Not from the Head but from the Heart
On Kurt Deschler's 100th Birthday
Kurt Deschler (1917—2003) was the descendant of a long-established entrepreneurial family from Söflingen (Steiger & Deschler GmbH). He was not only one of the passionate art collectors and patrons of his time; in his many years as a town councillor he had also been involved both in political and social interests of the community in his home town Ulm. On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, Museum Ulm presents a commemorative exhibition of selected treasures and artists’ positions from an extensive art collection that had been growing steadily for decades. Kurt Deschler’s collection bears witness to the in depth exchange and personal contact with such artists as Adolf Hölzel (1853—1934), whom he had met through friends, or Horst Antes, who was a frequent guest in Deschler’s house. They equally reveal great interest in pioneer art movements of the 20th century, classical modernism, abstractionism and the New Figuration art movement.
Not from the head but from the heart: The exhibition at Museum Ulm traces Kurt Deschler’s intuitive approach and emotional confrontations with art concepts from expressive abstract to classical figurative painting, emphasising the quest of early modernism to find a new definition of the image as such. The spectrum includes paintings, drawings and sketches of classical modernism artists like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Willi Baumeister (1889-1955), Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968) or HAP Grieshaber (1909-1981), expressive paintings by Slovenian artist Janez Bernik (1933-2016) as well as the anecdotic-satirical figurations of Fritz Fröhlich (1910-2001) from Upper Austria and the inimitably laconic line of the South German illustrator and caricaturist Romane Holderried Kaesdorf (1922-2007).
By juxtaposing these distinct positions, the exhibition opens new possibilities for the examination of art within and beyond historical categorisations.
