Exhibition Tour in English

The artist Theo von Brockhusen had a passion for light and colour. His work belongs to the art historical epoch of the German Impressionism. As a young artist in Berlin he gained recognition very quickly thanks to his patrons, Max Liebermann and Paul Cassirer. However, he was soon forgotten after his early death. So who was Theo von Brockhusen, and what significance does his legacy have today? 

Like many of his contemporaries, Brockhusen travelled to other European countries, engaging with avant-garde Impressionist painters for inspiration. He was a member of influential artists' associations such as the Berlin Secession and the Free Secession, both of which broke with conventional artistic tradition and organised numerous exhibitions. Atmosphere and light became the focus of German modernism's conception of colour and form. In 1925, gallery owner Ferdinand Möller dedicated a posthumous solo exhibition to Brockhusen in Potsdam. One hundred years later, the Potsdam Museum is honouring Brockhusen at his beloved location with a chronological exhibition of his work. Due to his personal circumstances, Brockhusen died at the age of 36 and was not among the well-known names of the Berlin Secession, such as Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Walter Leistikow, Karl Hagemeister and Lesser Ury, for a long time.

However, his work, dominated by colourful landscapes created mainly in the vicinity of Potsdam, has recently been rediscovered by the art trade and museums.

This special exhibition is dedicated to this extraordinary painter, presenting the establishment of German Impressionism in Berlin and Brandenburg around 1900 through his example. The monographic section of the exhibition is complemented on the basement floor by works from selected contemporaries, which illustrate the development of German Impressionism within the context of landscape art.

The Brockhusen exhibition has been made possible thanks to lenders from private art collections and museums across Germany. It is complemented by numerous additional works of art from the Potsdam Museum's collection.

Room 1

From 1906 onwards, Brockhusen explored the Havel landscape around Werder (Havel) and Caputh in search of inspiration for his work. Inspired by this region, he spent many summers here. Initially working with a darker, earth-toned colour palette, from 1907 onwards he began painting light-filled landscapes in the finest shades of colour. These paintings were created in Baumgartenbrück, where the Havel meets the largest bay, the Lake Schwielowsee. Adopting an Impressionist approach, Brockhusen used thick brushstrokes and a cool colour palette to capture the bustling wooden bridge and the summer day on the Havel. The artist skilfully directs the viewer's gaze towards the holidaymakers arriving at the steamboat landing stage in Baumgartenbrück in the distance.

During his intensive periods of work each summer, Brockhusen stayed with the Hermann family, who owned the local restaurant. He captured their garden and surroundings in several works. Since 1826, the house has welcomed numerous artistic personalities, including Theodor Fontane, Hannah Schreiber de Grahl, Marie Goslich and Karl Hagemeister. The house is still located in the same place and has hardly changed. Brockhusen gave the two works of the Old Wooden Bridge to the innkeepers out of gratitude for the carefree life and productive working environment at Schwielowsee that characterised his main body of work. The artist did not have to search long for this lively motif, as the old Baumgarten Bridge led directly from the water to the restaurant. He could observe and sketch the locals and day-trippers immediately.

Thanks to the mediation and financial support of the Cassirer couple, Brockhusen spent the summer months between 1906 and 1908 in Knokke, a coastal town in Belgium. Inspired by the special atmosphere of this seaside resort, he painted a large number of beach landscapes characterised by their colourful, lively compositions and comma-like brushstrokes. Using broad, energetic brushstrokes and a pronounced central perspective, Brockhusen impressively captured the interplay of light and shadow on the Belgian coast.

The works created in Knokke are among the highlights of his oeuvre and attracted considerable attention during his lifetime. They were exhibited at the Berlin Secession and the Paul Cassirer Art Salon in 1907/08, among other places. These summer stays were decisive for Brockhusen's artistic development.

