黑料不打烊

From 19 February 2009 to 1 August 2010 the two museums of the collector Oskar Reinhart in Winterthur are to merge temporarily. The renovation of the Villa Am R枚merholz provides a unique opportunity to see an important selection of its world-famous paintings by old masters and French Impressionists at the Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten in Winterthur, set here in an exciting dialogue with Reinhart's paintings by German and Swiss painters. The joint exhibition of the two collections owned by Oskar Reinhart (1885 - 1965) in Winterthur is indeed a unique event, and one which is unlikely to recur in this form for decades to come. Once the renovation of the gallery and home of the Oskar Reinhart collection Am R枚merholz has been completed, the paintings will return there permanently, in keeping with the collectors wishes. For the duration of the exhibition entitled In Dialogue - The Two Oskar Reinhart Collections, Winterthur, visitors will have an opportunity to enjoy the paintings which Oskar Reinhart collected between 1920 and 1960 as an ensemble of works that has evolved over time. It also means that, for the first time, the collector himself becomes the focal point of an exhibition. Oskar Reinhart's significance as a collector is due not least to the fact that, after 1920, he was one of very few people who continued to devote their attention to 19th century German artists - at a time when, internationally, French Impressionism had firmly established itself as the sole threshold to Modernism. It is therefore not surprising that the paintings and drawings at the Museum am Stadtgarten, which opened in 1951, are regarded as the most important body of 19th century German art to have been assembled outside Germany. Presenting striking parallels The exhibition combines around 280 paintings from both collections. It is housed on the first and second floors of the Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten and is structured mainly by theme, which serves to highlight in a most exemplary way the artistic criteria by which Reinhart selected his works. Reinhart had a marked preference for picturesque, flowingly executed paintings, and so his attention naturally focused on the genres of portrait, landscape and still life, as well as on artists who, in their day, already enjoyed an intense exchange across national borders. In addition to the many different connections between German and French 19th century painters, another theme emerges, one which has always had a considerable influence on the selection and presentation of works at the R枚merholz Gallery: namely the elements which link the paintings by old masters with those of their successors at the threshold of Modernism. The exhibition highlights include the rooms featuring portraits by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Wilhelm Leibl, Edouard Manet and Ferdinand Hodler, and still life paintings by Gustave Courbet and Hans Thoma. While these works were all painted almost around the same time, they are rarely - if ever - juxtaposed within museum galleries. The three rooms containing four centuries of landscapes also yield unexpected cross-references, for instance between the works of contemporaries Alfred Sisley and Frank Buchser or Camille Pissarro and Wilhelm Tr眉bner. As a concept which was drafted by the collector for the hanging of his paintings reveals, the two exponents of Romanticism Eug猫ne Delacroix and Arnold B枚cklin had from time to time been placed side by side in the R枚merholz gallery. Now juxtaposed once again, they reveal a wealth of literary and historical references. Indeed, Realism as the pivotal movement in the visual arts around 1850 is unlikely to be showcased more impressively as a movement out of a European mould than in the room whose focal point is the incomparable Courbet group from the R枚merholz. In a few individual cases important areas of the collection have been left out for conservation reasons. For instance, none of the drawings or Gothic panel paintings is on show, and Honor茅 Daumier is not exhibited on a scale befitting the importance which the collector actually attached to him. A history meticulously documented Key areas of the exhibition look at the history of the collection and the collector's personality. A selection of documents from the abundant archives at the R枚merholz provides an insight into the way in which Oskar Reinhart worked. A portrait gallery also refers to the family's long-standing tradition of patronage. Contemporary artists had already received the support of the collector's father, Theodor Reinhart, the proprietor of the Volkart Brothers trading firm. A group of paintings, notably by Geneva and Winterthur artists, demonstrates how this tradition lived on with Oskar Reinhart. The catalogue published for the exhibition contains a history of the Oskar Reinhart collection as well as a comparison of twenty pairings of paintings. They underscore the fundamental idea behind the exhibition and the Oskar Reinhart collection - namely the dialogue in which European painters engaged over a period of four centuries, across all ages and nations.