Around 147,000 visitors saw the exhibition Modigliani. Modern Views at the Museum Barberini, which closed yesterday, Sunday. This makes the Modigliani show – alongside exhibitions on Pablo Picasso (2019), Vincent van Gogh (2019/20), Edvard Munch (2023/24) and the sun in art (2023) – one of the museum’s most successful since it opened in 2017.
Image above: © Sebastian Bolesch
The exhibition was accompanied by an extensive educational and event program. Around 1,000 guided tours and workshops took place during the 16 weeks of the exhibition, as well as concerts, talks, lectures and yoga sessions. The education program attracted a total of 17,400 guests. One focus of the educational activities was on young guests, school classes and families: 4,400 visitors alone took advantage of these offers. The Potsdam Film Museum offered a themed film series, which ended yesterday with a screening of the silent film rarity La Garçonne from 1923. The Potsdam Music Festival also organized a concert in the exhibition.
Ortrud Westheider, Director of the Museum Barberini and curator of the exhibition: “Moderne Blicke presented a different Modigliani, did not repeat the image of Modigliani as a womanizer inclined towards alcohol that has been circulated for decades. I am very pleased that, in collaboration with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, we were able to give new impetus to Modigliani research and present him as a painter who did not degrade his models to objects, but on the contrary had a relationship with them that was characterized by equality. I am thrilled by the great response from the public – our visitors obviously appreciate the fact that we take a fresh look at supposedly familiar themes and artists with every exhibition. We seem to have succeeded in doing this again with Modigliani. We are now looking forward to focusing on the work of Maurice de Vlaminck from mid-September”.
Modigliani. Modern Views was the first exhibition on the artist in Germany for fifteen years. The exhibition brought together 56 portraits and nudes by Modigliani in dialog with 33 paintings, drawings and sculptures by Modigliani’s European contemporaries, including artists such as Gustav Klimt, Jeanne Mammen, Pablo Picasso, Natalia Goncharova, Egon Schiele and Paula Modersohn-Becker. The loans came from 48 institutions from twelve countries, including the Albertina, Vienna, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, the Nahmad Collection, the Phillips Collection, Washington, the Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, the Tate and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition was a cooperation with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, where the show was on display from November 24, 2023 to April 1, 2024.
From September 14, 2024 to January 12, 2025, the Museum Barberini is presenting the exhibition Maurice de Vlaminck. Rebel of Modernism is the first posthumous retrospective devoted to the Fauvist and influential artist of the French avant-garde at a German museum. With around 70 selected exhibits, it provides an extensive overview of Vlaminck’s entire painterly oeuvre: from his first compositions, executed at the beginning of the 20th century, to his experiments with Cubism inspired by Cézanne and Picasso, to his last landscape paintings. The starting point for the exhibition is the Hasso Plattner Collection, which has nine works by Vlaminck, including four key works from his Fauvist heyday. The approximately 40 international lenders include the Tate Modern in London, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Dallas Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