In 1909, Theo von Brockhusen married Hildegard Adelheid Bothe in Seelow. The couple's honeymoon took them first to Paris, then to the Belgian coastal town of Nieuwpoort, where Brockhusen created a series of new landscape paintings. Inspired by the works of Vincent van Gogh, which he had studied intensively, Brockhusen adopted Van Gogh's dynamic brushwork and stronger colour palette on this trip, which marked an important phase in his artistic development. The landing stage at Nieuwpoort was one of Brockhusen's favourite subjects. He painted it in several different versions. For holidaymakers, the approximately 500-metre-long walkable wooden pier jutting out into the sea and running parallel to the harbour entrance was one of the seaside resort's attractions. The pier, which ran vertically into the sea, aroused Brockhusen's compositional interest as he used the static architecture to explore spatial depth and create a cosmic illusion of the sky through the uniform brush structure of the most delicate colour tones. At the 1913 Berlin Secession exhibition, one of his paintings was hung next to a van Gogh. In direct comparison, the borrowed brush technique was revealed, earning Brockhusen the mocking nickname 'van Goghhusen' in Berlin's art circles.

Artists from the Havelland region in the Potsdam Museum art collection

In the 19th century, the Havelland region was considered the epitome of unspoilt nature. It was an idyll for landscape painters, who sought to capture the immediacy of the natural experience in order to depict the development of colour artistically. The area around Lake Schwielowsee was particularly popular with painters and graphic artists, reflecting the wider trend of artists from Berlin and Brandenburg working in the Havelland region. The Potsdam Museum's art collection includes several significant pieces comparable with those of Brockhusen in the exhibition. The artists' biographies under the heading 'Havelland Impressionism' impressively illustrate how they concentrated on the landscape of this region in their free work. Many artists regarded sketching directly from nature as an expression of a modern visual language. They believed that the depiction of natural phenomena was a worthy subject.

Room 2

By the end of the 19th century, Berlin had developed into a rapidly growing metropolis, greatly influenced by industrialisation. Social changes in the big city meant that day trips to Wannsee and the surrounding area became a popular way of exploring the Havel lakes region. The Berlin-Potsdam railway line and the increasing tourist development of the waterways made spontaneous trips more popular. Around 1900, numerous excursion steamers travelled from Berlin to Werder (Havel) for the tree blossom festival, and to the surrounding villages of Caputh, Ferch, and Petzow, since there were no paved roads. These tours offered visitors the chance to reach these areas by train via the newly built Potsdam-Wildpark and Ferch-Lienewitz stations, and at weekends, hundreds of day-trippers and summer visitors left Berlin to enjoy the idyllic garden restaurants and beer gardens near Potsdam. 

When the painter Theo von Brockhusen discovered the village of Baumgartenbrück on Lake Schwielowsee, the local beer garden became one of his favourite subjects to paint. From 1906 onwards, he lived with the owners of the local inn during the summer months and was fascinated by the everyday hustle and bustle of the beer garden, with its exuberant and cosy atmosphere. He depicted the convivial diversity and relaxed lifestyle in picturesque scenes. The artist only had to look out of his room in the inn to see these scenes: People seeking relaxation, such as walkers, lovebirds and cheerful school groups, rested under the chestnut trees with a cold drink, enjoying the view of the sun-kissed, sparkling Havel River from their shady spot. Brockhusen paid particular attention to the beer garden motif, experimenting with the formation of colourful light and shadow on the ground.

The Kaiser Pavilion and the Swedish Pavilion on Lake Wannsee, Nikolskoe and Moorlake were among the most popular places to relax in the shade or stop for tea and dancing. Berliners travelled to the countryside, discovering both the Wannsee area and the Havelland near Potsdam. The artists Brockhusen and Liebermann frequently depicted the popular theme of garden restaurants on Lake Wannsee and Lake Schwielowsee in their work. Five of Brockhusen's beer garden paintings are on display for the first time in the rotunda of the Potsdam Museum, alongside two of Liebermann's paintings from his series on excursion restaurants.

