Max Ernst, Rétrospective, Albertina, Vienne

Max Ernst, Rétrospective
Albertina, Vienne
23 janvier - 5 mai 2013

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L’Albertina accueille en ce moment la première rétrospective autrichienne consacrée au grand inventeur d’images Max Ernst. L'exposition présente une importante sélection de 180 peintures, collages, sculptures et exemples évocateurs issus de documents et livres illustrés. La multiplicité des oeuvres présentée permet de rassembler toutes les phases de travail, les découvertes et les techniques de l’artiste. 

Il ne fait pas de doute que Max Ernst fait partie des plus grands maîtres ayant marquée l'histoire de l'art du 20e siècle, aux côtés de Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Andy Warhol. 

Protagoniste précoce du dadaïsme, pionnier du surréalisme et inventeur de nombreuses techniques raffinées d’un nouveau genre, Max Ernst a créé une oeuvre qui échappe finalement aux catégories. 

La richesse innovatrice qu’il associe à ses techniques d’image et d’inspiration, les ruptures marquant ses nombreuses phases de création et la variété des thèmes déconcertent.

L’unique constante reste la persistance des contradictions.

English text:

In devoting an exhibition to Max Ernst, the ingenious inventor of images, the Albertina presents the artist’s first retrospective in Austria. With a selection of 150 paintings, collages, and sculptures, as well as impressive examples of illustrated books and documents, the show will cover all of the artist’s periods, discoveries, and techniques, while tracing his life and oeuvre in a biographic and historical context.

There is no doubt that Max Ernst ranks among the leading figures in twentieth-century art history, together with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Andy Warhol. 

He was an early protagonist of Dadaism, a pioneer of Surrealism, and the deviser of such techniques as collage, frottage, grattage, decalcomania, and oscillation, so that his oeuvre defies easily graspable definition. His inventiveness in handling imagery and inspiration, the breaks marking his numerous creative phases, and his changing back and forth between subjects cause irritation. 

What remains constant is the invariability of his contradiction.

ALBERTINA
Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Vienne
www.albertina.at

Rembrandt, Albertina Museum, Vienna

Rembrandt

Albertina Museum, Vienna

March 26 - June 27, 2004

With this large Rembrandt exhibition, the Vienna Albertina dedicates another exhibition to one of the main masters of its collection. It is the first retrospective on Rembrandt’s work in Austria.

The exhibition brings together 30 paintings by Rembrandt with the most significant examples of his graphical oeuvre – 80 drawings and 70 etchings. This gives a suspenseful insight into the great universality of this most important and influential Dutch artist of the 17th century.

Rembrandt’s creative genius, his fascinating technical mastery in all media and the wide thematic spectrum in his work is honoured in a unique manner. The exhibition is organised into thematically oriented groups, within which one can study the fascinating interplay between the individual media.

The exhibition shows self-portraits, figure studies, nudes and animal studies, portraits, mythological and religious representations as well as landscapes from all creative periods of Rembrandt’s work.

The exhibited paintings include major works such as „Flora“ from London, „Landscape with Stone Bridge“ from Amsterdam, self-portraits from Munich and Vienna and „Sophonisba“ from Madrid. Brilliant sheets such as the „Reclining Lion“ from Paris or the „Reclining Nude“ from Amsterdam as well as gripping scenes such as „Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert“ from Hamburg and countless landscape drawings filled with light, air and atmosphere will be shown.

Loans from the most important collections of the world complete the excellent Albertina collection of drawings and etchings by Rembrandt, several of which were already acquired by the collection’s founder Albert von Sachsen-Teschen – and which the Albertina is famous for. This is why the Albertina was always – and especially under its director Otto Benesch from 1948 to 1961 – an important centre of Rembrandt research.

Among the exceptional aspects of Rembrandt’s artistic personality was his versatile creativity both in the thematic and the technical area – a rare case in the Dutch Golden Century, during which artists increasingly concentrated on special areas, sometimes even only on one specific technique. Rembrandt’s versatility is even present within single media, as is demonstrated in the Albertina collection’s more than 40 drawings. Every artistic phase, every thematic area and nearly every technique is represented in qualitative examples.

