Edoesn’t light up? Federal President Steinmeier, the greeting speaker at the ceremony marking the centenary of the Museum Folkwang in the city’s philharmonic hall and patron of the large anniversary exhibition that opened on Sunday, began his speech with a well-aimed low blow. Munich shines, and the sky above the city is made of blue silk, as is well known from Thomas Mann’s novel “Gladius Dei”. But food? Essen does not shine, “Food smoked, glowed, sparked,” said the good-humoured head of state with a diabolical presidential smile. The audience took it motionless. One has taker qualities in the Ruhr area.
Thomas Mann published his mocking description of the Munich art scene in 1902, the same year that Karl Ernst Osthaus opened the Folkwang Museum in his hometown of Hagen to make his collection accessible to the public. The world’s first museum for contemporary art was not in Paris, London or New York, but in Hagen. Work on the building designed by Carl Gérard, which today houses the Osthaus Museum, was already well advanced when the young heir met the Belgian Henry van de Velde and decided to hand over the entire interior design to him. The result: an eclectic neo-Renaissance-style shell over an Art Nouveau total work of art and thus a first manifestation of a core idea of the Folkwang idea, according to which the arts and cultures of all times are in exchange with one another.
A bidding war ensued
Osthaus was not an aesthetic purist, but a follower of the reform movements of the Wilhelmine era who believed in the transformative power of the arts and wanted to establish beauty as the “ruling force in life”, thinking not only of his own life but the life of everyone people in the “art-deserted industrial district on the Ruhr” in mind. His museum was to edify and educate them, and his collection should serve to “educate the people”. Osthaus initially bought classicist works from the Düsseldorf school of painting, discovered the French Post-Impressionists, made studios available to artists such as Christian Rohlfs and, at the beginning of 1903, was the first German collector to acquire a work by Gauguin.
In 1905, the Hagen Folkwang was the first German museum to show a monographic exhibition of works by Van Gogh: eleven paintings and three drawings, including the earliest acquisitions “The Harvest, Cornfield with Reaper” and the “Portrait of Armand Roulin”. In the center of the museum’s entrance hall at that time hung a kakemono, a scroll painting by Kano Yosen-in Korenobu depicting a heron. He can now be seen in the exhibition along with the Van Goghs mentioned.
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