by Adele R
Originally published in Currents August/September 2004

 

Summertime in Hamburg often includes a lot of rainy days, but this year you can get the outdoors indoors and experience Mother Nature at her most beautiful at three terrific art exhibitions: atmospheric cloud formations in a double show of landscape painters, including Constable, Turner and Corot, at the Bucerius Kunst Forum and The Jenisch Haus Museum, and color-splashed gardens at the Hamburger Kunsthalle by Max Liebermann, Germany’s most famous Impressionist.

The Bucerius Kunst Forum and Jenisch Haus: Wolkenbilder (Cloud Pictures)

Artists have been painting cloud-filled skies for centuries and still do, of course. Spectacular heavens play a major role in the religious and mythological works from the Renaissance through the Baroque period and are a notable part of the glorious landscapes of the Netherlands painters of the 17th century. And the Bucerius Kunst Forum does include paintings from the 15th to 20th centuries which illustrate this fact. But the focus of the two Cloud Pictures exhibitions is the correlation between the new science of meteorology, which became a popular passion in the 1800s, and how the artist incorporated the scientific studies in artistic expression. Expect the big, glorious Constables and Turners and the like, mostly at Bucerius, but there are also many, very small, canvases here; oil sketches and cloud studies by artists of the 1800s, both famous and not so well-known. One of the latter is Johann Georg von Dillis who is himself the subject of a small exhibition at the Kunsthalle. There too, you can see some of his most beautiful cloud studies as well as at the Bucerius.

The Jenisch Haus is even more concerned with art’s discovery of meteorology. Who knew that Johann Wolfgang Goethe, for example, was fascinated by the science and painted and sketched cloud formations constantly, complete with documentation, as well as wrote poetry on the subject? At this museum, you will find the oil sketches and cloud studies from Constable and other wonderful artists, but also from important scientists of the time such as Luke Howard, who classified the cloud formations for the first time in London at the end of the 1700s and founded modern meteorology.

The Jenisch Haus offers something even more intriguing: a recreation of Jacques-Philippe de Loutherbourg’s paper theater, the Eidophusikon from 1780 (roughly translated as “imitation of nature”) by a British model-theater artist, Robert Poulter, including a four-minute “performance” (it’s paper, remember – no actors): Mondays through Fridays at 16:00 and Saturdays and Sundays at 13:00 and 16:00. Be sure to schedule your visit to include this delightful 18th century experience.

The cumulative effect of viewing these two exhibitions with well over 200 paintings and drawings of the heavens, especially the smaller paintings, drawings and oil sketches, is to lift a viewer right up to the skies, to be left floating. I acerbated this delightful sensation by seeing both exhibits in one day, easily done with private transportation. What could be a better finale to all this than a picnic at the Jenisch Haus Park on the Elbe? Or, if it is (yet again) a rainy day, try the cafeteria downstairs at the Bucerius.

In Max Liebermann’s Garden at the Kunsthalle

This exhibition is the second in the new Hubertus Wald Forum at the Kunsthalle, and the curators make use of the architecturally undefined space by a spatial recreation of Max Liebermann’s garden in Berlin’s Wannsee, the subject of over 200 works by Liebermann between 1910, when his summer residence, his “castle by the lake,” was built, and his death in 1935. The layout of the exhibition follows the garden, a diagram of which is found at the left as you enter the Hubertus Wald Forum and again, just to the left of the “garden’s terrace” above two short flights of stairs on either side leading down to the paintings. Don’t miss the room on the far right of this “terrace,” which contains some of the most beautiful paintings. These are of the garden area in front of the house, including the “farmer’s garden” and the cutting flowerbeds. Although credit is given to another landscape architect of the time, the real designer of the famous garden was Alfred Lichtwark, then director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and a great friend of Liebermann. He evidently inspired Liebermann to develop his garden styled on some of the great Hamburg gardens along the Elbe and contributed constant advice and direction.

Over 100 of Liebermann’s garden paintings (and some portraits of himself and his family) take you instantly into a world of formal flower beds and hedged gardens, tall birches, a beautiful lake and glimpses of a gracious villa. In other words, a scrupulous look into a privileged bourgeois life of the early 20th century. It is a particularly moving experience because the aftermath of this seemingly carefree summer life was so tragic. Liebermann died in 1935 after witnessing, with great disgust and unease according to his papers, Hitler’s inauguration as Reichskanzler from the roof of his Berlin house. In 1937, Liebermann’s paintings at the Berlin Nationalgalerie were confiscated by the Nazis. In 1938, his daughter Kaethe, whose “Aryan” husband had been forced to give up his job because of his Jewish wife, emigrated with her family to the USA. In 1940, the Nazis forced Liebermann’s widow, Marthe, to turn over the villa and gardens, and all the contents of the house, to the Reichspost for 160,000 Reichsmarks, which she was forbidden to touch. Then in March 1943, unable to arrange emigration, Martha Liebermann was notified to prepare for deportation. She killed herself before they could come for her.

Some visitors might be tempted to compare Liebermann’s Wannsee garden paintings with those of Monet’s at Giverny. But, rather than stack up the great impressionist’s work against these less radical, slightly more conventional scenes, it is best to leave Monet in France and let this Hamburg summer be filled with the brilliant flowers, sunlight, and charming views at the Liebermann villa in Wannsee.