Highlights Pinakotheke Modern

Highlights Pinakotheke Modern – Munich Germany

MAX BECKMANN

Versuchung (Triptychon: Mittelteil), 1936/37
Temptation (Tryptic), 1936/1937

This tryptic was realized in Berlin after Beckmann was forbidden to exihibit and his work condition have become extremely difficult. The artist wants to express the lack of freedom in his painting through the use of bondage and the enslavement of women. Every human seem to be locked in a cage. The temptation, the passion appears here as a psychological disease more than a positive feeling.

ANDY WARHOL

Aids/Jeep/Bicycle, 1985/1986

Andy Warhol’s painting are a must have for a contemporary art museum. This painting present objects of the mass consumerism that used to be worshiped : bikes, cars… the letter in black AIDS are here to symbolise the chaos of the end of the 20th century and this contradiction between the crazy growth and the disease.

PABLO PICASSO

Sitzende Frau, 1941
Seated woman, 1941

During the second World War, Pablo Picasso was painting in his studio in Paris a serie of portrait of a woman in an armchair. He was always representing Dora Maar, his lover during those years. All these painting symbolizes the war since the space is extremely narrow, her body and face are totally disfigured in front of such pains. The facial expression with opened eyes and mouth conveys to the woman a certain crazyness, reminding the painting of Munch « The scream ».

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER

Cirkus, 1913
Circus, 1913

This painting depicts a leisure time in the bourgeois society. People are attracted by this safe wilderness and its sophistications. Furthermore, Kirchner was extremely fascinated by the exotic dimension of the Circus, the animals and the dance. He inspired himself from the famous painting of the French painter Seurat “The circus” which was executed in 1891 and know kept at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Georges Seurat, The Circus, 1891

The difference in Kirchner’s interpretation is the distortion of the riders and of the different characters facing a massive crowd: this is indeed an expression of the duality of the scene, between bourgeois and the performers. The Circus of Kirchner embodies relevantly the movement he created : Expressionism.

FRANZ MARC

The Mandrill, 1913

Franz Marc founded the Blue Rider and became of the most important painter of German Expressionism. Franz Marc is regarded as a co-founder and advocate of the theory of the “Blue Rider”, is an important painter of German Expressionism. The concept of his painting is to connect every beings through colors and mixing shapes.

SALVADOR DALÍ

Das Rätsel der Begierde, 1929
My mum, my mum, my mum, 1929

Salvator Dali, like all the surrealist artists, paints images from his dreams, experiences as realistic as he can. The spectator is then free to analyze the painting maybe with some references to the theory of dreams from Freud. Dalí’s pictures are typical examples of the distance between theory and practice in Surrealism, which seeks to eliminate the mind ultimately through the mind. The symbolic of the mother is extremely Oedipal.