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14/2/2002

The Visions of Arnold Schonberg

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

The Paintings

On February 15, 2002, the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT will open the exhibition "The Visions of Arnold Schönberg", devoted the composer's highly acclaimed yet equally controversial painting.

Arnold Schönberg (Vienna, 1874 - Los Angeles, 1951) ranks among the most important and innovative composers of the twentieth century. Though less well-known, his contribution as a painter to modern art is also noteworthy in its own right. The SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT will present 150 selected paintings representing the Expressionist oeuvre of this great innovator. His paintings, which earned early praise from such contemporaries as Kandinsky and Jawlensky but were a focus of controversy within the artists' group "Der Blaue Reiter", have lost nothing of their visionary power over the years. The exhibition will be accompanied by performances of some of Schönberg's most outstanding musical compositions by the Frankfurt Museumsorchester der Oper Frankfurt under the direction of Paolo Carignani, the Ensemble Modern, the Walter Levin and the Basler Streichquartett, Stefan Litwin and others.

Max Hollein, Director of the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, sees the exhibition "The Visions of Arnold Schönberg" as "a challenge to us to examine Schönberg's painting from a contemporary perspective and thus to offer an opportunity for a current, broad-based assessment of one of the most important artist personalities of the twentieth century".

Both as a composer and a painter, Arnold Schönberg was completely and consistently receptive to the new and the unfamiliar. The life and career of this native of Vienna, the son of Jewish parents, are marked by spectacular artistic successes and catastrophic failures. He was the object of almost religious devotion on the part of his students and followers and the target of ridicule and rejection by his critics. Schönberg's musical roots can be traced to the Late Romantic period, and he composed his string sextet, "Verklärte Nacht", in the spirit of that era at the age of twenty-four. In 1908, he abandoned tonality in his "Second String Quartet", thus setting the course for the new music of the twentieth century. Schönberg's first efforts as a visual artist took place during this phase of profound change in his art, a period in which he suffered personal tragedy and a deep emotional crisis - his wife Mathilde left him to pursue an affair with a friend of Schönberg's, the famous Austrian painter Richard Gerstl, only to return shortly thereafter to her husband and children, after which Gerstl committed suicide.

Influenced by the work of Expressionist artists from Edvard Munch to Oskar Kokoschka, Schönberg himself saw painting as an opportunity for "direct expression", as a means of expressing the emotions, ideas and feeling for which he found no vehicle in music. The many self-portraits done around the year 1910 are images of a man intent upon breaking through the outer shell of his own humanity and penetrating to the innermost core of his soul. This "inner self" is particularly evident in what Wassily Kandinsky referred to as the "Visions" - a series of faces floating in an indeterminate light-space, faces in which the eyes play an especially important role. Schönberg, largely self-taught, both as a composer and a painter, said with reference to his own portraits that he could "imitate the gaze of most people. . . . And that is probably why my so-called 'Visions' are always gazes". The exhibition deliberately emphasizes this visionary aspect of Schönberg's art, setting aside his commissioned works and most of his stage designs. Schönberg's most intense work in painting took place between 1907 and 1912. He returned only sporadically to the medium in later years. In the early 1920s, he introduced a new style of composition based upon the twelve-tone method. Having moved to Berlin, he was forced to leave Germany in 1933. He settled in Los Angeles, where he died in 1951.

Likes his musical compositions, Schönberg's Expressionist visual art, most of which was created during an eruptive phase in his life as an outlet for the energy that powered his quest for personal and artistic expression, has always tended to polarize public response. Today, fifty years after his death, his painting continues to challenge the viewer, who is nevertheless captivated by their hypnotic aura.

The exhibition is to be accompanied by a catalogue published by Cantz Verlag containing articles by Otto Breicha, Robert Fleck, Daniel Libeskind, Karin von Maur, Hermann Nitsch, Nuria Schoenberg Nono, Franz Pomassl, Simon Starling and Ferdinand Zehentreiter. The texts illuminate historical, artistic and personal aspects of Schönberg's oeuvre.

HOURS OF ADMISSION: Sun. + Tue. 11 a.m. - 7 p.m., Wed. - Sat. 11 a.m. - 10 p.m.

ADMISSION PRICE: euro 6.

CURATOR: Blazenka Perica.
RESEARCH ASSISTANCE: Martina Weinhart.
EXHIBITION ARCHITECTURE: Wilfried Kühn, Vienna /Frankfurt.
Support for the exhibition is provided by the Cultural Foundation Deutsche as well as the Culture Forum of the Austrian Embassy in Berlin.

PRESS OFFICE: Dorothea Apovnik, SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, Römerberg, D-60311 Frankfurt, telephone: ++49-69-29 98 82-18, fax: ++49-69-29 98 82-40

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT,
Römerberg, D-60311 Frankfurt
telephone: ++49-69-29 98 82-50
fax: ++49-69-29 98 82-40
e-mail: welcome@schirn.de

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