Little escap(ad)e: Art immersion, part 3, and finale

The third part of my art immersion trip week before last was a trip to my favorite painter Emil Nolde. The Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden is currently showing a large exhibition of his paintings and water colours. Although I grew up in that area of southern Germany I had not yet been to the museum, which was opened only after I moved to a different part of Germany.

It is a very nice museum, with lots of light, an open-view walkway instead of a stairwell, and wonderful presentation rooms.

Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden,
picture taken from museum's website

However, it was so packed with people that it was hard to get to see the paintings at all. It was rather noisy, you could hardly concentrate, and as I am thinking back to it after a few days have gone by, I realize that not too much of this exhibition visit has stayed with me... Too bad. I didn’t even take any decent pictures of the four flower beds that municipal gardeners had arranged in front of the building from inspirations of some of Nolde’s famous paintings of his garden. Of course, I have seen the garden itself several times, and four individual flower beds don’t match the overall ensemble simply due to size difference, and location matters as well (the clouds look differently in Seebüll than in southern Germany). But the only thing I can say of this suggestion at art immersion is: pick a day with decidedly fewer visitors!

However, a week after my return from that trip one other chance opened up: a day excursion to Murnau, village of the “Blaue Reiter”, where the Schlossmuseum Murnau is currently presenting the results of their extended searches for Erma Bossi, a friend and colleague of Gabriele Münter and Wladimir Kandinsky. She is included in Münter’s painting of a discussion scene in her house from 1909/10, 

"Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the table, 1909/10" by Gabriele Münter,
picture of postcard of the painting

she exhibited with the circle of Blaue Reiter several times and has all but disappeared from art history books.

Born 1875 and raised in northern Italy, Bossi started paiting in Triest. She came to Munich and became a part of the circle trying to establish new directions in art that later became the Blaue Reiter group, travelled a lot, and returned to Italy probably before 1920. She continued painting, lived in Mailand mostly, and died in 1952.

The exhibition is an interesting show of a wide combination of items: paintings from Münter and other members of the circles they belonged to, photos, report cards from her school years, and a number of paintings by Bossi, sometimes accompanied by other painters’ paintings on the same subject or in a similar manner.

Erma Bossi, "Bathers", approx. 1911, picture from postcard

Erma Bossi, "In the Garden", approx. 1910,
picture from postcard

The problem about Bossi’s paintings is that the whereabouts about many of them seem to be completely unknown. The catalgoue lists at least a dozen of paintings which were catalogued and photographed in the nineties by a researcher who had started working on Bossi in the early seventies – but which could not be found for this exhibition.

No comment here on why the male members of Blauer Reiter only became the really famous ones...

In the afternoon I went to Münter’s house, located just on the other side of the railroad tracks, where she and Kandinsky spent several summers while painting in and around Murnau before the war. 

Gabriele Münter's house - view from the garden

view onto garden and Murnau castle and church,
from upstairs window

inside the house

This is the house where Gabriele Münter lived permanently after 1930, and where she kept all those paintings that she later donated to the city of Munich and which became the biggest asset of Lenbachhaus, known today as THE museum on Blaue Reiter.

No comment here on whether Münter would be as known today as she luckily is if she hadn’t been the one to make that donation...

More thoughts on Kathy Loomis’ statements

After posting yesterday I spent a long time during which I couldn’t go to sleep because I kept thinking about the whole matter of pictorial quilts, quilts in the art world, art in the quilting world, women in art etc.

This morning I talked to an friend of mine who is a goldsmith by training, and an artist – graduate of Munich Art School – and she pointed out to me that goldsmiths/jewellers face the same problem. Jewellery has a hard time being recognized as art, because it is considered decorative, a craft.

We both agreed on that it all boils down to the question of „what is art?“ What is the line that separates some kind of self-expression from art.

For example, when you see the following picture and know that it was drawn by a five-year-old boy, you would probably not consider it to be 'art':

However, if it bore a different signature, say 'Picasso', you might assume it to be an unknown picture dating from his blue period. (Far-fetched, I know, but let's just assume.)

Or, the above question put differently: „what sells as art?“ It is one’s own decision whether one is determined to make good art or whether one wants to join into the large group of commercial artists.
If you want to sell your work, you may also have to sell your soul. If you believe strongly in what you’re doing you might not have the nerve or time or need to sell what your are making. Vincent Van Gogh certainly strongly believed in what he was doing and didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to sell his pictures. (Of course, he was lucky in that he had a brother who paid the bills). His pictures do sell well today, though. I think they do because he only concentrated on painting good pictures, and not whether anybody wanted to have or see them, as long as he thought they were showing that he was getting better and better in what he was doing.

Another point my friend and I agreed on was that if quilters want to be recognized by the ‚real art people’ and participate in the art market (i.e. get their share of the money on that market) they need to get out into the real world and meddle with the real art people. Quilters, however, tend to hang out with their fellow quilters, and as much fun as quilt festivals may be, they simply are a big family convention – quilters meeting and talking to other quilters. The quilt world is a closed circle, and an art critic is not bound to go on the lookout for interesting new artist talents at a quilt show, even if it be a large one such as Houston, or the international quilts festivals in Birmingham, England, or Ste. Marie aux Mines, France.

Then, of course, there is the problem of making art with a needle, the wonderful title of Kathy Loomis’s blog. Any kind of needlework – as making jewellery, weaving, pottery – is still considered a ‚craft’. And, as Julia from NZ said, many quilters are perfectly content with considering themselves as crafters.

In big business art, the artist has the idea and employs crafters to execute these ideas. Ai WeiWei’s catalogue for his "So Sorry" exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, last year, shows this very clearly:



Ai WeiWei's Map of China, as it is being executed,
photo of the page in catalogue




Ai WeiWei's carpet for the hall in the museum,
as it is being made, photo of the relevant page in the catalogue



Ai WeiWei's various tables -
photo of the page in the catalogue

Obviously he did do the vases himself.
Photo of the page in the catalogue

Ai WeiWei has the ideas, crafters execute them for him, and he earns the credit. Don’t know how well he pays the crafters … (Don't get me wrong - I loved the exhibit and I think he has great ideas, and I think it honorable that he would employ people to do the manual work.)

I won’t go into the fact that the very large majority of quilters are women. That’s too much to talk about tonight!

Let me – and/or Kathy – know what you think, I’d be very interested in your thoughts.