Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

Cora worked with the ‘Desire for Freedom’ project for six weeks as an intern. She was even able to squeeze in a bit of time between enquiring about image rights for our catalogue, obtaining photo material, proofreading, and checking colour proofs to give us her impressions. 

The Romanian artist, Dan Perjovschi, takes 69 seconds to draw his picture on the wall in our exhibition space. In 69 seconds the word ‘capitalism’ is split in two and illustrated. ‘Capital’ gets a stick figure and the ‘ism’ a whole crowd of them. Once or twice the artist steps back a bit and looks at the drawing. Then he enlarges the ‘ism’ group.  

To provide you with an overview of the press response to the exhibition, we summarised several reviews and provided links to several others. A question brought up by two of the critics was whether a historical museum is necessary in order to present an art exhibition?

This question caused me to hesitate slightly. My perspective is neither that of an art historian nor of a historian (but rather one of a theatre scholar, if it is of interest). 

A Wednesday morning at the German Historical Museum: The exhibition is open to the public since last night and we are only interested in one thing—the response in the press. The computers in the project offices are quicker than usual, the Google Alerts are already in the mail boxes, and the outside world’s digital evaluation is quickly consumed. There is no audio record of events, but our responses reflected a wide range of emotions. 

The Desire for Freedom. Art in Europe since 1945 reopened to the public in Milan's Palazzo Reale three weeks ago. The opening speeches have been held. The newspapers have published their first reviews. Now it’s time to take a step back. Sticking to the subject of exhibition terminology, we would like to ask: How did the exhibition idea—‘the world in our heads’—become a model and then an exhibition? Why should a painting not hang next to a photograph? And how tall is our ‘optimal visitor’?

The exhibition designer Werner Schulte answered these questions for us.