Hence the arrangement of thematically oriented groups in this exhibition unfolded in nigh-on natural manner. This arrangement is not a forced construction, but rather corresponds to the way in which Rembrandt himself ordered his drawings. From the inventory list made of Rembrandt’s possessions in 1656 we were able to deduce that Rembrandt kept his drawn studies in albums that were systematically ordered by categories such as nude figures, landscapes, figure studies, animal representations, views, drawings of antique figures and others.

It is an immediate consequence of Rembrandt’s way of working that it is nearly impossible to demonstrate creative processes or coherent work groups in these thematic complexes. As far as research has shown, Rembrandt brought nearly all his compositions without preparation immediately onto the canvas or etching plate.

Almost all his works, whether painted, drawn or etched, were the result of an autonomous artistic process and can be regarded individually. A quick landscape sketch thus appears as „completed“ and closed within itself as an exemplarily produced etching or an intricately detailed landscape painting does; the small chalk study of a beggar may demonstrate the same concentrated gift of observation as a life-size portrait may. The spectrum of Rembrandt’s creativity comes to life in multifarious ways in the ever-returning tension between small and large formats, between sketch-like and carefully designed compositions, of fine line structures and generous artistic forms. 

ALBERTINA MUSEUM

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien
www.albertina.at

Pop Art & Minimalism, Albertina Museum, Wien

Pop Art & Minimalism - The Serial Attitude
Albertina Museum, Wien
March 10 - August 29, 2004

As different as a drawing by Albrecht Dürer and one by Pablo Picasso may be in perspectives of time and of art, they are still connected by their being bound the same concept of the drawing, which is carried by the idea of subjective artistic signatures, and which is accompanied by the qualities of spontaneity and singularity, of caprice or masterful virtuosity. Even long before it was defined into an apparently generally valid definition, the art of drawing was immediately related to the history of genius and the signature-like externalisation of a singular personality. The ideal birthplace of the drawing is the private, intimate drawing cabinet, its locational opposite is the public billboard, technically the mechanic reproduction in an era of mass media is its diametrical opposite.

Against this background of the history and the alleged trans-chronologically valid nature of the idea of the drawing, the Albertina exhibition Pop Art & Minimalism: The Serial Attitude thus essentially marks a break with its own tradition, taking as its subject the common preference for the principle of „seriality“ in the allegedly non-related art movements of Pop and Minimal Art. Indeed, since the 1970’s a number of works that are marked by „seriality“ as a technical, conceptual and methodological process were acquired for the Albertina’s collections. The current exhibition clearly demonstrates the points of contact between the contrasting art movements without blurring the differences between the individual works.

The exhibition understands its subtitle The Serial Attitude essentially as guiding light, taken from the article by the same name published by the artist, critic and curator Mel Bochner in 1967 in the magazine Artforum. Bochner bids goodbye the traditional concept of an expressive art, whose origin is understood as the artist’s intuition in this essay – which is simultaneously analysis and manifesto – and proclaims a planned method following a pre-decided system analogous to contemporary modes of production. One could not imagine a greater difference to a Rembrandt drawing, the spontaneous capture of a coincidental observation.

Pop Art and Minimalism both consequentially include industrial production of series, preferably by screen printing and other mechanical methods of production, into the technical creation of a single work of art – as different as the appearance of the individual works may be. While Minimal Art is characterized by the radical negation of contents, Pop Art practically lived off the materiality of a commercial iconography spread by mass media.

Pop Art was the answer to an era of mass communication, of television, newspapers and magazines, and of advertising. Andy Warhol and Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg reproduced the images of goods and objects of daily life, of billboards and of celebrities honoured as icons, spread far and wide via magazines’ offset print.

Minimal Art, on the other hand, negates in its self-reflection any form of representation. It prefers abstract primary structures and basic geometric forms. No subject and no motif, no ever so slight materiality feeds the illusion that was married to art for five centuries. The modules taken from the principle of industrial mass production break with any traditional idea of an artistic medium of the image.

