as director of exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and as director of Essen's Volkwang Museum. In Essen he curated a Cezanne exhibit that drew the attention of 380,000 visitors, a record few German museums can top. The first exhibition Gaßner will curate at the Kunsthalle will be this autumn's "Casper David Friedrich - the discovery of the Romantic" followed next spring by "The Black Square. The Icon of Modernism" in cooperation with the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Two intriguing ex-hibitions to be seen currently at the Kunsthalle and Galerie der Gegenwart are Edvard Munch and Horst Janssen. Edvard Munch's exhibit "..aus dem modernen Seelen-leben" at the Hubertus-Wald-Forum offers some comfort for all of us who can't see the first American retrospective of this great Norwegian painter, printmaker and draftsman at MoMA in New York. Edvard Munch (1863-1944) claimed, "..to paint what I saw, not what I see," thus struggling to shed light on anxiety as an existential problem, going hand in hand with the fundamental components of human existence: birth, love and death.
The 140 graphic works and 20 paintings on view intensely show the key issues of the provocative Expressionist artist: the battle of the sexes, angst, melancholy, illness and death. The exhibition unfolds around Munch's famous painting MADONNA, 1893-95, which sparked a whole body of graphic art. Among these works is a color lithograph MADONNA from 1895-1902, which shows a sensu-ous, seductive Madonna, border-ed with a sperm-like pattern, and an embryo-like figure looking like a skull crouching in the lower left corner. In 1904 this lithograph was too controversial to be exhibited at the Kunsthalle. That times have changed is also documented by Horst Janssen (1929-1995) in "The Hour of Mylene". The series of twelve erotic etchings is very explicit. Janssen's delicate figures seem to be made out of silk filaments, crawling and twisting across the paper in bizarre movements, caught and almost frozen in the act. The cycle L'HEURE DE MYLENE (1962) is one of the most important graphic series of Janssen's early work. Also on view are twenty-three sketches and drawings for the series. "The exhibition shows the whole spectrum of Janssen's graphic work," states Dr. Petra Roettig, curator of the show, "and the influence which the artists James Ensor and Paul Klee had on Janssen's artistic style at that time."
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"Art is not just the frost-ing on the cake... but the yeast in the dough," Prof. Dr. Hubertus Gaßner quot-ed Richard von Weizäcker the other day. The energetic and charming new director of Hamburg's biggest mu-seum, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, has big plans for the museum. The fact that the Kunsthalle finds itself in a difficult financial situation, like any other public museum for that matter, does not discourage him in the least: "I will not take the advice of the business consultants and cut down on opening times and raise ticket prices. I believe we have to have more visitors, more international exposure, to be more assertive and our income situation will improve."