After moving into his summer residence on Lake Wannsee in 1910, Liebermann stopped travelling to the Netherlands to paint. Instead, he found inspiration in the many restaurants located in the south-west of the city during the summer months. From the beginning of his artistic career, Liebermann was preoccupied with depicting groups of figures, their arrangement in space, and the distribution of light, colour and movement. From his Munich period around 1879 onwards, Liebermann painted scenic hidden object pictures of dance halls and garden restaurants, documenting his artistic development from realist to late Impressionist. Countless sketches made al fresco testify to Liebermann's intensive study of crowds of guests in excursion restaurants, based on studies of movement and lines of sight.

This can be understood in the context of the compositional references to Brockhusen, whom Liebermann met when he was young and regarded as a role model and mentor. Following in Liebermann's footsteps, Brockhusen approaches the subject of beer gardens, but not in an imitative way. The intensification of light contrasts and the exaggerated, accentuated colour scheme testify to his progressive independence. Most notably, his more expressive choice of colours from 1910 onwards is characterised by the specific use of violet and pink tones for the footpaths and sandy paths.

Room 3

The focus of his entire body of work is his colourful interpretations of the Mark Brandenburg landscape around Baumgartenbrück at different times of day and throughout the changing seasons. In this idyllic corner of the world, he produced numerous panoramic paintings characterised by atmospheric imagery stretching far into the distance. The lung patient was driven back to this area time and again by his longing for light and air. From 1910 to 1915, he worked tirelessly and his painting style reached its peak during this period. He used energetic brushstrokes to express liveliness and movement in his paintings. Comma-like brushstrokes and coloured lights and shadows modelled individual objects, making them stand out vividly from their surroundings. 

His pictorial compositions increasingly featured impressive landscape poetry, dealing with natural phenomena such as air currents and the incidence of light in order to symbolically reflect and express his emotions. Brockhusen's conception of landscape painting was characterised by a generous view from a distance, as he rarely drew the viewer's attention to details. From Hermann's hill, he looked out over the water's edge between the river Havel and Lake Schwielowsee, where he observed the 'pure beauty - harmony - of nature'. It was here that the painter began to work his magic with colour, translating his brushstrokes into emotion, movement, physicality and contrast. 

The Franzensberg with its lush apple orchard stretched behind the Hermann family home. Brockhusen climbed it with his canvases to find the perfect vantage point for his panoramas. There also stood the so-called Schill-lime-tree, complete with bench, where the artist would rest. According to legend, over 200 years ago, Prussian Major Ferdinand von Schill leaned against this lime tree on the mountain above what is now the Baumgartenbrück restaurant, looking out for his troops as he rallied them to fight against the the French occupiers. In 1809, Schill was seen as the instigator of the national uprising against the foreign rule of Napoleon. 

The destroyed lime tree was replaced with a new one. The Schill monument, a memorial stone, now stands in front of the Baumgartenbrück restaurant. Like Schill, Brockhusen chose the hill behind the inn as his viewpoint and sketched the Schill lime tree using thick brushstrokes and an expressive colour palette. The bright shades of blue and green, combined with the rhythmic brushstrokes, created a lively artistic expression, suggesting the all-encompassing, radiant sunlight. Three variations of the sublime tree are known, one of which was owned by his friend, the sculptor Fritz Klimsch.

 

In 1912, Theo von Brockhusen won the highly regarded Villa Romana Prize for his painting Die Brücke von Baumgartenbrück (The Bridge at Baumgartenbrück). This honour enabled him to spend six months in 1913 as a scholarship holder at the Villa Romana in Florence. He was given a studio apartment with a beautiful view of the Tuscan landscape. His preference for panoramic views from a bird's-eye perspective was fully satisfied: his eyes roamed over the Via Senese, olive groves, the cathedral dome, Florence's Campanile and the Apennine mountain ranges. He created panoramas with an infinite depth effect and painterly power as a result. The works from his Italian period reveal his joy in experimenting 

with composition and brushwork, which he varied in each painting. His impressive views of the Arno bridges, particularly the Ponte Santa Trinità and the Ponte alla Carraia, testify to his artistic engagement with the Tuscan landscape. His late Impressionist approach to painting is reflected in his study of the incidence of light at different times of day, as seen in the colour gradients of the water. This approach enabled him to capture atmospheric moments.

