Künstler und Propheten. Eine geheime Geschichte der Moderne 1872–1972

A secret history of modernism? Egon Schiele saw himself as a seer and a prophetic artist, František Kupka suddenly painted spiritualised abstractions, Joseph Beuys called for a social revolution by means of art, and Friedensreich Hundertwasser created the first of his famous spirals. These pioneering artistic developments would not have come about without the encounter with the life and work of the artist-naturists. The significance of the rise of these artist-naturists, who also understood themselves as religious dissenters and social revolutionaries, is a story that for the most part still remains to be told for the art of modernism. Their names, too – Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851–1913), for instance, or Gusto Gräser (1879–1958), Gustav Nagel (1874–1952), Friedrich Muck-Lamberty (1891–1984), Ludwig Christian Haeusser (1881–1927) – are almost forgotten in the art world today, although they were quite well known in avant-garde circles and were held in high esteem there. Through the exhibition and the book – with some 300 works by František Kupka (1871–1957), Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Johannes Baader (1876–1955), Max Schulze-Sölde (1887–1967), Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942), Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (1892–1982), Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000), Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) and Jörg Immendorff (1945–2007), as well as a wide range of documentary material – causalities are uncovered, unsuspected lines of connection are traced through modernism, and the so-called redeemers and the artistic avant-garde are embedded in a far-reaching art-historical and cultural-historical context.

Exhibition:
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 6/3 – 21/6/2015