The new exhibition in the Penzberger Museum is unusual.
From Saturday you can see knives and forks, a chest of drawers, a carved mirror frame, embroidery designs and chairs, even keyhole fittings and painted boxes - all from well-known expressionists.
The whole thing is entitled “Beauty All Around”.
Penzberg - It was famous painters of the "Blauer Reiter", the "Brücke" and the Rhenish Expressionism who also created handicrafts around 100 years ago.
It is precisely this interrelationship between modern painting and handicrafts that the new exhibition “All Around Beauty” in the “Museum Penzberg - Campendonk Collection” intends to show from Saturday.
It is part of the “Avant-garde in Color” series that runs in the Bernrieder Buchheim Museum, the Murnau Castle Museum, the Kochel Franz Marc Museum and the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
Penzberg was given the role of illuminating the expressionists and handicrafts.
The preparation took two years.
Arts and crafts: do they even go together?
Do arts and crafts go together at all? Isn't it true that artists look down on handicrafts? "That is a cliché that we want to break up," says museum director and art historian Diana Oesterle, who is also the curator of the exhibition. For example, there is Heinrich Campendonk. Before his time as a painter in the Oberland, he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Krefeld, where art and craft form a symbiosis. Campendonk was strongly influenced by his teacher Johan Thorn Prikker and also got to know Helmuth Macke. In 1912 Campendonk and Helmuth's brother August Macke even planned an arts and crafts academy in Cologne. An idea that the First World War ruined. Later, shortly after the war, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar,that brought art and craft together and whose straightforward, sober style became formative. Diana Oesterle has a mind game on this: If the world war had not happened and Campendonk and Macke had founded their academy, “today we might all be sitting in colorful, expressionist furniture”.
15 Lenders: The new exhibition is one of the most ambitious projects to date
Diana Oesterle describes the new exhibition as perhaps the most ambitious project that the museum has ever seen.
This is due to the large number of lenders and the infrastructure that was created for the exhibits - from the podium to the showcase.
A total of 70 exhibits can be seen, three quarters come from 15 lenders.
Some came from private property, some from large museums in Munich, Mühlheim an der Ruhr, Krefeld, Duisburg, Neuss and Freiburg.
Diana Oesterle is happy about their "great solidarity" in supporting smaller houses like the Penzberger Museum.
Only a small part is from our own stocks.
From Art Nouveau furniture to keyhole fittings - by Franz Marc
In “All Around Beauty” you can see, for example, a large carved mirror frame (1924) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, inspired by Africa and the South Seas, as well as a terracotta relief (1913) by Heinrich Nauen and Art Nouveau furniture and cutlery by Richard Riemerschmid . Or the painted fields of wood paneling that August Macke created in 1907 for his sister's restaurant. A ceramic bowl by Helmuth Macke from the 1920s is on display, painted with horses on the inside and cars and smoking chimneys on the outside. A chest of drawers and an almost two meter long tapestry by Campendonk, keyhole fittings by Franz Marc, boxes and boxes painted by Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, a batik cushion from 1912 by Thorn Prikker.
“A discovery for us” is the expressionist artist Fifi Kreutzer, says Oesterle.
Women, she says, are often neglected in art history.
Fifi Kreutzer was represented with wall hangings, weaving mills and ceramics at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition in 1914.
Now her work can be seen in Penzberg - and for the first time in southern Germany.
The "Beauty All Around" exhibition runs from August 7th to November 1st
The exhibition “All around beauty” in the “Museum Penzberg - Campendonk Collection” runs from August 7th to November 1st. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visitors are asked to register in advance by e-mail to “reservierung-museum@penzberg.de”. It is mandatory to wear a mask. Free entry for all visitors to the opening is on Saturday, August 7th, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The occasion is the five-year existence of the museum.
