Paintings and graphics from the collection of Aleksandras Popovas (Klaipėda). Exhibition in the framework of the arts program of the 20th anniversary International Thomas Mann Festival “Human Dignity”
It is not the first time that the artworks from the collection of Aleksandras Popovas from Klaipėda are showcased as part of the exhibitions within the framework of the arts programme of the International Thomas Mann Festival. The collection of painting and graphic works gathered by the collector over the last decade reflects his focus upon the fine arts heritage of East Prussia of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. Majority of the artists represented in the collection are related to the finest chapters in the art history of East Prussia – the Fine Arts Academy of Königsberg and the Nida Artists Colony.
The 2016 exhibition The Days of Man, the Eternity of Nature elaborates on the theme of the 20th anniversary International Thomas Mann Festival “Human Dignity”. Its exhibits speak of the routine of man’s mundane life and nature, a witness to human existence. The exhibition features 82 painting and graphic works by 61 artists, including oil paintings, watercolours, pastels, drawings, etchings, lithographs, and wood engravings. Showcased are the landscapes, portraits and figure compositions by Richard Birnstengel, Fritz Behrendt, Eduard Bischoff, Arthur Degner, Ludwig Dettmann, Olof August Jernberg, Julius Freymuth, Eduard Kado, Bruno Krauskopf, Helene Neumann, Ernst Mollenhauer, Alfred Teichmann, Anna Sinnhuber, Erich Waske, and others artists.
The teachers and students of the Königsberg Fine Arts Academy went for plein air painting workshops on the coasts of the Vistula Lagoon and Sambia Peninsula, or to the Curonian Strip, a fishing village of which, Nida, was made famous by the artists’ colony that was active until the end of the Second World War. A varied and awe-inspiring nature of the Curonian Strip drew local painters as well as artists from West Prussia and from all over Germany.
A student and a professor, a dignified celebrated painter and an aspiring rebellious artist coming from a roaring metropolis, everyone would find here an inspiring landscape, a primeval natural world untouched by civilisation, taciturn people, genuine children of nature – fishermen and women faithfully waiting for their return, peasants engaged in ploughing, sowing and harvesting. Motifs of dunes, pinewoods, the lagoon and the sea, scenes of work and feasts, portraits of local common people were moulded into eloquent pictures of nature and human life and portrayed in the works of art by painters of different styles, manner and skill. The exhibition will be open until August 31, 2016.
Kristina Jokubavičienė, Exhibition Curator
