Edition Scheffel - Blickachsen

Blickachsen 3 / Axes of View 3
and the moralizing inscriptions and adoration of virtuous heroes and antiquity one believed to be able to connect with
obtained their current references.” (A. v. Buttlar). Because the garden did not only include the idyll of heavenly and naively
romantic images, but was also the symbolic place for “wholesome country life as contrast to the moral decay of
the city” – a notion that modern day seems to have inherited.
This certainly applied to English society around the time of Swift, Dickens and Hogarth, who critically witnessed
the development of the English landscape garden. According to particular rules and conventions the (English) gardens
were regarded as public space, “playground” and room for the emerging bourgeoisie and at the same time mirror of
their enlightened ideals (Arcadia and Utopia), even when the first landscape gardens were created for suburban villas
and country estates of a small group of nobility and politicians.
“Happy is the man who is far from businesses” (Horaz, Oden). This “English” lifestyle was what the princely
family of Hesse-Homburg liked to assume when they became aware of their “splendid mineral waters” and began to
establish a suitable architectural and landscape setting. The charm of pleasure (the spa resort) benefited businesses
(the casino). A visit to the spas was an ideal meeting point for those in the upper echelons of society who travelled from
near and far and who regarded themselves as the elite of their nation.
This social system and the interaction of the spa resort institution, that has been strictly conserved, i. e. of
Kurpark and spa park, church, casino, temple and club, main and side roads, in landscapes that have been successively
created since the beginning of the 1840s, is the “stage” and the “axis of view”, that have structured Bad Homburg up
to now. Bourgeois tradition and quality landscape gardening once again influence the reactions of this year's artists to
the palace and landscape structure, even when the artworks of Ulrichs and Vostell, Plensa and Wortelkamp with their
critical and anti-illusionist features reject every cheap affirmation. For all of the participating artists, the park with its
unchangeable greens, fabrics and villas, fountains, sculptures and monuments, that is, with the whole spectrum of
nature and historical deep-rooted unity, represents a scale of their own art.
Each artist knew accordingly, that they couldn’t use standard Land Art as is normally the case in this genre,
they did not have to deal with an empty desert, but were rather forced to serve the “axes of view” that have existed for
a long time as visual relations between park, landscape and architecture. The autonomy of contemporary art, which
can rightly refer to the much-praised freedom of art in the tradition of the landscape garden, existed here in the shape
of reduction and the return to concentration. Furthermore, most of the artists chose the places for their artworks themselves
in order to take up their work after a careful study of the history and the location. The following explanations of
the individual artworks will explain this notion further.
When the sculptures are disassembled, the chosen places are wound up, the integrative system and the synopsis
of all of this year's “axes of view” will disappear, or rather, change – a situation that occurs at the end of every exhibition.
Only then does the “longing image” – to the unity of cultivated nature and (contemporary) art – have to make do
with memory, just as the landscape garden constantly demands. The “idea of natural space” is, however, by no means
a void, artless “emptiness”, as we have explained, but it is basically an illusionary subjective image, a kind of vision or
ideal that alternates constantly between the “Garden of Desires” and monuments of art. Only the philosopher and the
educated artist are concerned with this topic in its processes. Both value art according to the rule of the landscape
garden as “Temple of the Virtue” and not as a “Temple of Vanity” full of “hypocrites, pedants, liberals and garrulous
politicians”, as the great pioneer of the English garden William Kent (1684 - 1748) had admonished.
3. Education Through Art: The New Heroes, Gods and Buddahs.
Still today, a Russian orthodox priest lives in an apartment by the Kurpark's Elisabeth Fountain and is responsible
for the spiritual care of the parishes of Bad Homburg and Frankfurt according to a report by the former mayor
Wolfgang R. Assmann. He is the caretaker of the Russian Church of All Saints and or Russian Chapel, whose foundation
stone was laid in the presence of the commissioners, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, born Princess Alix of
Hessia, on 16th October 1896. The royal architect, Louis Benois, was called from St. Petersburg for the project.
It is interesting that the Nicholas II and his wife commissioned the same architect one year later (1897) to build
the Russian church for the artists' colony in Darmstadt. Ernst Ludwig (1868 - 1937) the Grand Duke of Hessen-Darmstadt
was pulling the strings for both projects – the Kurpark and the artists’ colony – in his “Hessenland”, and his sister was
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none other than Alix of Hessen. All of the important guests who stayed in Bad Homburg made sure that they visited the
lively “Hill of the Muses”, which then began to make history as an field of experiments and “open air museum” for
young artists.