In 1916, the Brockhusen family regularly stayed at the estate of the poet Erich Schwabach and his family in Kaiserswaldau, Silesia. It was in this inspiring setting that Brockhusen created several paintings, capturing the distinctive Silesian landscape of tree-lined avenues and expansive fields in an expressionist style. Encountering the host, who was involved in a wide range of literary and artistic activities, and experiencing the unspoilt nature provided the painter with new inspiration for his work, which is reflected in the expressive visual language of this period. Fields, forest clearings and footpaths were rendered in waves of muted purple tones; oversized branches and treetops swayed in the wind; stormy humidity was conveyed through dark clouds. Every element of the picture was in ecstatic motion. Objective reality receded into the background and colour became an expression in itself.

Room 4

In the summer of 1918, the Brockhusens spent several weeks in Kaiserswaldau once again. On the painter's 36^th birthday, a lively masked ball was held at Märzdorf Castle. There was plenty of alcohol and dancing until the early hours of the morning, and it was a boisterous, cheerful celebration. Nobody suspected that it would be Brockhusen's last birthday. Although Schwabach was concerned about his friend's poor health, nobody anticipated the sudden death of the prolific artist. On 25 April, Brockhusen was buried in Berlin-Nikolassee. Klimsch and Liebermann attended the funeral and paid their respects. During the Free Secession's summer exhibition in 1919, 23 of his paintings were brought together once again in a memorial exhibition. He created his entire artistic oeuvre in the spring and summer months – that was when the colour-loving landscape painter had the energy to paint. He returned repeatedly to the Havelland near Potsdam to paint his light-filled landscape panoramas. The colouring of his works was wet, fresh and cheerful, and exuded summer freshness. From 1914 onwards, however, he no longer depicted the sun-drenched landscape atmospherically; instead, he used it to intensify the exaggerated, energetic colour composition.

Brockhusen's significant works possessed a suggestive power; they glowed with non-naturalistic colours to enhance the atmosphere, emphasising the effect of colour rather than faithfully reproducing specific objects. His expressive works of art, which depicted the Havel bridges, blossoming orchards and tree-lined avenues swept by the wind, were dedicated to inner experience and self-expression. They continue to inspire viewers' thoughts and feelings.

Basement

Introduction – Basement 

In his collection of essays Berliner Kunstfrühling (Berlin Art Spring, 1893), art critic Franz Servaes examined the emergence of artistic modernism in Berlin. He noted that, by the end of the 19th century, German landscape painting had evolved from heroic epic to lyrical modernism. Inspired by developments in France, Berlin was breaking with old academic teaching methods and traditions in art schools, a move that would prove to be a renewing art movement over the next two decades. In Munich and Berlin, Germans experienced an 'artistic spring' that transcended national borders and entered the collective consciousness. There was a palpable transformation in the art scene, and the harbingers of modern art were already secretly creating their works. This ultimately led to the establishment of the Berlin Secession in 1898. From 1899 onwards, the courageous innovators of the Berlin Secession wrote their own success story in collaboration with progressive gallery owners and art collectors. Berlin developed into the epicentre of the German avant-garde. The establishment of new art movements brought with it the internationalisation of the art world. Symbolists, French Impressionists, and Art Nouveau artists from various countries were present in Berlin.

