The Potsdam Museum Barberini has been all about light since it opened in 2017. The “Art of Landscape” already examined how the Impressionists used their plein air paintings to trace the blazing sun of the south, the iridescent snow of northern France. That the house is now dedicated to the sun as a source of light: only logical.
And also that the sun is literally allowed to paint here. “The sun floods my canvas” is the name of a picture by Gérard Fromanger, who died in 2021, in the last room. A large sun-yellow circle from which traces of color are trickling. The sun, it drips. It is the post-modern giggling echo of the corona, a motif that can be found in countless variations in the show.
A ride through 2400 years
Fromanger sets the ironic conclusion to a journey that spans almost two and a half thousand years. It’s an amazing trip not only to the heart of Impressionism, but through the history of Western art. In order for this unbelievable ride to succeed, curator Michael Philipp, unlike the cooperating Musée Marmottan in Paris, where the exhibition was previously shown, did not sort the exhibition chronologically, but divided it into thematic blocks. And sorted out despite the 1000 square meters of space: the show is limited to Europe.
The impulse behind the exhibition was very concrete: the desire of the Potsdam museum to borrow Monet’s famous painting “Impression, Sunrise”, a depiction of the industrial port of Le Havre. It was on display at the first joint exhibition of the Société anonyme in 1874 and gave its name to Impressionism. It hangs in a central place in the Musée Marmottan. It was so difficult to separate there that it was only allowed to stay in Potsdam for eight weeks.
If you want to understand how groundbreaking this work is, you have to look at Monet’s painting “Argenteuil in the Late Afternoon”, also from 1872, in the same room. In Argenteuil the world is still in order, a pre-industrial idyll. In Le Havre, modernity is unmistakably there. Clouds and smoke merge into one mass. The sun, as later in the 1930s with Arthur G. Dove or in the 1950s with Jean Miró, is nothing more than a red eye. No consolation, no promise. Rather a warning signal.
Human hubris everywhere
This touches on two core motifs of this show. First: surprising continuities. Who would have thought that Caspar David Friedrich’s “Ostermorgen”, charged with religious hope, and “Grätenwald”, created in 1926 by Max Ernst, who was deeply shaken by the First World War, have so much in common? The bare trees, and also the question: can we expect anything from this pale sun ball?
The second, very impressive constant of this show is the striking ambivalence of the sun throughout the centuries. Herein also lies the topicality of this exhibition, which it does not carry in front of itself but can be felt in every room. The sun nourishes and nourishes – but it also consumes anything exposed to it for too long or too close. The fireball in Monet or Miró bears witness to this.
And also Catherine Sieverding. It shows large-format, red-glowing NASA images of the sun’s ball. The sun, a life-threatening mass. “Looking at the sun at midnight,” she calls it, a contemporary continuation of the ancient Icarus myth, which is a few rooms further on. Hendrick Goltzius shows how Icarus, even while falling, cannot take his eyes off the sun. Bernhard Heisig’s Icarus yells desperately against the fall.
Human hubris can be found everywhere here. It is well known that some rulers wanted to be the sun themselves. Long before Louis XIV, Alexander the Great came up with the idea of having himself depicted as the sun god Helios. Napoleon is also seen as Apollo, quite unsuccessfully: a realistic little head on a yellow background.
If in antiquity the sun was a deity, an invincible force that steered world affairs with a ride through the heavens, the dethronement came with the Old Testament. The sun became a star of God’s hand, bound by instructions: it should worship God – or express cosmic pain. When Jesus was crucified, the sun is said to have darkened.
After centuries of servitude, in alchemy, in religion, in the tarot, the sun only really came into its own in landscape painting from the beginning of the 17th century. Here, too, she remained the mood carrier, but she became a determining force. Turner’s, Monet’s, Boudin’s and Signac’s paintings show that. An exhilarating rebellion, which Monet himself already inscribed as the end point with Le Havre. Otto Piene gave the answer in 1961. His “Black Sun”: a soot stain.
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