Akim Monet is delighted to announce a joint curatorial project with the Buchheim Museum.

Opening reception Saturday, March 14
Buchheim Museum Bennried 6 to 9 pm

The Buchheim Museum recently inherited a sensational work from the estate of Lothar-Günther und Diethild Buchheim: a color pencil drawing of a provocative reclining female nude by Gustav Klimt. In addition, the museum managed to secure a loan from a private collection of a group of watercolors and drawings by Auguste Rodin thanks to galerist Akim Monet.

Particularly with his works on paper, Rodin, as the initiator of a manner of drawing freed from stylization and idealization, directly applied this technique to expose female seductiveness. Rodin was the pioneer of an artistic view of the female nude that defined classic Modernism in the early 20th century: artists from this period sought to depict immediate, natural eroticism.

Gustav Klimt, who met Rodin in Vienna in 1902, was one of the first to obsessively pursue this new approach to graceful beauty. His erotic works featured an unsurpassed international radiance. In Germany, it was the Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller who recognized the power of this new concept. Their drawings and paintings of nude cavorting girls are as legendary as they are problematic: Heckel and Kirchner’s handling of the childlike model Fränzi aroused suspicion of abuse. These art-historical connections from Rodin to Klimt, and through to Die Brücke, will be beautifully revealed in a “Kabinettausstellung” in the Drawings Room, through the juxtaposition of chosen works from the museum’s collection with the privately loaned sheets.

Exhibition curated by Daniel J. Schreiber, Buchheim Museum & Akim Monet, Berlin