Page 60 - Studio International - December1996

Baroque in Berlin

Hans Bellmer Like most international Festivals the Berliner Festwochen
La Poupée 1965
Aluminium sculpture in has a synthetic air about it. There is, of course, something
moveable sections synthetic about Berlin itself: the advance guard of the
16+ in. high Western way of life, a giant, neon-illuminated advertising
Included in the exhibition
Labyrinthe slogan shining out the virtues of a better standard of
living. The Festival has a part in all this; staged, publi-
cized, performed and acted to remind the world that the
island is still there. In the main the Festival is con-
cerned with music and the theatre, but it also brings
Berlin's vast artistic resources into action too and organizes
a series of special art exhibitions in the city's museums
and galleries.
This year the Festival had as its general theme the
Baroque; most of the plays and concerts had been chosen
to illustrate the period. There was a major exhibition of
the Baroque palaces and Residences in Germany in the
Gallerie des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, for example, and in
the Orangerie, Charlottenburg, a representative selection
Of German painting and drawing from the seventeenth
Bernard Schultze
The Great Migof-Labyrinth, century was on view. Both of these exhibitions were the
1966 delight of art historians. They were both pieces of bril-
Assemblage, wooden boxes
with coloured sculptural and liant scholarship, comprehensive, intelligent and search-
kinetic elements. ing not only in the problems which they posed but also
x 38 x 10 ft in the ways in which they solved them. The catalogues
Created by the artist
especially for the exhibition particularly were meticulous works of scholarship, docu-
Labyrinthe menting and illuminating one of the darker sides of art
history. Seventeenth-century German painting is largely
an unknown factor, its painters thought of as dull, repeti-
tive and imitative with little to say for themselves which
had not been said in a better way elsewhere. If it did
nothing else, the exhibition made an impressive claim for
Elsheimer, a painter who is perhaps only now beginning
to be given the credit his work demands. His entire ouevre
must be one of the smallest of any painter and much of
it was shown here. His approach to his subject, his
colours and technical facility mark him as a painter with
influence and of great originality and distinction.
Until the unification in 1871 Germany was, of course, a
patchwork of greater and lesser states, a conglomeration
of dukes, princes, kings and electors, each of whom had
palaces, residences and courts, and Germany remains
one of the richest countries in terms of court architecture,
particularly from the Baroque period. The exhibition of
Baroque Residences, which was devoted to the major
buildings in Germany from the period was no less reveal-
ing than that at the Orangerie. Each building was given
a section in which were exhibited plans, contemporary
paintings, portraits and objects illustrating the manners
and way of life of the time.
The exhibition at the Akademie der Künste was not con-