RUBENS AND OTHER MASTERS. Paintings, Sculptures and Objects of the Prince of Liechtenstein
Special Exhibition in Korea 2015/16
After touring a number of exhibition venues in the Far East, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Kochi, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore and Taipei, the Princely Collections are now visiting Korea for the first time with a large-scale exhibition that is being presented at its foremost museum, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul.
One hundred and twenty-five selected works drawn from various genres, including paintings, prints and engravings, sculptures, furniture, tapestries and Kunstkammer objects, illustrate the variety and range of the collections owned by the Reigning Prince of Liechtenstein, Hans-Adam II, giving people in Korea first-hand access to artists and epochs of European art with works that have never before been shown in this country, including numerous representatives of the Flemish school. The main focus is on works by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens. These are displayed alongside paintings by contemporaneous Dutch and Italian Baroque artists, allowing visitors the opportunity to directly compare the divergent styles from various perspectives.
The exhibition highlights the works of Peter Paul Rubens, the ‘painter of princes and the prince of painters’, who exerted an enduring fascination on the Liechtenstein family from their first acquisition of a work by this artist, the “Ascension”, purchased before 1643. With eighteen autograph works by this exceptional artist, complemented by paintings by his pupils, four engravings and two tapestries based on his works, his oeuvre is particularly richly represented. The “Portrait of Clara Serena Rubens”, which shows the artist’s daughter, is one of his most intimate and touching works. With the “Decius Mus Cycle”, represented here by selected paintings, tapestries and engravings, Prince Johann Adam Andreas I von Liechtenstein added another highlight to the collection, one which shows Rubens from a very different angle, as the painter of mature, dramatic Baroque compositions that constitute landmarks in the history of European art. Nevertheless, these works should not be allowed to overshadow paintings such as the “Lamentation of Christ” or the “Discovery of the Infant Erichthonius”, in which the dynamism of the Baroque in Rubens’s painting is equally evident.
Clustered around this nucleus of Rubens holdings is a selection of earlier and later masters, ranging from Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “Earth”, a work once owned by the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II, to Hans Makart’s impressive painting of the “Death of Cleopatra”, from Murillo’s intimate depiction of the “Virgin and Child” to Canaletto’s realistic renderings of Venetian vedutas. Baroque joie de vivre is conveyed in the meticulously detailed paintings on copper by the South Tyrolean artist Johann Georg Platzer, while the atmosphere and handling of light in Biedermeier art is embodied in the picture entitled “Restored to New Life”, a work by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, arguably the greatest master of Vienna Biedermeier painting.
The final selection of masterpieces represents highlights of the Vienna Biedermeier era, giving an idea of the rich range of treasures that have been on display at the Liechtenstein city palace since its opening in the spring of 2013. To single out only one work, the “Girl with a Straw Hat” by Friedrich von Amerling, an icon of Vienna Biedermeier painting that entered holdings of the Princely Collections only a few years ago, may stand for many.
The exhibition in Seoul is completed by important sculptural works from the Princely Collections. Like the collection itself, the Kunstkammer of the Liechtenstein family goes back to the time after 1600, when Prince Karl I, as the palatine of Emperor Rudolf II at Prague Castle, rivalled his imperial employer in the collecting of such objects. At a young age Karl had developed a foible for lapidary work, and after Rudolf’s death in 1612 he was able to exploit the emperor’s court workshops at Prague for his own passion for collecting. He commissioned numerous small pictures of coloured natural stones (‘commessi di pietre dure’) some of which were subsequently made into precious objects around 1620. Dating from the same period are the pietra dura plaques that were incorporated around twenty-five years later into Melchior Baumgartner’s cabinet, an object that has also been acquired in recent years for the Collections.
The interest in precious objects continued with Karl’s son, Prince Karl Eusebius I, who commissioned the carving of the “Maienkrug” bearing his coat of arms from a huge block of smoky topaz that had been discovered in Bohemia. Karl Eusebius’s son, Prince Johann Adam Andreas I von Liechtenstein, subsequently acquired valuable objects made of ivory that harmonized perfectly with the existing holdings. The Collections possess a whole series of battle scenes (battles of antiquity and from the Turkish Wars) by the virtuoso craftsman Ignaz Elhafen, but undoubtedly the most important piece on display here is the “Deckelhumpen” created by Matthias Rauchmiller, one of the most precious ivory objects ever created in Europe and acquired by Johann Adam Andreas I von Liechtenstein in 1707. The interest of the Liechtenstein family for such objects continues to this day, as attested by the acquisitions made by the current Prince Regnant, Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein, in this field over the past ten years. Here mention should also be made of the extensive collection of bronzes, which has no equal anywhere in the world, an outstanding example of which is represented by the small figure by Andrea Mantegna of “Marsyas”/”St Sebastian”. Further precious objects in the Princely Collections serve to document the rise of the silversmith’s art in Augsburg, one of the major European centres, illustrated by absolute masterpieces from all its stages of development. Precious furniture with Boulle marquetry, complex mechanisms or sophisticated details together with the finest Far Eastern porcelain mounted at a later date by the Viennese silversmith Ignaz Joseph Würth, attest to the tastes and passions for collecting of one of the most important noble families in Europe.
