Press Release
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april 15, 2015 - Kunsmuseum Basel
Cézanne to Richter. Masterpieces from the Kunstmuseum Basel
As the main building of the Kunstmuseum Basel closes on February 2, 2015, for a year of renovations, the museum launches a rich program of exhibitions, primarily at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. The series begins with a particular highlight: Cézanne to Richter — Masterpieces from the Kunstmuseum Basel. Curated by the museum’s director, Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, the exhibition traces the major developments in European painting through the 1970s. The show features around seventy works by Cézanne, Pissarro, Monet, Degas,
Renoir, van Gogh, Modersohn-Becker, Böcklin, Hodler, Braque, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Miró, Fontana, Palermo, Tanguy, Richter, and others. The exhibition opens on February 13 at 6:30pm. Guy Morin, President of the Executive Council of Basel-Stadt, and Bernhard Mendes Bürgi will welcome the visitors.
One highlight of the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel is its collection of eminent works of late -nineteenth-century and classic modernist art.
From February 14, 2015, until February 21, 2016, works by masters from Paul Cézanne to Gerhard Richter
will be on display in the great skylight hall and the adjacent galleries of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. The exposition offers a panorama of the evolution of European painting through the 1970s that enables visitors to trace the seminal artistic developments of the period. The presentation of around seventy works is generally arranged along chronological lines; instead of constructing a didactic narrative in which one school succeeds
another, it vividly illustrates the simultaneity of disparate tendencies that is the period’s essential characteristic. The show opens with French artists such as Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Edgard Degas, Auguste Renoir, and
Paul Cézanne who sought to pioneer visual languages beyond the strictures of academic painting. Paul Cézanne’s oeuvre exemplifies this spirit of art as a tenacious quest for new forms. He was one of the first painters to make the fact explicit that a picture is composed of individual brushstrokes and specks of color.
Cézanne and his friends Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas encouraged each other as they pursued their unique and very different paths. Vincent van Gogh was introduced to this circle of artists around the self-organized exhibitions of the Impressionists during his stay in Paris. He gave a more radical edge to many of their ideas; his art inspired several generations of twentieth-century artists, including the German
Expressionists Paula Modersohn-Becker, Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde.
When Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism in the early twentieth century, they regarded Paul Cézanne as their father figure. His searching reflection on artistic forms seemed to pave the way for their fragmentation of the traditional pictorial subjects into numerous facets.
Picasso’s Le Poète presents all elements of a classical poet’s portrait, but splintered and displaced so as to transform the head into an assembly of abstract partial forms. Another revolutionary step in twentieth-century painting was abstraction: artists abandoned the depiction of visible reality and explored the potentials of expressive color, as in Wassily Kandinsky, constructive reduction, as in Piet Mondrian, or lyrical composition
with hints of figuration, as in Paul Klee or Joan Miró.
In the 1950s, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale marks a turning point in the history of painting: he slashes the canvas, as the vehicle of painting’s illusions, to open up the space behind it. In the 1960s and 1970s, artists take increasingly critical and ultimately disenchanted views of painting’s possibilities, and some conclude that the genre’s future lies in non-painterly techniques: see Blinky Palermo’s fabric picture.
Abstract painting is a central strand in the history of twentieth-century art, but the figurative tradition is far from dead.
The exhibition traces its evolution starting with the Swiss painters Arnold Böcklin and Ferdinand Hodler. Böcklin
laid the foundations for an imaginative and sometimes fantastic figurative painting that subsequently inspired the Surrealists, as exemplified by the work of Yves Tanguy.
The show concludes with a recent addition to the museum’s collections, Gerhard Richter’s cycle Annunciation after Titian.
In several versions, Richter blurs his appropriation of a painting by Titian to produce abstract chromatic spaces, in a reflection both on the history of painting and on a defining issue in twentieth-century art: the dialectic between abstraction and figuration, which he unites in a novel synthesis.
Guy Morin, President of the Executive Council of Basel-Stadt, and Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, director of the Kunstmuseum and curator of the show, will welcome the visitors. The event is open to the general public. We are especially pleased that, from February 2015 through the end of the year, all visitors to the Museum für Gegenwartskunst will be admitted at no charge. The special free admission is made possible by an unusually generous grant from the “Fund for Artistic Activities at the MGK,” which is underwritten by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and the Christoph Merian Foundation. For more than twenty years, the Fund has regularly supported the MGK’s exhibition programming. During the closure of the Kunstmuseum, the Fund hopes the people of Basel and the surrounding region as well as visitors will avail themselves of this special opportunity to discover the museum on the Rhine and immerse themselves in its art.
The exhibition is supported by Credit Suisse AG.
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
Cézanne to Richter — Masterpieces from the Kunstmuseum Basel
Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Basel,
February 14, 2015 – February 21, 2016
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