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

Last week we introduced our online exhibition catalogue (which brought in several interesting comments: Dear Mr. Müller, we will report on how things have been going); this week we present the exhibition poster, specifically its imagery.

What kind of gloves are seen on the poster? 

After our last Tuesday Question explained why there are only 113 artists in our exhibition, but 180 in the catalogue, this Tuesday Question also has to do with the catalogue. Since in addition to our traditional printed catalogue we also have an online version.

But why an online version, and what is it? 

‘Overloaded.’ criticised some reviewers. ‘Too many works.’ wrote others. But not one had found it ‘Too empty.’

This edition of our Tuesday Question has to do with quantity. And we posed it to our curator, Monika Flacke: 

The Jewish graphic artist Leo Glückselig emigrated with his family from Vienna to New York in 1938. Almost sixty years later, he saw a photograph of a work by the French artist Christian Boltanski in a newspaper article about an art exhibition. And was immediately taken aback by what he saw. 

The rooms in the exhibition have names, such as ‘We are the Revolution’, ’99 Cent’, ‘A Hundred Years’, or ‘The Realities of Politics’. A room title that not only mystified some visitors, but also some of our own staff is from the third room, ‘Journey into Wonderland’. The works presented here range from Damien Hirst’s Dead End Jobs to Anselm Kiefer’s Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols), Günther Uecker’s Kriegssarg (War Coffin), and Armando’s Schuldige Landschaft (Guilty Landscape). They focus on how to deal with remembrance, especially after the Second World War.

But what does that have do with a ‘land of wonder’?