The Berlin “Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge” turns its visitors into “thing caretakers” and uses the care contributions to finance acid-free boxes and cleaning of its objects Advertorial Article Parallax Article Purzel, the little Aral man, was still available until recently. So was the potato masher, as well as a wooden hand and a light blue drip catcher. They are all waiting for their “thing keeper”, […]

The Berlin “Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge” turns its visitors into “object caretakers” and uses the care contributions to finance acid-free boxes and cleaning of its objects

Purzel, the little Aral man, was still available until recently. So was the potato masher, as well as a wooden hand and a light blue drip catcher. They are all waiting for their “thing keeper”, a sponsor who takes care of a museum piece for a year and for a minimum of 40 euros and a maximum of 500 euros.

The so-called “Dingpflegschaften” are an idea of the Berlin “Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge”, a very special institution in the Berlin museum landscape. The focus here is on everyday objects, design without big names – although there are also many well-known designer pieces. Presented in large cabinet showcases, sometimes arranged by color, sometimes by shape or purpose, visitors are presented with new contexts and original views of their mundane everyday world.

The museum thus offers nothing less than an homage to the frequently used objects of everyday life that are usually only appreciated for their functionality: coffee pots, ashtrays, keys, light switches, tools, toys.

For the past eight years, the museum has always held a “thing care day” at the beginning of December, giving visitors the opportunity to choose exhibits on site, negotiate a care fee and then have their “own” exhibit in the museum for a year. The “hope cow” has been given a keeper in this way, as has the Melitta quick filter number 102, and a reservation has already been made for a baby rattle.

Many other pieces are still waiting. The museum concludes a total of 120-140 care contracts with its visitors from all over Germany every year. Some have been looking after “their” object for years, others change. The caretakers include companies, families and many enthusiasts.

“Of course, an object care association like this is a communication tool,” says museum director Renate Flagmeier. “Other museums have patrons’ associations, but we have our thing keepers.” However, it’s not just about visitor loyalty. The money that comes into the museum with the sponsorships is used specifically for restoration, maintenance and acquisition. With the approximately 6,000 euros that are raised annually through the “Dingpflegschaften”, the sponsors enable the museum’s “things” to live in acid-free boxes and folders. The money also helps with minor repairs and cleaning. This is enough for most objects. For larger restoration projects, the museum does have to apply for funding.

Anyone who missed this year’s Thing Care Day can sign up for a sponsorship on the museum’s website. At this address, there is a colorful range of small and large, forgotten, cherished, no longer used everyday “things” that would like to be cared for.

The artist Lyonel Feininger wanted to destroy his unsuccessful painting “On the Seine, Paris”, but it survived. The painting has now been researched in Halle – with many new insights into Feininger’s painting style. Discovering a new, unknown painting by Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) is a big deal. But it is also a big deal when the […]

The artist Lyonel Feininger wanted to destroy his unsuccessful painting “On the Seine, Paris”, but it survived. The painting has now been researched in Halle – with many new insights into Feininger’s painting style.

Discovering a new, unknown painting by Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) is a big deal. But is it also a big deal if the artist himself rejected the painting? This was the question facing the Moritzburg Art Museum in Halle (Saale). “At the end of the 1990s, I became aware of an unknown painting by Lyonel Feininger in private ownership in Dessau. At first, it didn’t seem very credible that such a painting should have existed undiscovered in the GDR for decades,” says painting curator Wolfgang Büche. But he knew that Feininger had been a teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau between 1926 and 1933, so it was entirely possible that a painting had remained there.

There were no indications of its authenticity for a long time, neither in exhibition catalogs nor in correspondence. Büsche found the decisive clue in the archive of the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge. A glass negative shows the painting, and on the back of a paper print Feininger had noted: “Lyonel Feininger 1912/An der Seine, Paris/(picture destroyed).” This identified the fragmentary surviving painting and extensive research could begin in Halle.

This has now become the subject of an exhibition entitled “Lyonel Feininger: Paris 1912. The return of a lost painting”. However, doubts as to whether a painting rejected by the artist and only preserved by chance should be treated as part of the oeuvre persisted to the end and are the major theme of the exhibition and catalog. In the end, everyone involved – museum director Thomas Bauer-Friedrich, restorer Albrecht Pohlmann, curator Wolfgang Büche and art dealer and Feininger specialist Achim Moeller – came to the conclusion that research into such an important painting must be made public. Because: “The painting from 1912 is, so to speak, at the pivotal point of Feininger’s oeuvre. The failure of this painting, which still contains many of the old Mummenschanz figures, made Feininger realize that he had to start anew in his painting,” says Wolfgang Büche.

And that is exactly what the artist did, who already had a career as a caricaturist and comic artist behind him at the time. His skills and the new avant-garde pictorial ideas developed on the basis of the drawings and in confrontation with French Cubism, Fauvism, Orphism and the ideas of the Blauer Reiter and Brücke artist groups. These discussions can be studied excellently in the painting in Halle – after extensive cleaning and the consolidation of loose paint layers. Restorer Albrecht Pohlmann has not only been able to prove the existence of five superimposed layers of paint on the basis of examinations by Kerstin Riße and Ivo Mohrmann from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (X-rays, IR reflectography, cross-sections of the paint layer), but has also gained astonishing insights into Feininger’s search for a new painting technique. “Feininger was an absolute perfectionist,” says Pohlmann and adds: “The late Impressionist, brushstroke-accentuated texture has been erased in today’s appearance through the described alteration process (dissolving with turpentine oil and scraping off the paint layer with a painting knife).”

Survived and researched

These results are extremely valuable “because Feininger’s work is largely unexplored in technological terms. It is therefore impossible to determine whether overpainting a painting in five or more layers was a common procedure for Feininger around 1912,” says restorer Pohlmann. The painting combines five paintings with different colors, but it is difficult to reconstruct them completely. “Otherwise we would have to cross-section the paint layers in several hundred places,” says Pohlmann. For him, the insight into Feininger’s creative process is the most important finding of his research.

In addition to the painting and the restoration explanations, the exhibition in Halle also shows numerous study sheets that illustrate Feininger’s path from caricature artist to avant-garde painter. The results of the study of the Paris painting have made this path to the crystalline division of motifs, to the masterpieces such as the Halle views “Red Tower” and “Cathedral in Halle”, more comprehensible.

The painting will remain on permanent loan to the Moritzburg Art Museum, but according to current plans it will not become part of the permanent exhibition.

Halle, Moritzburg Art Museum, 24.10. to 29.01.2017, catalog: 15 euros (in the museum) 19.80 euros (in bookshops)