SPECIAL EXHIBITION

The portrayal of the Rhine and landscapes along its banks by pictorial artists was hardly ever more varied than in the first decades of the 20th century. In numerous works, above all by the young and progressive artists of the Rhineland, the powerful stream is rendered through a wide range of motifs, styles, and metaphors. On the one hand, this was the result of experimentation with the various avant-garde art currents that were transmitted above all in cities of the Rhineland such as Düsseldorf and Cologne through brisk international exhibiting. And, on the other hand, it was a consequence of the dramatic political, economic, and social upheavals and transformations that occurred before and after the first world war.

Identification with the Rhine and the Rhineland was strong among the artists. Only very few new associations were founded that did not include the Rhine in their name. Thus, in 1913, in response to the desire for a new artistic label distinct from avant-garde circles in Berlin and Munich, August Macke gave his friends in the group of up-and-coming artists the name “Rhineland Expressionists” as a mark of their identity. In Düsseldorf, “The Young Rhineland” was formed in 1919; in 1923 the “Rhine Group”; and in 1923 the “Rhineland Secession.”

The heated ideological “Fight for the Rhine” after the first world war and the ongoing occupation of the Rhineland by the victorious allied powers increasingly spawned reactionary currents and evoked traditional values. The vocabulary of images used by many artists was calmed and consolidated as the artists turned away from Expressionism‘ s triggering of form. A sober and new objectivist view of the Rhine prevailed, which increasingly took on otherworldly, neoromantic features toward the end of the 1920s.

The show comprises some 120 works from public and private collections, including artists such as August Macke, Theo Champion, August Deusser, Herm Dienz, Hans Dornbach, Ernst Isselmann, Franz M. Jansen, Willa Kramme, Fifi Kreutzer, Helmuth Macke, Carlo Mense, Alexander Mohr, Heinrich Nauen, Walter Ophey, August Sander, Henriette Schmidt-Bonn, Paul A. Seehaus, Franz W. Seiwert, William Straube, Hans Thuar, Hans Trimborn, Erich Winter.