Both the Kurpark and Muse Hill that had been furnished with related staffage buildings and monuments, pleasure
grounds and art-temple, constituted an ideal space for the search for mental and physical well-being that society
sought then and still seeks today.
Even a short characterisation of the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt serves as a historical model for the unstoppable
rise of the European avant-garde and at the same time – beyond the invasion of today's banalities – provides a scale
even for the search for sense and use of the present day. Furthermore, it demonstrates the complex relationship between
commissioner and artist that, especially in the field of outdoor sculptures in public spaces, is still at stake today.
The “Blickachsen” may smoothly take up the tradition of its own past.
When Joseph Maria Olbrich 1879 - 1898 built the exhibition hall of the Vienna Secession with its cubic walls and
highly decorative metal dome, he caught the attention of the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig von Hesse.
In 1899, the Grand Duke commissioned the architect to create an artists’ colony on the Mathildenhöhe in
Darmstadt. It was built, along with the Hochzeitsturm (“Wedding Tower“), as the “shining” chore of a well regarded
artists centre, in which seven artists – amongst others Peter Behrens – were allowed, to build, outfit and live in their
houses, with total artistic freedom (completed in 1907; compared to the tower of the Bad Homburg palace). Contrary to
all previous conventions, the public were given the opportunity to visit this ensemble as an artwork unto itself.
The inexhaustible repertoire of nature used by Olbrich, the advocate of landscape gardens, replaced the previous
dominance of eclecticism. Nature served as example and guiding principle for the design of houses, fountains,
monuments, the “Swan Temple” and even the model workers' houses. Olbrich demanded not only an isolated “Muse
hill”: “We must build a city, a whole city. Everything else is nothing! The government should give us a field, and this will
be where we want to create a world.”
This search for a new, better “world” was to complement the repetitiveness and rigidity of the cities in separate
refuges of intense variety and surprises, motives which, as we have seen, are essential of the spa garden and landscape
garden.
Henry van de Velde, one of the founding fathers of the new art (art nouveau), demanded “ to follow a line which
is able perform the wonder of filling the our environment with breath and song.” This humane dimension seems to
represent a sharp contrast to the purely mechanical and industrial dimension of iron and steel constructions.
Nevertheless, the desperately needed machines, according to van de Velde, were regarded as “creations of a higher
level”. He compared the machine with “heroes, gods and buddahs, who squat pensively on their pedestals and disappear
when more beautiful creations are born.”
The sculptor Bernhard Hoetger was able to take on this role for the Mathildenhöhe. Under the motto “Kreislauf
des Lebens“ (“The Cycle of Life”) he decorated the plane tree grove beneath the Hochzeitsturm with statues and
reliefs. He included Asian inspired figures of “light and shadow”, the “vase carriers” or the “summer”. With his complex
program, Hoetger belongs to one of the first sculptors who set out to furnish a demarcated outside area with sculptures
in the spirit of a total artwork and to create a network of communicating “axes of view”.
From the interplay between the “idylls” (Bad Homburg and Mathildenhöhe) that are both situated on hills and
are topographically also close to each other, a conclusion is: The landscape garden requiring limitless nature and
freedom for recreation and healing (Bad Homburg) and the artists’ colony Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt supplement
each other once again to the dual concept of Arcadia and Utopia, both in tradition and modernity. Only those who respect
the freedom of art and nature will reach modernity’s “higher level” in the present and the future. Limitation and
restriction means curtailment. Just as the great philosopher of Enlightenment Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
used the pruning of plants as metaphor for bad upbringing, it can also destroy artistic imagination. Without imagination,
no images can be created, as we have already heard, and no emotion will rise on the horizon of freedom.
The community of all artists who present themselves for a time in any sculpture garden and in “Blickachsen”
has to feel obliged to the notion of this concept of freedom within tradition and modernity, if they want their subject
matter and designs to be taken seriously. Additionally, the artworks of our time may show us totally different features,
as is evident in “Blickachsen 3”. From the tension between nature and technology, construction and person on one
side, and in the attempt to come to terms with the guidelines of the locations on the other, new “heroes, gods and
buddhas” will arise.
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