Surrealism from the Pietzsch artwork assortment in Berlin | EUROtoday

André Masson spent the summer season of 1926 in Sanary-sur-Mer, the small port city on the Côte d’Azur that will later grow to be well-known as a base for German emigration underneath Hitler. Masson, who began out as a cubist, flirted with surrealism, whose manifesto, written by Breton, had appeared two years earlier. Fascinated by écriture automatique, he tried a brand new type of picture manufacturing by throwing sand onto a canvas that he had beforehand coated with glue after which accentuating it with oil paint.

One of those “sand pictures”, whose vibrant surfaces, crossed by crimson strains, appear to point an upright determine, is named “The Hunter”. It was created in 1927. Eleven years later it got here into the possession of the legendary artwork supplier Alphonse Kann, who went to highschool with Proust and is taken into account one of many function fashions for the character of Charles Swann in “Search for Lost Time”.

But the portray does not stick with Kann for lengthy. In the summer season of 1940, the artwork supplier’s whole stock was confiscated by the “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg”, the central workplace of National Socialist artwork theft in Europe. Two years after the tip of the Second World War, Kann obtained the Masson image again. When he died in 1948, it ended up in a Paris gallery, from the place it traveled to Geneva, New York, Rome, Chicago and West Berlin. At the start of the Nineteen Eighties, the couple Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch lastly acquired the “Hunter” for his or her non-public assortment. It has been a part of the gathering of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin as a donation since 2010.

Works of artwork have their fates. The widespread destiny of the photographs proven within the exhibition “Networks of Surrealism” within the Mies van der Rohe Building on the Kulturforum is that their tales all find yourself within the Pietzsch Collection. Previously, they had been scattered everywhere in the world, not least because of the Second World War triggered by Hitler’s Germany, which pressured the Surrealists into exile, underground or rural hiding locations. Victor Brauner painted his “Hand Animal” there in 1943, during which a cat-like determine grabs a unadorned, mendacity feminine determine by the blonde hair. The portray, which remained in his possession till Brauner’s demise in 1966 and was then offered from his property to Paris and America, is certainly one of a very good fifty works from the Pietzsch assortment, the provenance of which will be absolutely confirmed.

The collector couple donated greater than 150 work, drawings and sculptures of classical modernism to the Nationalgalerie fifteen years in the past. The provenance researchers on the State Museums examined 100 of them; round forty of them had gaps within the proprietor checklist, and one was clearly looted artwork – Masson’s “Hunter”. On the again of the body, the image’s path via historical past will be seen in fragments. An stock quantity (“KA 1081”) information its confiscation by the Rosenberg Office; a crimson cross signifies that, like many different works of the avant-garde of the time, it was supposed for destruction. The labels of a Paris gallery and New York’s Moma announce his resurrection. Restitution to Alphonse Kann in 1947 legalized any subsequent sale. Nevertheless, you take a look at the image with totally different eyes while you see it from behind. It is as if one had been now conscious of the numerous fingers which have touched it over the course of its hundred-year existence.

The incontrovertible fact that solely about thirty footage and sculptures are proven within the Berlin exhibition will not be a matter of stinginess on the a part of the curators, however moderately a way of directing the viewer’s consideration to the necessities. The concentrated presentation makes it even clearer what Surrealism really was – not a mode, however a motion. Artists as various as Miró, Dalí, Magritte, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta are gathered within the rooms of the National Gallery. What connects them will not be a particular type of expression, it’s the “networks of surrealism” that the exhibition desires to inform about.

At the middle of those networks had been typically artwork sellers, such because the Belgian ELT Mesens, who purchased works by Max Ernst early on, or the Frenchman Paul Rosenberg, who managed to maintain necessary components of his assortment, together with Masson’s massive format “Massacre”, which was just lately acquired from the Pietzsch couple, protected from the Nazis.

A special sort of networker was the American journalist Varian Fry, who hosted quite a few artists in his Villa Air-Bel in Marseille from 1940 onwards to be able to deliver them to America from there legally or illegally. They additionally included Masson, Bréton and Max Ernst, for whom Fry secured visas to New York, the place they quickly parted methods once more. However, he may do nothing for the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who fought within the Spanish Civil War and was persecuted due to his Jewish origins. Tzara stayed behind and joined the Resistance. He took Max Ernst’s portray “Two Naked Girls” from 1925 underground with him. The image remained in his possession till his demise, then it traveled through Paris to Switzerland, from the place it entered the Pietzsch Collection in 2002.

If there’s one tangible lesson from this exhibition, it’s that artwork will not be a counterworld. She clings with each fiber to historic actuality, which she tries to beat with paint, cloth, sand and stone. At the doorway to the present hangs Joan Miró’s portray “The Arrow Piercing the Smoke” from 1926, during which a beetle-like crimson determine floats on a deep blue background subsequent to a construction manufactured from black dots, strains and surfaces. Miró gave the image to the choreographer Serge Lifar, who directed the Paris Opera ballet from 1930 and remained in workplace even after the Wehrmacht invaded. In 1945 he was banned from working as a collaborator for one 12 months.

After the battle got here “The Arrow . . .” within the assortment of the gallery proprietor Paul Pétridès, who was additionally accused of collaboration and was solely capable of exonerate himself via intensive returns. Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch purchased the image within the Nineteen Eighties; it’s certainly one of their earliest acquisitions. You do not must have all of this in your head while you stand in entrance of Miró’s murals. But when you recognize it, it resonates in its vibrant colours, its delicate strains and dancing dots.

Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning. Networks of Surrealism. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, till March 1, 2026. The accompanying brochure prices 10 euros.