The Painter’s Garden: at the Städel Museum

Sunday, 08 October 2006 23:45

Frankfurt, Germany - At the beginning of the dark season, when local gardens begin to take on their winter appearance, artificial paradises will bloom in full splendor in the Städel Museum.  The exhibition Gardens: Order, Inspiration, Happiness is dedicated to the motif of the garden, which will transcend eras and genres in the visual arts, and will present viewers with the rich variety of significance and modes of representation, with more than 200 loans from important international museums and collections.  On exhibition 24 November 2006 to 11 March 2007.

Gardens offer people protection, relaxation, and inspiration.  They move artists as well, and for centuries they have inspired masterpieces.  The painted garden is as varied as its meanings: A wall surrounds a medieval garden and keeps evil out of its magic realm.  For Peter Paul Rubens, the garden is a space for private life.  Caspar David Friedrich saw it as a mediator between human beings and nature.  Vincent van Gogh used the garden as a projection screen for his melancholy.  Impressionists such as Claude Monet planted lavish and imaginatively designed gardens and recorded them in paintings of splendid color flooded with light. Renoir’s lilacs, Manet’s dahlias, and Pissarro’s fruit trees became symbols of a new, sensitive style of painting.

Gardens are a piece of ordered nature; they unite unrestrained vital energy with the planning spirit of the gardener.  That is another reason why they have been an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration to artists.  The happiness felt in a garden is not reserved to artists alone, however.  The harmony of human beings and nature, shielded from harsh reality by hedges or garden fences, makes the garden a small paradise on earth for everyone who visits it.

The works exhibited demonstrate this feeling of happiness in a variety of ways.  Gustave Courbet, Pierre Bonnard, and William Merritt Chase preserved intimate glances at a peaceful garden world, whereas Claude Monet and Henri Matisse were inspired by the vegetation’s variety of colors and forms to achieve new forms of artistic expression.

The concentrated gaze at individual plants demonstrated both in medieval detail drawings and in Paul Klee’s herbaria reveals a profound link between the artist and the motifs of the garden.  As a space of human experience, a place for contemplative reflection, and as a source of creative energies, the garden has always been a fruitful theme for the visual arts.

Visit Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt at : www.staedelmuseum.de