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27/4/2007

Josephine Troller (1908-2004)

Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern

Paintings

Curated by Christoph Lichtin and Isabel Fluri

Three years after her death, the Museum of Art Lucerne is honouring Josephine Troller as an artist who deserves a solid place in the art history of Lucerne in the second half of the 20th century. Not just because of her striking appearance, but above all because of the independent body of work that this self-taught artist created, effectively undisturbed by the countless artistic movements in the half-century after 1945. The artist wasn’t made known to a wider public until 1970, when Jean-Christophe Ammann – director of the Museum of Art Lucerne at the time – showed her works in the context of major contemporary artistic positions. From that point onwards, Josephine Troller’s paintings and drawings were no longer seen exclusively as ‘naïve art’, but perceived as highly autonomous works, and appraised as an interesting contribution towards the trend of so-called ‘Innerschweizer Innerlichkeit’ (‘Central Swiss inwardness’).

The many works from the second half of the 1940s that occupy a special place in this survey demonstrate that Josephine Troller found her own very independent form of visual expression in her early, predominantly ornamental pencil and gouache drawings. Even in her first drawings and paintings, however, many things were present in sketch form that would later undergo further formal elaboration, or even become an actual code. Various pictorial types prove to be defining for the artist’s extensive work. Some of these will be significantly represented in the exhibition. Thus, from the early 1950s, her pencil sketches and paintings show sketched landscapes, some of them views of a lake, but particularly views of small villages. The region of the Ticino, for example, where Josephine Troller spent her family holidays at this time, forms the real basis for numerous depictions of outside spaces.

Another group of works shows – in what we might call an extension of the landscapes – artificially laid-out garden-style parks, most of them clearly isolated from their surroundings and some of them inhabited by animals, in a way that they recall the art-historical topos of the Garden of Eden. In a third pictorial type the clearly restricted external space becomes a ‘stage space’, apparently arranged symmetrically and according to a strict central perspective. This pictorial arrangement also occurs in many of the small-format ballpoint pen drawings produced mostly around 1973 and in the early 1980s. Apart from this, the exhibition doesn’t only want to re-show the iconic portraits and self-portraits of the late work, which have already been shown several times, but rather, more as a survey of the work as a whole, to use earlier works to demonstrate the development of the figure and the genre of the portrait in Troller’s work.

The presentation of some of the many works from the estate, along with those in the Museum’s own collection and those on loan from private collectors, provides the first overall view of the work of this extraordinary Lucerne artist. The drawings and paintings will be arranged partly in thematic and partly in chronologically arranged groups. The works, some of which are being shown publicly for the first time, will be complemented by some of the artist’s highly individual sculptural works, as well as a film including archive material made especially for the exhibition. Finally, the Museum of Art Lucerne has edited an informative book on the life and work of Josephine Troller, carefully produced in collaboration with the Lucerne publishing house Edizioni Periferia. It includes essays by Isabel Fluri, Christoph Lichtin and Max Wechsler, as well as an art-historical appendix and is profusely illustrated.

Kunstmuseum Luzern
Europaplatz 1 - Luzern

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