Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

Bankers on the telephone, bankers shouting, hurried footsteps, and the rustling of clothing: these are the background sounds you would normally expect to hear at the world’s stock markets. For those not at the scene of the action, the rising and falling of stock prices occurs in silence—followed on a ticker.

The Norwegian artist Svein Flygari Johansen, on the other hand, discovered a very individual soundtrack: the Altaelva River.  

‘Overloaded.’ criticised some reviewers. ‘Too many works.’ wrote others. But not one had found it ‘Too empty.’

This edition of our Tuesday Question has to do with quantity. And we posed it to our curator, Monika Flacke: 

For two years, our curators travelled across all of Europe in search of artworks for our exhibition. And anyone who travels has a story (or two) to tell. Every Friday, we would like to recount one of these stories. In our first story, co-curator Ulrike Schmiegelt tells how her intuition about the whereabouts of a mislaid ring led to a successful loan.

The Jewish graphic artist Leo Glückselig emigrated with his family from Vienna to New York in 1938. Almost sixty years later, he saw a photograph of a work by the French artist Christian Boltanski in a newspaper article about an art exhibition. And was immediately taken aback by what he saw. 

Henry Meyric Huges lives in London. The first contact with him is always with E-mail and it is soon clear that he answers his E-mail more quickly than anyone else on the Desire for Freedom team. And he writes wonderful E-mails at that. The team members who have not had a chance to meet him personally are enthralled about his British courtesy and understatement. We met him for the first time shortly before the exhibition opening. It reinforced our digital impression and that despite his quite impressive biography (understatement): Director of the Hayward Gallery in London, founding member and President of Manifesta, President of the International Art Critics Association AICA, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. And he speaks fluent German.