Staatsgalerie Stuttgart’s director, Christiane Lange, talks about the ongoing exhibition “With All the Senses! French Paintings,” the potentiality of Impressionist art to evoke pleasant emotions, and the well-functioning alliance among museum directors.
In the course of the ongoing exhibition “With All the Senses! French Paintings,” you are showing 33 Impressionist pieces from anonymous private collections that have rarely or never been exhibited before. How did you manage to win these impressive masterpieces for the show?
Receiving 33 works on loan from private collections for this exhibition is the result of our long-standing cultivation of contacts within the art world, which ranks among our most important duties. We stay in constant contact with collectors, galleries, and museums. Similarly, this is how street artist Banksy’s “Girl with Balloon” came to the Staatsgalerie on loan in 2019.
What is it about Impressionism that fascinates you personally?
Monet once stated that his colleague Renoir was like a river meandering through a meadow as beautiful as Mona Lisa’s smile. This is what Impressionism is all about: to transform the immediate perception of nature’s beauty in its everchanging appearances into the utmost artificiality of the medium of painting, and thus to trigger equally intense feelings in the observer. This is exactly what the Impressionists succeeded in and why their works still manage to delight people all around the world.
Within the ongoing show, you work intensively with social media and other digital channels. Was it planned from the beginning to include social media that intensively, or did this modern form of audience interaction come about as a result of the present coronavirus pandemic situation?
We have been using social media for many years. However, the current Impressionism exhibition is indeed the first in the course for which our communications and intermediation team developed a special social media campaign, which functions very well. The awareness of digital media has increased enormously due to the coronavirus pandemic, and we have adjusted to this trend. For the first time, we will publish a program brochure in March that solely comprises our digital offerings.
In your opinion, might the ongoing coronavirus crisis be an opportunity to captivate a completely new, young target group for the Staatsgalerie through the increased use of virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and the integration of social media?
Even if corona acts as an amplifier, the development toward digital offers, especially for younger target groups, has existed for quite a while in the museum world. Last year, for instance, we were able to implement two wonderful digital projects as part of the state of Baden-Württemberg’s funding program “Digitale Wege ins Museum II” (“Digital Paths to the Museum II”). The VR installation “Art Hunters” and the search machine “K_AI” aim to deliver art to a digitally interested, primarily non-museum-affiliated target group between 16 and 30 years old.
Apart from the current exhibition “With All the Senses,” you are likewise offering a comprehensive digital program. Among others, you started the video series “Art Meets Art,” in which actors, dancers, or musicians interact creatively with works of art, and you installed an improvised radio studio on your premises. How did you conceive of these creative ideas?
We have a young communications and intermediation team that simply developed and implemented really good ideas over the past year.
The Staatsgalerie usually provides a complex and varied visitor program: adventure tours for children, workshops, curator tours, and so forth. Does it affect you personally that you cannot offer all this right now?
No question about it, guided tours, workshops, and an accompanying program tend to turn a museum visit into a true experience for many people. None of this can occur during the corona outbreak. However, this gives us the opportunity to test new approaches in intermediation to reach people in different ways. In an Instagram livestream, we spoke to contemporary artists about, inter alia, the question of how to make use of the internet to present oneself as well as art. We are currently also creating workshops for schools that can be accessed via an online platform.
You once stated in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, “We (the museums) have to think about how we can solve problems cooperatively. We are not competitors; we are all in the same boat.” How important is this alliance among art institutions in the time of the coronavirus pandemic?
It is of utmost importance. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, we, the art museum directors, have been in a constant exchange. We share experiences and sometimes specific work tools such as hygiene plans. We also support each other with unbureaucratic extensions of loans to give unseen exhibitions the chance to attract an audience at a later point in time. We are an excellent community, but we already were before the crisis.
What are you particularly looking forward to when the Staatsgalerie reopens?
The months of closure seem like an eternity. Without our visitors, who turn the Staatsgalerie into a lively place, an essential part of the nature of the museum cannot be experienced: the joy of jointly discussing art in front of the original work. All the better that the time until the reopening is getting shorter.
Prof. Dr. Christiane Lange
After studying art history, Bavarian history, and church history in Munich and Berlin from 1984 to 1990, Prof. Dr. Christiane Lange operated at the Klewan Gallery in Munich until 1999. In 1994, she obtained her doctorate, having studied the Würzburg cathedral builder Hans Schädel. From 2000 onward, Prof. Dr. Lange served as curator at the art gallery of the Hypo-Kulturstiftung Munich; from 2006 to 2012, she held the position of director there. She has been teaching at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts since 2003, from where she received an honorary professorship in 2011. Since 2013, Prof. Dr. Lange has been serving as director of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
Exhibition “With All the Senses! French Paintings”
In the course of its ongoing exhibition “With All the Senses! French Paintings” (16.10.2020 – 04.07.2021), the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart is showing 60 Impressionist works of art, 33 of which were sourced from anonymous private collections and have rarely or never been publicly exhibited before. Included are masterpieces by the most famous Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Edgar Degas. Works by Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte, Jean-Louis Forain, and Paul Gauguin can likewise be viewed in the exhibition. The organizers explicitly invite visitors to engage in experiencing the Impressionist pieces with all their senses. A special focus is placed on interaction through social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook.
Links
Website of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart | Instagram Account | Facebook Account
Related Article: All Senses Engaged at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
