JGA July-August 09 - The Jewish Georgian

July-August 2009 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN Page 11
Dachau Artist Colony exhibition continues at Oglethorpe
T
he groundbreaking exhibitions
“Dachau Before Dachau: European
Artist Colony 1860-1914” and
“Dachau Concentration Camp: Years of
Destruction 1933-1945” are at the
Oglethorpe University Museum of Art
(OUMA) through August 30.
When Chloe Edwards, president
of Oglethorpe’s Jewish Student Union,
first heard that the exhibition was coming
to the school, she “was intrigued but also
apprehensive, “ she wrote in the The
Stormy Petrel, the student newspaper.
“What could this mean to me, as a Jew and
the current president of the Jewish Student
Union, and also as an art lover, someone
who attends the opening of new OUMA
exhibits religiously each semester? Could
I, in good conscience, attend this exhibit,
let alone endorse it? While I have heard
arguments for supporting and shunning
the Dachau exhibit, having thought long
and hard about it, I find that I must support
the efforts of the museum in bringing
this exhibit to campus. “
The following essays are reprinted,
with permission, from the exhibition catalogue
accompany the Dachau Artist
Colony exhibition at the OUMA.
—————
It was during the twentieth century
that the name “Dachau” became famous
throughout Europe and the world in association
with horror. For Dachau was the
location of the concentration camp that
bore the city’s name from the very beginning.
The name “Dachau” will always go
hand in hand with memories of the
National Socialist crimes against humanity,
a circumstance placing a special
responsibility on the city which it must—
and will—never evade. This responsibility
means, among other things, that Dachau
must do everything in its power to ensure
that the memory of the abominable crimes
of National Socialism is kept alive for the
generations that did not witness the events
first-hand. The first and foremost obligation
assigned the city of Dachau by its
own history is to be a city of peace and a
place of learning and commemoration for
the world’s youth.
As a site of remembrance, Dachau
actively confronts its history. One concrete
expression of this is the Dachau
Youth Guesthouse, which invites young
people from Germany and abroad to study
National Socialist despotism and organizes
discussions with persons who experienced
the historical events. The town has
furthermore established a Department of
Contemporary History in addition to hosting
an annual symposium on the same
subject.
Yet Dachau was and is also a city of
culture. Already in the late nineteenth century,
due to its proximity to Munich, one
of the most important artists’ colonies of
Europe emerged here. Attracted by the
fascinating landscape of the Dachau
Moor, a substantial number of artists—
Adolf Hoelzel, Ludwig Dill, Arthur
Langhammer, and others—moved to
Dachau. And thanks to the unusually large
number of artists presently living and
working here, the city is still a vibrant
artists’ centre today. What is more,
Dachau has become increasingly active in
the Federation of European Artists’
Colonies EuroArt.
In the coming years, by means of a
traveling exhibition in English, Dachau
would like to introduce itself internationally
as a place of commemoration and culture.
In the process, it will decidedly not
use culture as a means of distracting from
the city’s history. On the contrary: the city
of Dachau wants to show how important
the interplay of commemoration and culture
is for a peaceful and open world.
In Dachau, culture and commemoration
are inseparable. Along with the city’s
active commemoration and remembrance
work, art and culture serve as responses to
its history and act as its ambassadors to
the world. The city of Dachau, whose
name has become synonymous with the
atrocities committed during the Third
Reich, is opening its doors and presenting
itself to the world as a cosmopolitan and
international city of culture.
—Peter Bürgel, Mayor, City of Dachau
—————-
The Artists of Dachau
The Dachau Painting Gallery is situated
in the middle of the picturesque historic
city of Dachau, right opposite the city
hall. Its permanent collection provides
documentary evidence of the artists’
movement in the 19th century, which gave
an important stimulus to the development
of art in Germany. It was here in Dachau
that the open-air painting found one of its
origins, the discovery of the landscape as
an independent motif.
Due to its location in the vicinity of
Munich, Dachau became a popular meeting
point for landscape painters in the 19th
century. First, they were enthusiastic
about the atmospheric landscape of the
Dachau Moss, with its changing natural
light. Later, the painters began to show
interest in the picturesque city, the village
life, and the people in their traditional costumes.
Besides purely artistic reasons
which made the landscape painters leave
the Munich art scene and go to Dachau,
some of them came because of economic
considerations. In comparison to Munich,
living in Dachau was cheaper and the
rents for studios were reasonable. Dachau
became an artists’ location where the
painters tried to portray the landscape in a
true-to-life way. This was successfully
achieved by painting right in front of the
motif, in the landscape itself. Nature had
become a work of art.
The Dachau Moss (or moor) was discovered
in the first half of the nineteenth
Gustav Keller (1860-1911),
Heimweg/Way home, oil on
cardboard, 28 x 34.5 cm
Museumsverein Dachau
century, by Johann Georg von Dillis, who
was a teacher in landscape painting at the
Munich Academy from 1804 to 1814. He
visited the Dachau Moss together with his
students and encouraged them to paint
from nature. It was only in the middle of
the nineteenth century that artists like
Eduard Schleich the Older, Carl Spitzweg,
and Christian Morgenstern came to
Dachau. They were strongly influenced by
the artists from Barbizon, whom they had
visited in 1851. The style in painting of
the second half of the century was characterized
by Adolf Lier and Wilhelm von
Diez, two famous teachers in landscape
painting at the Munich Academy. Among
their students were painters like Fritz
Baer, Josua von Gietl, Richard von
Poschinger, Joseph Wenglein, Ludwig
Willroider, Hans am Ende, Ludwig
Herterich, Fritz Mackensen, Max Slevogt,
and Wilhelm Trübner.
Around 1900, Dachau became an
artistic colony through the work of art of
Ludwig Dill, Adolf Hölzel, and Arthur
Langhammer and an art center from which
an important new style developed. From
Hans von Hayek
(1869-1940),
Verschneiter Bauernhof/Snow
Covered Farm, 1904, oil on
canvas, 60.5 x 80 cm
Stadt Dachau
Otto Rau (1869 – 1900s),
Winterlandschaft/Wintery
Landscape, oil on canvas,
49.5 x 65.7 cm
Dachauer Galerien und
Museen
Dr. Ulrich und Gertrude
Lechner Stiftung
1893 until 1905, they met in Dachau to
discover new styles in painting and
expressions. Their breakthrough came in
1898, when the three artists had a joint
exhibition as “The Dachauer“ in Berlin.
With the outbreak of World War I in 1914,
Dachau, as many other artistic colonies,
lost its importance. New, sensational fashions
in painting were created in the big
cities, and only a small group of painters
remained in Dachau. Nevertheless,
besides the traditional open-air painting
which still was continued by some artists,
there were also avant-garde-style painters
in Dachau, like August Kallert, Adolf
Schinnerer, and Paula Wimmer, all artists
who were looking for development out of
the regional boundaries.
OUMA is located on the campus of
Oglethorpe University, 4484 Peachtree
Road N. E. Hours are 12:00 noon-5:00
p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. Admission is $5.
For additional information, visit
http://museum.oglethorpe.edu, or call
404-364-8555.