Nevertheless, these differences must not obstruct the view of the commonalities. Serial methods such as addition, combination, permutation and mirroring shape the appearance and the design structures of the accordant print works by Donald Judd, the serigraphs of the Mao series by Andy Warhol or the 14-part series „Alex“ by Chuck Close.

Seriality, however, is not only present in multi-part works: the multi-part picture series is just one special case of the principle of seriality. (Pop Art and Minimal Art used the techniques of mechanical production of images.)

Seriality becomes the real subject in the mechanical reproduction technique of screen printing. The principle of repetition is immanent here in the single work itself. This moves the form of technical production into focus: the matrix dots of offset print. The industrial printing methods from the entire realm of photo-graphics is the answer to Jackson Pollock or Franz Klime’s physical expressionism. These methods of mechanical printing preferred by Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden as much as by Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke can moreover be read as an answer to the crisis of structure of the printing method that had become too technical and artisan. When Lichtenstein and Judd made a woodcut, it became a conscious aping of a screen print without wood grain, without the material’s resistance. The photo-mechanical printing technique of screen printing was seen by printing aficionados for a long time as reproduction without its own artistic value for a good reason.

The exhibition Pop Art and Minimalism: The Serial Attitude is dedicated to this process of gaining independence from the traditional concept of drawing and print work via the principle of seriality. As wide as the spectrum of this principle’s application may be: in its entirety this exhibition seems to be telling of the end of a historical idea of drawing and print that was once the raison d’etre for our collection’s birth. However, it does certainly not speak against our collection that all exhibited works are part of the Albertina collection. Quite to the contrary, this fact underlines the high degree of critical self-reflection of our own raison d’etre, it is witness to our consciousness of our collection’s historicity: that of its creation and its reason, its nature and its structure.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder

Exhibited Artists:

Josef Albers, March 19, 1888 Bottrop (Germany) - Orange (Connecticut) March 25, 1976

Donald Baechler, Born 1956 in Hartford, Connecticut

Chuck Close, July 5, 1940 Monroe, Washington; lives in New York

Jim Dine, June 16, 1940 Cincinnati, Ohio; lives in New York and Putney, Vermont

Jasper Johns, May 15, 1930 Augusta, Georgia; lives in New York and Saint-Martin (Caribbean)

Donald Judd, June, 3 1928 Excelsior Springs, Missouri - New York February 12, 1994

Alex Katz, New York July 24, 1927; lives in New York

Imi Knoebel, December 31, 1940 Dessau as Klaus Wolf Knoebel; lives in Düsseldorf

Sol Lewitt, September 9, 1928 Hartford, Connecticut; lives in Chester (Connecticut) and Bari (Italy)

Roy Lichtenstein, October 27, 1923 New York - New York, September 29, 1997

Robert Mangold, October 12, 1937 Tonawanda, NY; lives in New York

Brice Marden, Bronxville, New York, October 15, 1938; lives in New York, Hydra (Greece) and in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania

Agnes Martin, March 22, 1912 Maklin (Saskatchewan, Canada); lives in Taos, New Mexico

Blinky Palermo, June 2, 1944 Leipzig - Kurumba (Maldives) February 17, 1977

Sigmar Polke, February 13, 1941 Oels (Silesia, now Poland); lives in Cologne

Robert Rauchsenberg, October 22, 1925 Port Arthur, Texas; lives in Captiva, Florida

Robert Ryman, May 30, 1930 Nashville, Tennessee; lives in New York

Sean Scully, June 30, 1945 Dublin; lives in New York, Barcelona and Munich

Richard Serra, November 2, 1939 in San Francisco; lives in New York and Novia Scotia (Canada)

James Turell, May 6, 1943 Los Angeles; lives in Flagstaff, Arizona and Inishkeame, Ireland

Andy Warhol, August 6, 1928 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - New York, February 22, 1987

Tom Wesselmann, Born 1931 in Cincinnati, Ohio, lives in the USA

ALBERTINA
Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien
www.albertina.at