BEN WILLIKENS PAINTING INSTALLED IN THE BUSCH-REISINGER MUSEUM
Released: January 22, 1998
Cambridge, Massachusetts - The Harvard University Art Museums is pleased to announce that the painting Berlin, Reich Chancellery (Hall of Honor), by the German painter Ben Willikens (b. 1939), is on display at the Busch-Reisinger Museum through March 8, 1998. The 1996 painting is from the series Places: Munich, Nuremberg, Berlin. "We are pleased to be presenting this important painting from a major new series by one of Germany's leading representational artists," said Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. "Willikens, whose compelling paintings have not been shown in the United States before, has a unique and challenging approach to difficult subject matter, and we are grateful to the artist and to Carol Johnssen for making this special presentation possible by lending the painting." Support for the presentation of Berlin, Reich Chancellery (Hall of Honor) was provided by the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.
For some 25 years, Ben Willikens has been exploring the social, psychological, and metaphysical ramifications of architectural spaces. His monochrome canvasses and gouaches are always devoid of human figures, although his consistent use of traditional one-point perspective inevitably draws the viewer into an engagement with the empty spaces, which seem to oscillate between sterility and transcendence, theatricality and permanence.
Willikens has always dealt with public spaces of power and authority. In the early 1970s, he reworked his personal experiences as a clinic in-patient into antiseptic, quietly terrifying images of hospital interiors and their institutional equipment. The following two decades saw a turn to grander, more luminous, often imaginary spaces, including depopulated renderings of the architectural settings in Leonardo's Last Supper (1976-77) and Raphael's School of Athens (1987-88). Since the mid-1980s, he has also undertaken numerous mural commissions from corporate and state organizations, as well as designing stage sets for theater and opera productions. His most recent series, including Berlin, Reich Chancellery (Hall of Honor), undertakes the delicate task of investigating the spatial qualities of official buildings designed for the genocidal National Socialist dictatorship in Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s.
The painting installed in the Busch-Reisinger renders a room in Adolf Hitler's New Reich Chancellery, designed in 1938-39 by Albert Speer (1905-1981). The viewer will see one end of the famous "mosaic hall" (46.2 meters long and 19 meters wide), part of the procession of ceremonial spaces leading visitors towards the Führer's reception room and offices. The walls and floor of this "hall of honor" were decorated with light grey and gold mosaics set into red marble, the side panels depicting paired eagles. Badly damaged in World War II, the Chancellery was razed to the ground by Soviet occupying forces in 1948.
Willikens strips the building of all furnishings, including decorative ornament and Nazi insignia. Coolly approaching the aesthetic power and fascination exerted by this and other Nazi buildings, the artist seems to direct attention to the elegant proportions and geometric clarity of these quasi-neoclassical spaces. Yet the blank planes and claustrophobic silence surely reflect an enlightened stance, critical of the architecture's authoritarian ambition. Confronting these places of repressed memory has been a necessary, and necessarily risky project for German artists of Willikens' generation.
Ben Willikens was born in 1939. He studied painting at the Stuttgart Academy in 1962-65, and has exhibited throughout Europe. He is represented in numerous public collections, including the Busch-Reisinger Museum. He currently teaches at the Academy in Munich.
Conference
Berlin: Fashioning a National Capital at the End of the Twentieth
Century
February 6, 1:00-7:30 p.m., February 7, 10:00 a.m.-5:30 p.m. and February
8, 8:30 a.m.-2:00 p.m.
Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street,
Cambridge, free
Harvard's Center for European Studies is presenting this thematically-related
conference. Please call (617) 495-4303 (Monday through Friday) or consult
www.fas.harvard.edu/~ces for program details.
Lecture
Speer Today, Gone Tomorrow: Coming to Terms with Nazi Architecture
Wednesday, March 4, 6:00 p.m., Fogg Art Museum, free
This lecture will be given by Iain Boyd Whyte, professor of architectural
history and theory, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and will be followed
by a reception. Complimentary parking will be available at the Broadway
Garage on Felton Street between Broadway and Cambridge Street. Please
call (617) 495-4544 (Monday through Friday) or consult www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
for more information.
**
The Harvard University Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea Ewen at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please contact the Friends, Fellows, and Special Programs Office at (617) 495-4544. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.
**
The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and on Saturday mornings. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m.
The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. -end