The National Gallery of Slovenia and the
Gemäldegalerie Dachau in the center of the city near Munich are presenting the
connections between Slovenian artists and the town, the image of which
underwent a dramatic change during the first half of the 20th century. At the
beginning of the 1900s, Dachau was an artistic colony of Athens on the Isar
River, as Munich was known at the time. German modernists who worked there had
a strong influence on the second generation of Slovenian realists and the core
group of Slovenian Impressionists. Matija Jama painted along the Ampere River,
which flows through the city, and Matej Sternen stayed in touch with his Dachau-residing
classmate from Anton Ažbe’s Munich painting school. A diametrically opposed
experience of Dachau was endured by a generation of artists who came of age
during the Second World War, as many were interned in a concentration camp that
the Nazis had opened next to the city immediately after taking power in 1933.
The exhibition and accompanying catalogue thus address
both seemingly unrelated stories and present both the stylistic and historical
influence of the city on Slovenian modernist painting. The exhibition presents
Slovenian artists in three chapters with 44 paintings, while the Munich and
Dachau artists associated with them are highlighted in the permanent collection
of the Gemäldegalerie Dachau on the floor below.
The exhibition presents second-generation Realist
artists who lived and worked in Munich. Anton Ažbe opened a painting school in
the city on Georgenstrasse in 1891, which soon became a popular meeting place
for future modernist masters such as Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianna von
Werefkin and Wassily Kandinsky. Ažbe insisted that his students acquire
technical and artisinal skills, but then gave them opportunities for own
experimentation and the development of individual styles. Ivana Kobilca studied
and worked in Munich for ten years, first under the mentorship of Alois
Erdtelt. It was in Munich that she conceived at least some of her most famous
works, also by following the example of Wilhelm Leibl, Fritz von Uhde and Max
Liebermann, important German modernists who represented a break with the dark
and earthy tones of the Academy. All three were also connected to Dachau and
worked in the city. Ažbe, Kobilca and the future Slovenian Impressionists were
connected by their association with Ferdo Vesel, who had come to Munich from
Vienna to attend the Academy and shared a studio with both Kobilca and Jakopič.
The main representatives of Slovenian Impressionism,
Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar, Matija Jama and Matej Sternen, came to Munich
individually, but at the end of 1899 they all gathered in the city for a few
months. The following year they presented themselves at the First Slovenian Art
Exhibition in Ljubljana, in 1902 at the Second, and then again in Vienna in
1904. Slovenian artists were able to see the works of the French Impressionists
as early as 1891, as they were part of the annual exhibitions both at the
Glaspalast and at the exhibitions of the Munich Secession. Its fellow
instigators in 1892 were both von Uhde and Heinrich von Zügel, who had already
been painting in Dachau in the 1880s and who also became a professor at the
Academy in 1895. In the Munich environment, which encouraged experimentation,
they drew inspiration from German contemporary artists, Sternen, for example, from
Lovis Corinth, Leo Putz and Ludwig Dill, who, together with the influential
theorist and painter Adolf Hölzel and Arthur Langhammer, formed the core of the
Dachau artist colony around 1900.
The last part of the exhibition is dedicated to Zoran
Mušič and his existential motifs, which were influenced by the painter's
six-month captivity in the Dachau concentration camp and whose life was
connected to most of the socio-political upheavals of the 20th century. As a
bucolic city dedicated to art, Dachau was actually a suitable zone of
interest also due to its symbolism: directed violence, based on a perverse
interpretation of evolution, was supposed to recreate a lost paradise. Mušič
confronts us with this abyss even outside his cycle We Are Not the Last, because behind the aesthetic, meditative
motifs of rocks, plants, buildings, harbours and mountains we feel discomfort,
horror and a warning that is, unfortunately, still relevant today.
Exhibition authors
Laura Cohen, Michel Mohor
Expert collaborators
Alona Barkalova, Kaja Cajhen,
Mateja Krapež
Conservation and restoration preparation of the
material
Barbara Dragan, Susanne Herbst, Andreja Ravnikar, Johanna Stegmüller
Exhibition of the Gemäldegalerie Dachau and the
National Gallery. In collaboration with the Slovenian Cultural Centre - SKICA
Berlin
Represented by: Barbara Jaki, Nina Möllers, Saša Šavel Burkart
Gemäldegalerie Dachau
Konrad-Adenauer-Straße 3
85221 Dachau, Germany
28 November 2025 – 12 April 2026