2019’s major special exhibition will bring together outstanding masterpieces from international collections.
The show will have a double focus. On the one hand, it will concentrate on the collection history of the art museum in Halle’s Moritzburg by reconstructing the modernist collection that was confiscated as “degenerate” in 1937 and subsequently lost. On the other hand, it will highlight paintings by selected, internationally renowned Bauhaus masters who taught at the Bauhaus schools in Weimar, Dessau and/or Berlin between 1919 and 1933 and whose works formed or still form part of the museum’s collection.
During the Weimar Republic, the Moritzburg Art Museum Halle (Saale), Saxony-Anhalt’s state art museum, was one of the most important German museums of contemporary art, the art of what today is called classical modernism. Its two most influential directors, Max Sauerlandt (1880–1934, director 1908–1919) and Alois J. Schardt (1889–1955, director 1926–1935), developed the collections with a focus on contemporary art – works by representatives of movements such as expressionism, constructivism and New Objectivity. The result was a unique collection that made Halle’s museum a central attraction for a host of national and international guests alike.
When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, this hitherto renowned collection was suddenly a collection of proscribed art. The abovementioned artists were now regarded as “degenerate” and their works vilified in “exhibitions of shame”. In the summer of 1937, the Moritzburg Art Museum Halle (Saale) lost its distinguished collection of modernist art – a collection unique in the quality of each individual work –as part of the preparations for a “degenerate art” exhibition in Munich that opened in July 1937. 146 works of art were lost in total. To date, fourteen have been re-acquired.
As part of the museum’s reconstructed lost collection, visitors will be able to marvel at masterpieces by Feininger, Heckel, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Lissitzky, Marc, Nolde, and Rohlfs among others from international collections in Germany, France, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, the US and Japan.
Besides viewing the artworks as part of a conventional exhibition, visitors will also be able to experience the historical collection’s quality and significance in an almost complete virtual reality presentation. In cooperation with the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle’s degree course in Multimedia and VR Design, all of the collection’s works available as images will be presented digitally in a unique setting: the design for a modern art museum for Halle on the Lehmanns Felsen cliffs submitted by Walter Gropius in 1927 as part of a municipal competition for a new “crown jewel” for the city. Via a projection that visitors can control themselves, they will be able to walk through the digital museum and virtually experience the historical collection lost in 1937 in a location that was designed for the collection but never brought into being. Accordingly, this part of the exhibition will convey nothing less than the vision of what Halle and its art museum would be today if the Great Depression and the Nazi dictatorship had not happened.
The exhibition will be complemented by five cabinets focusing on the works of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer and Georg Muche during their time as “masters” at the Bauhaus. Major works by all five artists formed and still form part of the museum’s collection. The cabinets will each show around five paintings by each artist. These images, which will be on loan from Europe, the US and Russia, will convey a vivid picture of how their creative output changed over the 14 years in which the Bauhaus existed.
