Historie

History

The history of the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe begins in Düsseldorf. There, in 1819, a Royal Prussian Academy of Fine Arts was founded in order to pacify the Rhineland, which had been under Berlin's thumb since the end of Napoleon, and to keep the artists, who liked to do their political business, quiet - at that time, only men were admitted, the reason given being possible embarrassment in the nude hall. The artistic program in Düsseldorf came from that group of once rebellious early modernists, known as the Nazarenes, who had become very established with their images of saints. The program revolved around the principle of the master class, whereby the aim was not so much to teach mastery as to teach mastery. Art was to be taught by gathering around exemplary individuals who embodied that art.

The Karlsruhe Art Academy is a subsidiary of Düsseldorf. It was founded in 1854 by Friedrich I of Baden, then Prince Regent, later Grand Duke of the country. The founding director and source of ideas was Wilhelm Schirmer, Düsseldorf professor of landscape painting, because in the meantime the landscape had replaced Christian themes as a place and a stronghold of artistic meaning. Soon the Grand Ducal School of Art, as it was named, developed into an attractive educational institution that was home to many interested people (only men!) as teachers and students. Names such as Karl Theodor Lessing, who mainly illustrated stories from history and was therefore a history painter, Hans Thoma as a representative of Art Nouveau or Karl Hofer, who later made a career in the Berlin of the 1920s, stand for this.

The art school survived the First World War better than the Grand Duchy. In the Weimar Republic, which followed the demise of the empire and was based on a democratic understanding of art, the school finally admitted women. In 1920, it had been merged with the School of Applied Arts, so that the traditional divisions into autonomous arts here and applied arts there began to falter. In the 1920s, the institution, now called the Badische Landeskunstschule, was one of the most important art academies in Germany, certainly not least because of this new fluidity. Names such as Karl Hubbuch, Georg Scholz, and Wilhelm Schnarrenberger stand for the boom in the understanding of art cultivated here, which was strictly committed to reality. One brings this art to the term New Objectivity, after the title of an exhibition that took place in 1925 in the Kunsthalle Mannheim and represented some Karlsruhe positions. After 1933, no stone was to be left unturned; here, as everywhere else in Germany, those who had not escaped abroad were brought into line and trimmed to Nazi standards. The war did the rest.

After the hardships of reconstruction, the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste Karlsruhe found itself in 1961 with the name it still bears today. The building was involved, perhaps with a slight delay, in what shaped post-war art, above all the global language of abstraction, which went hand in hand with the rehabilitation of everything that had been ostracized as degenerate under National Socialism. Erich Heckel, for example, a veteran of German Expressionism before the First World War, gave lessons here in his later years.

The house then came into line with the spirit of the times that gave the 1970s/1980s a key term, with names such as Georg Baselitz, Per Kirkeby, and Markus Lüpertz. As representatives of a position that aspired to painting and nothing but painting, they gave the New Spirit in Painting a face and the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe no less than international standing. The house is committed to this reputation to the present day. The faculty, which now has a gender ratio of 50:50, is constantly being supplemented, expanded, and renewed with names of international repute. The bond with the Düsseldorf Art Academy continues to be forged in its own way: in its reputation as one of the most important training centers for art.

Prof. Dr. Rainer Metzger