European trends in a new conception of art were adopted. This marked the beginning of a new epoch in art history, characterised by a fresh approach to representing sensory impressions: the impression. Among the artists described as avant-garde in Germany were Max Liebermann, Walter Leistikow, Lovis Corinth, Karl Hagemeister, Lesser Ury, Julie Wolfthorn, Curt Herrmann, Max Uth, Ulrich Hübner, Franz Skarbina, Philipp Franck, Dora Hitz, Hans Baluschek, Fritz Klimsch, Heinrich Basedow the Elder and, later, Käthe Kollwitz, Georg Kolbe, Emil Pottner, Waldemar Rösler and Theo von Brockhusen. The older generation of Secessionists had already made art history. The internationally recognised exhibition activity, influenced by Max Liebermann and Paul Cassirer, encouraged success and inspired younger artists to join this free association. In 1906, Theo von Brockhusen joined the association alongside Max Beckmann, Karl Hofer, Heinrich Nauen, Emil Nolde, Hans Purrmann, Ernst Barlach and Georg Kolbe. By the early 1920s, Brockhusen had established himself as a leading figure within the association, his talent and confident style earning him a place on the executive committee.

Berlin Secession

The first exhibition of the Berlin Secession opened with a bang on 2 May 1898 at 12 Kantstraße in Charlottenburg. Under the leadership of its president, Max Liebermann, the doors opened to a new world of art with landscapes, portraits, and scenes of everyday life hung airily in a specially constructed building. In his opening speech, Liebermann said: 'There is no single direction in art that leads to salvation for us, but rather, every work that embodies a sincere feeling appears to us as a work of art, regardless of its direction.' Only the commercial routine and superficial craftsmanship of those who see art only as a source of income are fundamentally excluded.' Up to 2,000 visitors flocked to the building every day to see works by artists who swam against the tide. 

What had happened? In protest against the conservative exhibition policy of the Association of Berlin Artists and the exclusion of modern art, 65 artists had founded the free association called the Berlin Secession. Notably, women were also admitted as founding members for the first time: Käthe Kollwitz, Dora Hitz, and Julie Wolfthorn. The association was deliberately formed as a split from the academy dominated by the Empire under Anton von Werner's direction, in order to achieve artistic freedom. The first exhibition of modern art attracted 70,000 visitors in just 130 days. Visitors were impressed by the simple interior design by van de Velde, which drew attention to the Impressionist, naturalistic and socially critical realist artworks. There were 330 paintings and graphic works on display, as well as 50 sculptures, none of which had anything in common with the photorealistic and historicist painting style of the Berlin Academy.

Most of the works exhibited at the time bear witness to the influence of Impressionist art. Motifs borrowed from everyday life, characterised by a brightened colour palette and loose brushstrokes, capture private, fleeting moments of social interaction. The Secessionists observed unspectacular, fleeting situations in cafés, gardens, and theatres. Their depictions of changing moods, fleeting light and the sensation of the moment changed art and paved the way for modernism.

Free Secession

Between 1898 and 1919, the German art scene underwent a steady transformation in artistic styles, influenced by the cultural and political climate of the time. The catastrophe of the First World War further accelerated this development, resulting in the representation of most modern art movements, including Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, New Objectivity, Dadaism, Symbolism and Constructivism, in the metropolis of Berlin. At that time, the city was a centre of artistic freedom, political upheaval and a vibrant way of life. 

As early as 1910, a young group of Expressionists challenged Impressionism, leading to the establishment of the New Secession. In 1913, disputes over personnel and exhibitions caused another scandal within the Berlin Secession, resulting in 42 members, including its former co-founder and chairman, Max Liebermann, leaving the artists' association. In March 1914, some of these artists reorganised and founded the Free Secession, with Liebermann as its honorary president. This new association comprised around 50 members, including Ernst, Barlach, Max Beckmann, Theo von Brockhusen, Charles Crodel, Dora Hitz, Fritz Klimsch, Georg Kolbe, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Waldemar Rösler and Käthe Kollwitz. It existed until 1924.