What May Vanish Becomes Image.

It is a truism, as frightening as it is fascinating: everything that has been captured in images no longer exists, or not in the form in which it was depicted. In visual art, impermanence is often conveyed allegorically, by a memento mori or melancholy meditation on the evanescence of things. Images of dreams, encounters with people, explorations of nature similarly convey only passing instants. Sometimes the ephemeral becomes the explicit subject of a picture that nonetheless seeks to record it: clouds are forever changing shapes, snow soon melts, trees bloom only briefly.

In this age of climate change, the awareness that our entire environment is undergoing rapid transformation has become universal. That is why we now see works of landscape art in particular with different eyes. They show nature as always already marked by human interference. No longer just a fine sight, a landscape now becomes an endangered ecosystem.

The exhibition is structured around such instants of recognition. It presents well-known as well as rarely or never-seen works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the collections of the Lenbachhaus, the Historischer Verein von Oberbayern (Historical Society of Upper Bavaria), the Christoph Heilmann Foundation, the Munich Secession, the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, the KiCo Foundation and the Förderverein Lenbachhaus e.V. Art works with the ephemeral and with the knowledge of transience. That is where it concurs with the idea of the museum, which holds works of art, collects them, and proposes to both preserve them and share them with the public.

With works by: Albrecht Adam, Antoine-Louis Barye, Joseph Beaume, Rosa Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, Heinrich Bürkel, Maria Caspar-Filser, Lovis Corinth, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Johan Christian Dahl, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Narcisse Virgilio Diaz de la Peña, Jules Luis Dupré, Maria Eichhorn, Thomas Fearnley, Thomas Theodor Heine, Jacques Hérold, Wilhelm Jakob Hertling, Paul Hoecker, Wassily Kandinsky, Wilhelm Leibl, Franz Marc, Pierre-Jules Mêne, Christiane Möbus, Christian Ernst Bernhard Morgenstern, Gabriele Münter, Jean Bloé Niestlé, Blinky Palermo, Leo Putz, Gerhard Richter, Richard Riemerschmid, Carl Rottmann, Théodore Rousseau, Eduard Schleich d. Ä., Johann Sperl, Carl Spitzweg, Toni Stadler, Wilhelm Trübner, Timm Ulrichs, Johann Georg von Dillis, Wilhelm von Kobell, Franz von Lenbach, Gabriel von Max, Max Joseph Wagenbauer, Fritz Winter

Curated by Karin Althaus, Assistant Curator: Johannes Michael Stanislaus

We would like to thank Klaus Modick for the title of the exhibition.

Exhibition texts (PDF)