1912 – Mission Moderne
Recalling the Sonderbund exhibition of a century ago in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum
MúzeumCafé 32.
It was exactly a century ago, in 1912, that the third international exhibition of the Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler was held in Cologne. The organisers set up the exhibition with the explicit aim of helping contemporary art to achieve a break-through. This aim was achieved. To this day the exhibition has been regarded as one of the most important European modern art projects in Germany. It wanted to present the ‘youngest’ tendencies in painting and the then most prominent art movements in Europe. The result was novel for the public. The comprehensive presentation of contemporary art was also connected to exhibiting the works of the most important predecessors. On the centenary of the Sonderbund exhibition, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne is celebrating this historic event with a jubilee retrospective show. The fact that Cologne and the Rhineland played a prominent role in the development, reception and spread of modern art deserves a commitment to returning to and continuing the tradition. The 2012 show has revisited the concept of the original exhibition which was divided into different sections. These were devoted to individual artists as well as being designated according to the artists’ nationality, as in the case of world expos and biennales before. Thus at the 1912 exhibition the works of contemporary Hungarian artists were displayed together, representing Hungary in Room 13. As a member of the Cologne Sonderbund exhibition’s working committee and an art historian working in the Royal Fine Arts Museum, Zoltán Felvinczi Takács (1880–1964) was in charge of selecting the Hungarian works of art in 1912.