In the Network of Modernism. Kirchner, Braque, Kandinsky, Klee ... Richter, Bacon, Altenbourg and their critic Will Grohmann

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Will Grohmann’s professional biography stands as a shining example of the potential of art criticism to bring about change in the 20th century. His reviews shaped art history, his monographs and catalogues raisonné remain standard texts to this day. He discovered artists and promoted them. As a dynamic intermediary between the various parties involved (artists, gallery owners, museums, the media and the public), he shaped the perception of modern art. He exerted his influence and used the media forms available to him to reach a public hungry for the new and enthusiastic about the avant-garde. Working from Dresden directly after the First World War, he established contact with various figures in the art scene and collaborated with renowned Dresden galleries of modern art: Richter, Arnold and Neue Kunst Fides, to name but a few. He was in close personal contact with artists formerly of Die Brücke (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) and became an advocate of the Bauhaus from the outset in the early 1920s. He curated and co-organized such important exhibitions as the International Art Exhibition Dresden in 1926, the seminal Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung (or General German Art Show) in 1946, also held in Dresden, documenta I, II and III, as well as the biennales of Venice, São Paulo and Paris. As a result, he had a decisive stake in the dissemination of avant-garde art around the world.

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multimedia technology

The exhibition makes use of the possibilities of new media in conveying to visitors the hidden ways in which the artists, works and contexts relate to each other. An interactive media concept plan has been drawn up in a joint project between the SKD, Technische Universität Dresden (Departments of Digital Media and Art History) and the Dresden University of Applied Sciences (Faculty of Spatial Information). The collaboration has harnessed the creativity of professors and students alike. Various applications on multitouch displays invite visitors to call up as they wish diverse contents relating to the artworks, Grohmann’s network and the large reservoir of background information, allowing the visitors to immerse themselves in the art critic’s visual world and explore it for themselves.


Café Zuntz

During the exhibition’s run, Café Zuntz in the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau’s foyer will give visitors a chance to swap ideas and impressions on the show. The café is being set up especially for the exhibition and aims to evoke the historic 1920s café of the same name, a legendary meeting place for the Dresden art scene on Prager Straße.

research project

An extensive research project lasting several years has evaluated the critic’s unique, richly documented personal collection of writings, which is now held at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. As part of the project, some 80,000 documents were examined, including letters addressed to more than 2500 people. This body of correspondence and his scores of newspaper articles and other writings are a testament of Grohmann’s global network of contacts in the art world, which he built up and cultivated for over more than half a century.