As of: March 27, 2024, 12:00 p.m
By: Wolfgang Schörner
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The curators Anette Völker-Rasor (l.) and Katharina Zimmermann (r.) with museum director Annette Vogel (2nd from right) in front of the picture “Monument to Philipp Otto Runge” by Heinz Kreutz.
© Wolfgang Schörner
Heinz Kreutz is one of the artists who helped German painting join the international avant-garde after the Second World War.
The new special exhibition in the Penzberg Museum is now dedicated to him, under the title “Frankfurt, Paris, Penzberg”.
Although it should actually be called “Antdorf near Penzberg”.
Penzberg – It is said that it was cigarette pictures that inspired Heinz Kreutz to work artistically 80 years ago.
The young man escaped the “hell of Stalingrad” in 1943, seriously injured.
He was lying in a hospital when someone gave him cigarette pictures depicting works by artists such as Franz Marc, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, ostracized by the Nazi regime as “degenerate art” and possession of which, even if only as cigarette pictures, was dangerous was.
The album with the pictures still exists today.
It can be seen in the exhibition “Heinz Kreutz: Frankfurt, Paris, Penzberg”, which opened at the weekend at the “Museum Penzberg – Campendonk Collection”.
New exhibition in the Penzberger Museum shows over 60 works by Heinz Kreutz
The new exhibition shows more than 60 works by Heinz Kreutz, who was born in Frankfurt in 1923, stayed in Paris for a long time, lived in Antdorf for 40 years from 1976 and died in Penzberg in 2016.
The exhibition is also structured according to these stations.
It was curated by Anette Völker-Rasor from the Penzberger Kunstzeche-Verein, of which Kreutz was an honorary member and with whom he organized two exhibitions in Penzberg over 20 years ago, as well as by Katharina Zimmermann, who looks after the Ströher collection, in collaboration with museum director Annette Vogel .
The Ströher Collection is one of the most important collections of German art after 1945, most of which is exhibited in the Museum Kuppersmühle for Modern Art (MKM) in Duisburg.
The MKM Foundation has owned Heinz Kreutz's artistic estate since 2022.
The Penzberg exhibition was created in cooperation with the Duisburg Museum, which recently showed a large retrospective on Kreutz's 100th birthday and has now made the majority of the images available.
The painter Heinz Kreutz in his house in Antdorf.
© Katrin Fügener
The city of Penzberg itself owns two Kreutz works: the watercolor “Origin, Unfolding, Absong” from 2006, which was given to it in 2021 by the Haas family from Icking, and the painting “An Sappho” from 1959. The Roche company also presented as a The oil painting “Color in the Grace of Light” is available on loan.
Heinz Kreutz co-founded the Quadriga group after the war
In 1952, Heinz Kreutz founded the group Quadriga with Karl Otto Götz, Otto Greis and Bernhard Schultze, which caused a great stir at the time and with which German painting reconnected with the international avant-garde after the war.
The pictures that are now shown in Penzberg are very different.
But what unites them: All of them (with one exception, the “Red Rehe” from 1946, influenced by the “Blauer Reiter”) are non-representational.
The focus is on color and light.
Kreutz also developed his own color theory, which he published in 1973.
There are some dark images among them that give the impression that darkness is exploding - probably a reflection of the traumas of war.
But right next to it the colors shine, as if light were breaking through.
Then again the colors are divided by strict lines.
The exhibition takes visitors almost chronologically through Kreutz's creative period and his wide range of techniques.
In the Großhadern Clinic, colored figures are simply whitewashed
In addition to the cigarette pictures, you can also discover an anecdote in the exhibition that takes place in the Großhadern Clinic.
In the late 1970s, Heinz Kreutz designed a wall in the patient wing of the newly built clinic with life-size, colored figures.
However, the artwork was later simply painted over white.
There is a publicly visible work at Iffeldorf-Eurach: a wayside shrine that Kreutz once designed on a private commission.
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The exhibition in the Penzberg Museum
The exhibition “Heinz Kreutz: Frankfurt, Paris, Penzberg” can be seen in the “Museum Penzberg – Campendonk Collection” until June 23rd: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
There is also an audio guide (via smartphone) and a booklet about the exhibition written by Anette Völker-Rasor.
Public tours are every Sunday from 11 a.m.
More about the accompanying program: www.museum-penzberg.de