Manet Joek Museum

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An institution is by the online dictionaries description ‘an organization, establishment, foundation, society, or the like, devoted to the promotion of a particular cause or program, especially one of a public, educational, or charitable character.’ When referred to within an artistic context it’s usually in reference to organizations such as galleries and museums, but also educational facilities such as University. Institutions play a key role in the art world by acting as a platform to exhibit and sell artists work in an environment that is widely accessible to the general public. Museums also act as a space to preserve and display historical works of art for public viewing, artwork that would otherwise be held in private collections. Both …show more content…

Himself and other artists in the late 60s realized that institutions were becoming known for their “cultural confinement” and thus felt that this was something to attack aesthetically, politically and theoretically. In 1974 Haacke attempted to participate in the ‘Project 74’ exhibition, created in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Wallraf-Richartz museum in his hometown of Cologne Germany. The work he planned to contribute was a piece entitled, Manet-PROJEKT’74, which was made up of ten paper panels reflecting his intensive research reveling the origin of Edouard Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus (1880), that in 1968 was donated to the Wallraf-Richartz museum. Within the research he reveals that the friends of the Wallraf-Richartz museum, in memory of Konrad Adenauer, the federal republic of Germany’s first chancellor, donated the painting. Through such research he discovered that Hermann Josef Abs, the chairman of the friends of the Wallraf-Richartz museum had been an important financial advisor and banker for Hitler’s Reich during the Second World War; and whom gained another position of high power as the chairman of the organization prior to the war ending. The piece was created to depict “how easily the posture of cultural benefactor allows an individual to ‘clean’ their ambiguous criminal past”(ewaneumann), even one as incriminating as an ex-Nazi. Each of the ten panels within the piece was titled by the exact price paid for the painting throughout its history and underneath, in Haacke’s own terms, were “CV’s of the paintings owners”. Thus demonstrating the inextricable entanglement of cultural ojects with political and personal history. Although as one would imagine Manet-PROJEKT’74 was rejected from the exhibition due to it explicitly criticizing the museum and it’s patrons; it was later exhibited at the Paul

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