The difficult challenge of openness
The National Museum in Beijing has been rebuilt by German architects Gerkan, Marg and Partners. “George Biggin’s Ascent in Lunardi’s Balloon” (around 1785/1788) by Julius Caesar Ibbetson is one of the works from the exhibition “The Art of Enlightenment.”
The National Museum of China in Beijing has reopened with “The Art of the Englightenment,” the biggest ever exhibition of German art abroad – By Bernhard Schulz
The foyer of the almost completely rebuilt National Museum of China in Beijing is enormous: 260 meters long, 34 meters wide and 27 meters high, the dimensions of a gigantic cathedral. Because this is also a place for official events it is designed to hold up to 14,000 visitors.
There weren’t that many at the opening of the exhibiton “The Art of the Enlightenment” by German Foreign minister Guido Westerwelle in early April. The guests of honor had plenty of space to stroll around. But already the next day, the masses streamed into the museum and expectations are optimistic for the overall number of visitors during the year-long exhibition. Even more so in regard to the possible effect the theme of “Enlightenment” may have in China and in particular in the capital Beijing, which is also the center of intellectual thought in China.
The Peoples’ Republic has recently been acting in a highly contradictory manner. On the one hand, Lu Zhangshen, the general director of the museum, praised the beneficial influence of Western thought. “The European idea of the enlightenment became an important reference point for the Chinese people during the struggle to overcome the fuedal oppression and in the battle against foreign aggression,” he writes in the catalogue.
On the other hand, China refused entry to one member of the official German delegation because the renowned Sinologist recently made a speech honoring the imprisoned dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. And only two days after the ceremonial opening of the exhibition, the rising star of global contemporary art Ai Weiwei, who recently announced plans to open a studio in Berlin, was arrested at Beijing airport and imprisoned.
The National Museum is located on Tiananmen Square directly opposite the building housing the People’s Congress. Tiananmen is the place where the Chinese state has represented itself since its 10-year anniversary in 1959. The museum building is a physical example of the course of Chinese modernization. Only the facade is original. Behind it, the Hamburg-based architects Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) have created a new building with an astonishing over 191,000 square meters of surface area, allegedly the largest museum building in the world.
The choice of a foreign architecture firm caused some resentment in China but the state got exactly the design it was looking for: monumental, representative, not too modern in apperance but technically state of the art. The €255 million price tag was around one third the sum that would be required for a similar building in the West. The building is “at the limit of the justifiable,” said Meinhard von Gerkan in a self-critical comment. The People’s Republic certainly is not shy when it comes to making a splash.
Gmp is currently working on more than 80 commissions in China, from the museum building to the creation of Lingang, a new city for 800,000 residents near Shanghai, which with its central artificial lake and its footprint oriented toward the points of the compass, closely follows Chinese conceptions. The restrained work of the Hamburg architects, which refrains from showy effects, has not gone unnoticed in China, where architectural jokes – which quickly lose their novelty value – are often on display.
This image fits with the good reputation of German products, which enjoy high esteem not just on China’s roads. But it is unmistakeable that the Communist Party leadership remains fixated on economic ties, and finds cultural and intellectual exchange more difficult.
What effect can Enlightenment have? The German exhibition could hardly be more topical. The three big German museum associations from Berlin, Dresden and Munich, sent almost 600 objects – paintings, sculpture, drawings and arts and crafts. It is the largest ever German exhibition abroad. It is financed by €10 million from the German foreign ministry and active sponsorship participation from the private sector, underlining the importance attached to the project: as a cultural exchange appropriate to China’s standing but at the same time as a door opener and a booster of economic relations, which have long since reached a critical size for both sides.
Critical mass is also the topic of “Englightenment.” It is no coincidence that the philosopher Immanuel Kant was quoted in the opening speech, who along with the older universal genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, can be described as “the” German contribution to the enlightenment. According to Kant, enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Its imperative is “the ability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”
Such words have an admonitory character in Beijing. The exhibition makes clear that enlightenment and the freedom of thought and action that grow from it are not to be had at a small price. The exhibition is not didactic. Instead it tries to deliver a nuanced picture of the Enlightenment era. There is no “art of the Enlightenment,” only of the era in which it took place, especially the 18th century.
Stylistically some things are placed together that actually rule each other out, from the court paintings of the Dresden Royal household of August the Strong to the painted nightmares of Henry Fuseli. The philosophy of the dawning age of modernism arose under absolutism and announced bourgeois virtues beyond the feudal pomp, long before the bourgeoisie brought forth its own public sphere, in which political ideas were discussed before finally leading to the political revolution.
The Prussian King Frederick the Great, an admirer and adherent of the French enlightenment as a result of his contact with Voltaire, is represented with a late portrait that almost fails to attract attention among the plethora of artworks.
Frederick did not care much for portraits – he preferred to correspond with the intellectual greats of his age. And therein lies the dilemma of the exhibition: art is not at the center of the enlightenment, but the letters and publications, the books and lectures in which Enlightenment thought formed and was disseminated.
Only when the dark side of liberated thought became clear during the French Revoltion, do the visual arts begin to discover a powerful form of expression in the images of Romanticism. Goya’s etchings, the “Caprichos” and the “Horrors of War,” are also on display in Beijing.
But mostly, art must be content with the role of illustration. The interest in natural science expresses itself in numerous experiments, which can even be carried out at home. In this part of the exhibition, which is divided into nine sections, numerous instruments are on display from microscopes to vacuum pumps. The encounter with untouched nature becomes fashionable, such as travels to the then still fairly wild Alps. And all of Europe was delighted by the descriptions that Alexander von Humboldt brought back from his expedition to South America, which brought to life a completely unknown world.
The era of the Enlightenment is over, the enlightenment itself is not. It led to the project of modernism. It is incomplete, including and particularly so in present day China. There is a need for further enlightenment in the People’s Republic, no longer, as was the case 100 years ago, to overcome feudal oppression. But to overcome the current surveillance and repression of the one party state.