"Pygmalion's Workshop"-- fine forms
If you find yourself near the subway station at Königsplatz any time soon, you should consider visiting the Lenbachhaus Kunstbau. There, you will be made privy to an exhibition whose curators certainly chose an ambitious topic: the various ways in which artists, from the Renaissance to the early 20th century, have dealt with one of the most complex and difficult subjects in art— human beings.Barring few exceptions, the exhibition does not strive to—nor could it—display work by famous artists; instead, it concentrates on lesser-known names. The title of the exhibition, “Pygmalion’s Workshop,” alludes to two of its focal points: the myth surrounding a famed sculptor of classical antiquity, and academic painting.
The show is divided into seven sections, the first of which is devoted exclusively to the establishment and development of art academies. These contributed to the social advancement of artists, who, in the Middle Ages, had been considered artisans and were organized in guilds.
The second section concentrates on the sculpture of classical antiquity and the powerful influence it exerted on the new image of humanity that emerged during the Renaissance. Numerous casts of Laocoön or the Farnese Hercules as well as pictures of artists’ studios bear witness to the use of antique statues for study purposes. This widespread practice is documented in a series of drawings of such statues.
The third part of the exhibition turns to the ancient myth of Pygmalion, as told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Pygmalion fell in love with one of his own statues and, in answer to his prayers, Venus, the goddess of love, breathed life into it. Since the Renaissance this myth has served as a parable of sculptors’ ability to create images virtually indistinguishable from living human beings. Implicitly it equates the artist with the divine creator. The exhibits in the previous sections of “Pygmalion’s Workshop” embrace the notion of mimesis, i.e., the imitation of nature—a term derived from Aristotle’s Poetics. In this section, however, the viewer’s gaze is drawn to René Magritte’s Attempt at Impossibility (1928), perhaps the most striking painting in the show. In it he, like so many 20th-century artists, radically breaks with Aristotle’s artistic theory, depicting a painter about to portray the second arm of a lifeless female nude. The image testifies to the Surrealists’ rejection of creating the illusion of animate beings in art. The soullessness of modern life had taken center stage.
The fourth section is devoted to anatomical models and their depiction. Here numerous painstakingly rendered anatomical studies are on display, revealing a number of artistic intentions and impulses. They include Angelo Bronzino’s Saint Bartholomew of 1555, which shows the martyr in a pose of humble supplication. This image is remarkable because the saint’s skin has been peeled back on certain parts of the body to reveal the musculature beneath. This unconventional portrayal was intended to demonstrate the artist’s sound knowledge of human anatomy, while also expressing the saint’s piety through the pose of his flayed body. This use of poses and gestures to convey meaning, common practice since the Renaissance, reflects Aristotelian doctrine, which considered the soul to be the source of the body’s life, expressed primarily through movement.
A rear corner of the long Kunstbau space is devoted to articulated dolls known as “lay figures.” Initially used by artists in the Renaissance to illustrate the theory of proportions derived from the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius, these figures took on new roles and meanings in the centuries that followed. In the 20th century, for example, they were thought to embody the soullessness of the times, images of them populating the canvases of such artists as George Grosz, Max Ernst, Otto Dix and Rudolf Schlichter.
The penultimate section of the exhibition focuses on nude models, whose use is documented at some of the earliest art academies, founded in the 16th century in Bologna and Rome. Drawing from living models—“life drawing”—was the final stage in the preliminary course of study offered at academies. Its purpose was to provide students with a store of images by enabling them to draw the human figure in any pose from memory and, therefore, to create original compositions.
The seventh and final section of the exhibition concerns itself with trompe l’œil, a manner of painting that aims to deceive the spectator, if only temporarily, into thinking that the objects or surroundings depicted in a picture are real rather than two-dimensional representations.
“Pygmalion’s Workshop” is surely one of the most unusual exhibitions to have been held in Munich this year. One of its strengths is that it does not hone in on a single artist or an individual artists’ group, but brings together disparate works from different periods. In this way it is able to trace a major feature of artistic activity through the ages—the oscillation between reproducing nature as accurately as possible and depicting it in ideal terms.
