|  Johannes
Baader
Doppelportrait Baader/Hausmann, um
1919/1920
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We were in charge
of the press relations for the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt,
Egon Schiele saw himself as a visionary and
prophetic artist, FrantisÕek Kupka forged an abstract style
of painting infused with spiritist principles, Joseph Beuys
called under the rubric “social sculpture” up
for social change due to creative actions, and Friedensreich
Hundertwasser was an ecological crusader whose spiral paintings
were holistic in essence. These pioneering artistic attitudes
and developments would have not come about without contact
with several “prophets”. Some of these were artist-naturists,
others were modern-day Christs, while still others saw themselves
as social revolutionaries of a kind. Their relevance for modern
art remains a largely untold story. Today, their names –
Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Gusto Gräser, Gustav Nagel,
as well as Friedrich Muck-Lamberty and Ludwig Christian Haeusser
– have almost been forgotten. During their lifetime,
however, they were widely known among a broad-based public
and in avant-garde circles. Artists and intellectuals also
admired them, albeit often behind closed doors.
The SCHIRN is presenting a large-scale exhibition
on this theme with some 400 works by various artists. They
include Egon Schiele, FrantisÕek Kupka, Johannes Baader, Heinrich
Vogeler, Joseph Beuys, Jörg Immendorff, and Friedensreich
Hundertwasser as well as a variety of documentation materials.
The exhibition both reveals causalities and establishes unexpected
connections. It also embeds the ‘barefoot-prophets’
and the artistic avant-garde in a wide-ranging social historical
context.
Curator: Dr. Pamela Kort
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