Starting on June, 24: Each Thursday the Museum Barberini presents special lectures (in German) on a particular aspect of the Hasso Plattner Collection or the current exhibition. Museum curators, conservators, and guides speak about their various disciplines and areas of work, offering a glimpse behind the scenes and offering new perspectives on the works of art.

Thursday, August 5, 2021

Late Thursday! The museum will be open until 9 p.m.
Lecture + ARTE film documentation

Gardens of the Artists: The Impressionists as Gardeners and the World of Plants
Andrea Schmidt, art historian, Museum Barberini
In the nineteenth century the Impressionists created a world of idylls, beauty, and tranquility in their paintings, selecting sunny fields, shimmering rivers, and city streets and cafés as their subjects. The artists’ own gardens also provided an important motif that represented the epitome of an ideal world. This is where they experienced changing nature and depicted the days and seasons using light and color. The art historian Andrea Schmidt will explain how the paintings evoke summer light and delicate scents of these self-made paradises.

The lecture will be followed by a film

Giverny: The Last Water Lilies by Monet
Documentary film, ARTE France, 2020, 14 min.
The picturesque town of Giverny is located around eighty kilometers from Paris. This is where the French painter Claude Monet created his own world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The garden that he planted on his property is in a sense a living Impressionist painting.

Thursday August 12, 2021
From Impressionism to Fauvism: A Brief Guide to Style on Example of the Hasso Plattner Collection
Dr. Dorothee Entrup, art historian, Museum Barberini
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris became the center of Impressionism. What are the stylistic characteristics of this new art movement, and how did it develop? How did Neo-Impressionism and Fauvism grow out of this movement, and how do these styles differ? Works from the Hasso Plattner Collection illustrate the artistic developments in Paris on the eve of the modern era.

Thursday, August 19, 2021
Tour de France: A Cultural-Historical Tour of the Favorite Locales of the Impressionists
Dr. Claire Guinomet, art historian
Impressionist paintings depict real places in a precise way. References to places are the subject of this cultural-historical tour of France. Following the footsteps of the Impressionists, various regions—Normandy, Île-de-France and Paris, and Provence—along with their historical and cultural features, will be presented, and the influence of these places on the painters of Impressionism will be examined.

Thursday, August 26, 2021
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895)
Dr. Ira Oppermann, art historian
Berthe Morisot, in addition to being one of the outstanding artist personalities of Impressionism, was one of the few women in the Impressionist circle. Employing a free, extravagantly long brushstroke, she developed a unique technique for capturing motifs in a way that is more suggestive than descriptive. Her quest for immediacy attests to her resolution and sense of modernity that was barely considered by contemporary critics. As a figurative painter, Morisot depicted women getting dressed, at work—both inside and out—and in threshold areas such as at a window. Her favorite models—her sister Edma and, later, her daughter, Julie—give viewers access to the private world of this exceptional artist. In her landscape pictures the painter focused on park scenes, gardens, and maritime depictions with precisely arranged ships. In this lecture, all phases of the artist’s career will be presented and considered in context using works by Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Thursday, September 2, 2021
Late Thursday! The museum will be open until 9 p.m.
Lecture + ARTE film documentation Monet and Water

Lecture by Corina Ott-Seelow, art pedagogue (ca. 20 minutes)
Émile Zola wrote that in Claude Monet’s pictures “the shimmering, transparent water sleeps and roars.” Not only was water a biographical element in Monet’s life, starting with his childhood spent in Le Havre at the estuary of the Seine; water was also a central topic in his artistic work. The artist never tired of painting reflective surfaces and multicolored refractions of objects. All his life Monet was fascinated by the transience and changeability of water, and in Giverny, where he died, it was his favored subject for his paintings.

Using selected examples from the Hasso Plattner Collection, in this lecture Corina Ott-Seelow explains the challenges Monet experienced while painting water and how his art differs from the work of his fellow Impressionists.

The lecture will be followed by an ARTE film

Water Lilies: Claude Monet’s Legacy
Documentary film by François Prodromidès, ARTE France 2017, 52 min.
The documentary tells of the deep friendship between Claude Monet and the French politician Georges Clemenceau. In 1918, when Clemenceau was prime minister, Monet offered to donate two paintings from the series of water lilies that he was currently working on to the French state. The documentation examines the motivation of the two friends: the political goals of one, and the artistic search of the other. 

Lectures for further dates will be announced soon. 

Venue
Auditorium

Runtime
45 minutes

Please note:
The number of participants is strictly limited to 25. Early booking is recommended.