Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

Frauen – Liebe und Leben (A Woman’s Love and Life) is the title of a cycle of poems by Adelbert von Chamisso set to music in the nineteenth century by Robert Schumann. The cycle tells of the life of a devoted and loving wife from her first love to her death and gives its name to the current exhibition from the collection of the couple Maria Lucia and Ingo Klöcker at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg.

But what does the collection have to do with Chamisso and Schumann? Its special feature is that it focuses entirely on the portraits of women. The spectrum ranges from the post-war period to the present and includes paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures. Represented are artists as diverse as Wolfgang Mattheuer, Alex Katz, Thomas Schütte and Sigmar Polke. And as diverse as are the artists, so too is their view of the theme Woman. They present her intimately and in public, unadorned or sublime.

The exhibition arranges the pictures according to the nine poems of Chamisso’s cycle and so sets a thematic line. The poems provide a broad framework for the artworks and at the same time form a contrast with them. Chamisso’s cycle is static and does not show the woman as an individual. She lives a woman’s life customary at the time of the poems’ composition, a life that comes to an end as her daughter begins to traverse the same cycle. The portraits in the exhibition have little in common with this image of women: they impress the viewer by their diversity, giving an insight into many genres and representations of femininity.

“Es blicket die Verlaßne vor sich hin/ Die Welt ist leer./Geliebet hab ich und gelebt, ich bin/ Nicht lebend mehr” (The abandoned woman gazes straight ahead / The world is void. / I have loved and lived, / am no longer among the living), wrote Chamisso; but for the artist, the motif of Woman is inexhaustible in its variety.