Idyll in an Obstructed Landscape. The show reconstructs the artist's once-celebrated painting cabinet, presented by the city of Zurich to the Zurcher Kunstgesellschaft in 1818 on permanent loan as the city's first publicly accessible art exhibition, destined to survive both the Napoleonic Wars and the confusion of the Helvetic Republic and serving as the cornerstone of today's Kunsthaus collection as early as the first half of the 19th century.
In an exhibition entitled 'Idyll in an Obstructed Landscape’, to run from 26
February until 16 May 2010, the Kunsthaus Zürich presents the work of Zurich
painter and poet Salomon Gessner. The show reconstructs Gessner’s cabinet,
which comprises 20 gouaches and watercolours and laid the cornerstone for
the Kunsthaus collection in the first half of the 19th century. An additional 50
pieces from the museum’s own collection and on loan from owners domestic
and foreign round out the survey of Gessner’s oeuvre.
Salomon Gessner (1730-1788) was celebrated during his lifetime for his art and
poetry, the latter translated into more than 20 languages. In Europe and the
Americas as well as in Russia, Armenia and the Caucasus, Gessner’s 'Idylls’,
elegantly naïve tributes to the ideals of the Enlightenment, met with an
enthusiastic reception. Gessner spent the better part of his life in Zurich,
painting, writing, publishing, practising politics and raising a family, while his
gouaches, watercolours, drawings and engravings made their way into the most
renowned cabinets in Paris, St. Petersburg, Weimar and Vienna, among other
places. Committed to a lyrical school of painting guided by the subjective
experience of nature and independent study beyond the walls of the academy,
Gessner had admirers and detractors in equal numbers.
REALITY AS POETRY
When Gessner died at the age of 57, just prior to the French Revolution, the idyll
had been removed from its pedestal of timelessness, its staging ground shifted
into the viewer’s very self. Gessner imputed a creative unconscious to all of
humanity, to dilettantes, mavericks and artists alike, and thus anticipated one of
the findings of psychoanalysis: that our interpretation of reality as poetry is
among the fundamental abilities and requirements of human consciousness, a
function common to all who enjoy it, given sufficient leisure.
GESSNER’S CABINET OF WATERCOLOURS IN THE KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH
Now, in his reconstruction of Gessner’s once-celebrated Cabinet of
Watercolours for the Kunsthaus show, curator Bernhard von Waldkirch affords
contemporary viewers just such leisure. The exhibition, whose 70 pieces include
20 gouaches and watercolours as well as 17 hand drawings and engravings, is
complemented by works on loan and provides a survey of Gessner’s oeuvre.
Zurich’s first publicly accessible 'painting collection’, the cabinet survived the
Napoleonic Wars intact and in 1818 was presented by the city to the
Künstlergesellschaft, the predecessor of the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, as a
permanent loan. A standing exhibition throughout the first half of the 19th
century, it constituted the cornerstone of the Kunsthaus Zürich’s collection.
CHALLENGING THE PRECEPTS OF SYSTEMATIC LANDSCAPE PAINTING
Visitors are afforded fascinating insight into the minutiae of Gessner’s
cosmology. Self-taught, the painter contrived what he hoped would be a short
cut on the royal road to eminence. His models for the realistic creation of a
painting’s foreground were drawn from no lesser Dutch masters than Nicolaes
Berchem, Anthonie Waterloo and Jacob van Ruysdael. His ability to conjure an
idyllic Arcadian ambience, meanwhile, Gessner owed to such major innovators
of classical landscape painting as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. At the
same time, he broke with the systematic approach to landscape as propounded
by the French academy and Germany’s prolific and influential Jakob Philipp
Hackert.
ARM IN ARM WITH LYRICALLY-MINDED VIEWERS
Gessner’s profound admiration for the Old Masters sensitized him to states of
mind, or moods, as evoked by such ordinary rural motifs as a stream bed. As the
exhibition demonstrates to marvellous effect, this topos, together with moss-
covered cliffs, symbolizes a gentle melancholy. The eye of viewers susceptible to
lyricism is silently guided over picturesque wooden bridges and past cottages
sheltering under mighty walnut trees, and ultimately, as it were, to the very
monument of harmony and sodality. Gessner’s Alpine landscapes resound with
the heroic ideal of a rejuvenated nature.
OBSTRUCTED LANDSCAPE
The poetry and naturalism of Gessner’s paintings are at their most intense in
compositions whose evocation of enclosure creates the impression of an
obstructed landscape. The horizon is positioned high in the tableau, and the
painter’s eye is trained on the proximate rather than the distant. Subjects and
narratives are couched in a virtually impenetrable foreground arrogating the
surface of the painting almost completely.
ADMIRERS AND DETRACTORS
His formal innovation made the idyll-painter of Zurich a pioneer of 19th-century
poetic landscape and history painting, its material taken directly from human
nature. For the first time ever, a publication to accompany the exhibition will
address Gessner’s reception with selected examples. Sources consulted include
the statements of the artist’s critics and disciples alike – painters and graphic
artists such as Claude-Henri Watelet, Pierre Narcisse Guérin, Adam Friedrich
Oeser, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Hans Jakob
Oeri, Arnold Böcklin and John Constable, as well as poets who also wielded a
paintbrush, like Gottfried Keller and Adalbert Stifter. The latter’s observation
rings true to this day: The gentle law of nature that holds sway over Gessner’s
microcosm is the very same whose broken lines and interplay with the visible
world continue to preoccupy us even now. The study of Gessner’s accession to
the status of 'painter-poet’ and his reception as an artist, entitled 'Salomon
Gessner. Idyllen in gesperrter Landschaft’ (Hirmer-Verlag, Munich, 275 pp., over
100 colour ill.), comprises essays by Anke Fröhlich, Mechthild Haas, Anett
Maren Lütteken, Wiebke Röben de Alencar Xavier, Valentine von Fellenberg and
the conservator of the museum’s Collection of Prints and Drawings, Bernhard
von Waldkirch, all specialists in art, literature or cultural history. The book is
available at the Kunsthaus Shop for CHF 68 and distributed in Switzerland by
NZZ Libro.
Image: Die Träumerin, 1780, Kunsthaus Zürich, on permanent loan from the city of Zurich.
Supported by the Truus and Gerrit van Riemsdijk Foundation, UBS Culture
Foundation, the Dr. Adolf Streuli Foundation, the Cassinelli-Vogel Foundation
and private patrons.
Press contact:.
Kristin Steiner, tel. +41 (0)44 2538411, kristin.steiner@kunsthaus.ch
Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz 1, CH–8001 Zurich
Sat, Sun, Tues 10 a.m.–6 p.m., Wed, Thurs, Fri 10 a.m.–8 p.m. Easter 1-5 April and Ascension 12-13 May 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Admission:
CHF 14 / concessions CHF 10.