This exhibition was a lovely example of how a multiplicity of voices in an exhibition enriches the experience of visitors. And it provides food for thought on how museums can use co-curation to avoid or emphasise certain topics.
120 Years of Brücke celebrated the formation of the Brücke group of artists by four architecture students in Dresden, Germany, on June 7th 1905. Soon joined by a further five artists, their aim was to revolutionise art, “in opposition to older, well-established powers” by embracing styles that became fundamental to the development of Expressionism. The Brücke Museum, founded in 1964, holds around 5000 works by the group and associated artists. The range of styles, subjects and media in its collection is huge. How then to choose the works that best represent the artists and their ideas?
The Museum’s answer is to invite 120 Berliners to choose their favourite work in the collection and to write a short text about why they’ve chosen it. The result is a wide range of thoughts, insights and opinions that no single curator could ever have produced.
The chosen works are hung side-by-side, in no discernible order. Next to each work is a text with the name of the work, the name and occupation of the person who chose it, and their words. This is all we get to know about the 120 co-curators, who make an eclectic bunch. They are people from the museum’s local community, artists, art historians, creative practitioners, a surprising number of politicians and civil servants in cultural organisations, plus police specialising in art crime and members of two anti-fascist organisations.
Many of the artists, art historians and architects give us the advantage of their expertise or professional curiosity. Some of these comments stand alone, offering insights into particular works. An architect has chosen Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Purple Trees … which is on the reverse of the canvas of another painting, Nude Woman Combing Her Hair. We’re told that Purple Trees was painted after this, so one wonders how Kirchner decided between the two paintings – or maybe it was someone else? Others remind us of aspects of art that are rarely mentioned in exhibitions. Berlin’s chief inspector of police for art crime has chosen a work by Max Pechstein that was subject of a forgery. It indicates how Pechstein’s work has been valued, albeit in a backhanded way, and tells us about art as commodity and status symbol.
Other co-curators give insights into techniques that stayed with me as I looked at other works. Artist and academic Friederike Feldmann starts her comment on Factory at Night with “[n]othing is going on in Fritz Bleyl’s pictures. And that’s why I like them so much.” She goes on to describe how Bleyl achieves that sense of nothing, and now I’m being guided to see how the picture was built up, how the brush strokes achieve their effect. I look at others of his paintings to see if I can see the same. Artist Andrea Büttner talks about the importance of preliminary sketches, how they are more “like thoughts, conversations, notes … not at all concerned with being a result”. She’s referring to her choice of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Design for Coffee Pot Cover. This is one of several preliminary sketches in the exhibition and her words allow visitors to think about what those sketches represent, and how the final pieces might have developed.
Many of the co-curators have drawn on their personal experiences to choose their favourite work. Their observations, questions and reactions to the works provide visitors with a rich set of insights, whether or not we share those experiences. I was also struck by the number of purely affective responses. A ten year old school student chose Fritz Bleyl’s Lake with Sailboat because “it is such a calming image”. An artist responds to Max Kaus’s Reclining Woman with Cat with “What can I say? Security, serenity, happiness!” Poignantly, the managing director of Berliner Museums chose Ernst Ludwig Kircher’s Tightrope Walkers with Rope and Umbrellabecause it “radiates a lightness that I long for at the moment … In these tense times, I wish we could all experience many more moments like this.” I hadn’t made that connection, but it made me look at the drawing again. It is so rare to find this kind of interpretation in art museums, and reminds us that it is just as important and valid as any other. Often when institutional curators are developing exhibitions they talk about making the subject “relevant” to the audience. These personal responses show how nebulous that idea is, and how much it is a feature of the conventional approaches that centre historical or technical perspectives. And it is, of course, a call back to the Brücke artists’ original intent to move away from “academic art” towards a more expressive from.
The advantages and limitations of co-curation become most apparent with discussion of the Brücke artists themselves. For a landmark anniversary, an institutional curator might be tempted to produce an exhibition that is purely celebratory in tone. Here, we see some of the Brücke artists’ unpleasant sides. For example, the project manager for Berlin’s sites of remembrance selected Ernst Kirchner’s Head of a Black Man. His response discusses how Kirchner didn’t typecast his white subjects, but used racist tropes in his depictions of this subject. This immediately reminds us that the Brücke group may have been exciting and revolutionary, but they also held objectionable views.
Many of the co-curators mention the Nazi’s condemnation and confiscation of the Brücke group’s work as “degenerate art”. The Brücke group’s work has often been used a symbol fascist censorship, and many of their supporters were Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis, including Rosa Schapire whose portrait by Schmidt-Rottluff is in the exhibition. But there is a noticeable omission in the commentary. The Brücke artists’ attitudes to the Nazis and national socialism were highly ambiguous, and indeed Emile Nolde was an outright antisemite and member of the Nazi party. None of the co-curators mention this.
The Brücke Museum is certainly aware of this part of the artists’ history, and it appears that they have not intervened to insist that co-curators mention it. That is absolutely correct: the museum cannot ask co-curators to select works and write about them and then insist on certain views being put forth. But it is a reminder of the complexities and unpredictability of co-curation. In this instance, the museum has hand-picked the co-curators and given them free rein. I found myself wondering whether the museum was hoping this subject would be raised by, say, the anti-fascist organisations or art historians, or whether its choice of co-curators was a sleight-of-hand that enabled it to avoid an awkward subject.
This absolutely does not take away from all the other richness of this exhibition. And of course, that that richness doesn’t stem from co-curation per se. Rather, it is the act of letting each co-curator’s voice be heard individually and in their own words, with no externally imposed narrative, that gives the depth and breadth. In doing that the Brücke Museum and its co-curators have created a rare and refreshing exhibition.
120 Years of Brücke, 120 Berliners, 120 Art Works. Brücke Museum, Bussardsteig 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
29 March – 22 June 2025
Rachel Souhami 