Those who enter the Münchner Kunstverein in the Hofgartenarkaden these days will be amazed: on the walls painted in reed green, nothing can be seen but dark green painted rectangles of different sizes and apparently randomly distributed. Flyers help the perplexed: Each green rectangle stands for a picture that once hung in the same place, namely in 1937 when the National Socialists first presented in these rooms what they removed as “degenerate” during their “clean-up” from dozens of German museums Art “condemned. You can find out where Wilhelm Lehmbruck's “Große Kniende” stood in the stairwell and that behind it hung Franz Marc's grandiose “Tower of the Blue Horses”, the still uncertain end of which began here: after a protest by the regiment in which Marc was killed in the First World War ,the painting was removed from the exhibition and Hermann Göring incorporated it into his collection. It is said to have been seen again in Berlin in 1945, since then it has been lost, probably destroyed, like so many of the works shown in Munich at the time.
The same room brought together works by Lovis Corinth in abundance, as well as by Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee and Gerhard Marx;
the next one lined up, crisscrossing each other, pictures by Kandinsky, Feininger, Schmidt-Rottluff, by famous and unknown masters.
In total, the green representative areas quote a hundred works of the hate tirade on the avant-garde, which originally filled other rooms that are now separated.
For her current exhibition “No River to Cross”, the artist Bea Schlingelhoff was able to fall back on Stephanie Barron's standard work on “Degenerate Art” from 1992, and the model reconstruction of the Femeschau carried out in 1991 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was also helpful.
No membership for "non-Aryans"
It was therefore not due to a lack of research that an obvious memorial show had not long been held at the historical site. Schlingelhoff's intervention urgently fills a memory gap. The photos from back then in your head, the lurid slogans on the walls and the crowds of visitors that streamed through the rooms for weeks before the show moved on to other German cities come to mind. The Münchner Kunstverein did not move to its current location until 1953, when the Archaeological Institute resided there during the times of "degenerate art".
With her central interest in the history of her respective exhibition location, Schlingelhoff starts from several sides;
Here, for example, the artist, born in 1971, examines both the location and the institution in terms of their relationship to the fascist regime and derives structural consequences from this.
Part of the artistic process of each of their exhibitions is the preparation of a document that negotiates with those responsible the conditions and, if necessary, changes under which the art is to be shown.
Director in a hurrying nerd
In the archive of the Münchner Kunstverein, which has been researching its own history intensively for several years, Schlingelhoff discovered an amendment to the statutes of 1936 that forbade “non-Aryans” membership. Again, as in 1933, when the association was subjected to the National Socialist ideas by means of conformity, the director at the time was there with fire and flame in anticipatory nerdism. Bea Schlingelhoff wrote an open letter, a request for forgiveness from the Kunstverein for the collaboration with the Nazi regime, director Maurin Dietrich and exhibition curator Gloria Hasnay signed it. The excuse for those who can no longer hear them are demonstrations of repentance, but at best also expressions of will to learn from history.
But Schlingelhoff doesn't stop there, she creates facts that she documents in the last room. There is still an exhibit hanging between the green spaces: It is the framed draft for a preamble to the association's statutes, it contains the permanent commitment to "the principles of non-discrimination and equal treatment towards members and non-members"; an extraordinary general meeting passed a majority vote on this amendment to the statutes last summer. A memento on the outside facade of the art association should also last; There a brass plate bears the names of Maria Caspar-Filser, Jacoba van Heemskerck, Marg Moll and Emy Roeder, four largely forgotten artists who also vilified the “Degenerate” exhibition.
Bea Schlingelhoff - No River to Cross. In the Munich Art Association; until November 21. The first comprehensive publication on the artist's work appears.