The Flâneur: from Impressionism... | Exhibitions

The Fl芒neur: from Impressionism to the Present

Kunstmuseum Bonn

Bonn | Germany

Sep 20, 2018 - Jan 13, 2019

The exhibition The Fl芒neur will focus on images of the city as seen by the fl芒neur. The roaming gaze of the fl芒neur, the people-watcher who strolls aimlessly along streets and squares, hoarding the impressions gained en route, has proved a fitting gauge of the fleeting, fickle, protean big city ever since the early days of modernism. The fl芒neur and the city are mutually dependent, for while the fl芒neur needs the city as the only element in which he can thrive, the city needs the fl芒neur as a foil from which to derive images of itself, no matter how fragmentary or collage-like they may be. AThe fl芒neur is both the eye that looks at the city and the eye through which the city looks at itself. For it is in seeing and in walking that the city comes into being.

The Fl芒neur will formulate aspects of a theme that has been shaped as much by developments in art as by how the figure of the fl芒neur himself and the cities that he inhabits have changed. To do this, it will bring together works from museums and private collections in Germany and abroad by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, August Macke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and George Grosz, in a selection ranging from Impressionism to Expressionism and the New Objectivity.

Photography since the 1930s is likewise a key medium for the urban experience. A second focus of the show will therefore be its discussion of the city and the fl芒neur as depicted since the 1970s, specifically in the works of the photo-realists of New York and in the paintings of the Neue Wilde in Berlin, whose claim to legitimacy rests on their 鈥渞einvention鈥� of the city as a social space in constant motion. Performance, film, and audio-walk all use walking, seeing, and hearing as a means of actively experiencing and defining the urban structures of an ever more complex world.