The Hohenbuchau Collection

Landscapes form a central core of the princely picture gallery, covering the entire span of the collection from the late 14th to the mid-19th century. If the landscape at first appears not as the actual theme of the work, but only a view, a background staffage, it subsequently acquires increasing weight as a genre in its own right, and enjoys its first golden age in the 17th century, most of all among the Flemish and Dutch painters. These same artists have been represented by incomparable major works in the Princely Collections ? the introduction to the 1948 Lucerne catalogue observes that ?the eyes of the princely collectors have always been aimed at Belgium and Holland both in the past and in the present day. The exhibition covers the entire spectrum of landscape painting, through to recently acquired examples of urban landscapes, shown here for the first time. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Arcadian landscapes were produced, ideal landscapes that were supposed to lead the visitor away to an imagined ancient world that had never existed in that form; a generation later, painters such as Ferdinand Georg Waldm?ller sought the light of the south and during the time of Biedermeier discovered plein-air painting, which would lead without a break to Impressionism. This period in particular could not be better covered than by the material of the Princely Collections; all the great names of the day are represented here by significant major works.

In this paradigm changing study of art and thought from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance Clare Lapraik Guest re-evaluates the central role and theoretical dignity of ornament in pre-modern art and literature.

Mund, Lippen, Zunge und Zähne – Sprache, Schmerz und Schrei – Essen, Schlingen, Speien und Spucken – Lust und Leidenschaft: Die Mundhöhle ist im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes eine äußerst reizvolle Körperzone. Ihrer Erkundung haben sich dabei nicht nur Wissenschaft und Medizin gewidmet, Gleiches gilt auch für die Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte – von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Diesen breit gefächerten motivgeschichtlichen Pfad verfolgt das Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg im Herbst 2020 erstmals in einer umfassenden Ausstellung rund um den Mund. Der begleitende Bildband bietet mit seinen anschaulichen Essays nicht nur inhaltliche Vertiefungsebenen an, sondern reicht weit über die Ausstellung hinaus. Hier wird der Mund mit seinen Fähigkeiten auch im Bereich der Filmgeschichte, Ethnologie, Literaturwissenschaften und Architektur unter die Lupe genommen.

Catalogue raisonné.

The Dutch history painter Joachim Wtewael is widely admired for his astonishing small paintings on copper. The Getty Museum's Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan is one of his finest works in this unusually demanding medium. Though only eight inches high, this Mannerist painting contains eleven figures in three different spaces, captured in a dramatically charged moment from the famous story told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The author's detailed analysis of Wtewael's painting also serves as a fine introduction to Dutch art of the Golden Age. Illustrated with seventy reproductions of paintings, drawings, etchings, and decorative objects, Anne W. Lowenthal's study ranges over the broad historical and cultural context in which Mars and Venus was created.