Exhibition view . Photos by M. Fehr
Wandschmuck is a general term for art prints produced in extremely high runs, often glass framed and destined to serve as wall decoration in flats, hotel rooms and offices. They had reached their peak popularity around 1860. Very popular were the copies of works of famous artists such as Michelangelo, but also depictions of children, family scenes, animals, hunting and religious motifs and not rarely even erotic and political themes popular among those aspiring to come across as intellectually and socially elevated to their visitors.
The Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge in Berlin that collects objects of mass production, disposes of around 300 prints falling into the Wandschmuck category that were not catalogued or exhibited in any professional context before. They approached the Art in Context Institute of the University of Arts Berlin and in particular the professor and art professional Michael Fehr with the offer to present this collection to the public, and to eventually define a more structured theoretical frame for its understanding. Together with my colleagues Dominik Dittberner from Germany and Xue Wang and Gong Zhang from China I worked on cataloguing the collection items and projecting the exhibition format. With our mentor professor Michael Fehr we opted for a two-fold contextualization of the collection items. First we wanted to accentuate the mass-production character of these popular prints, their variance in terms of production quality, their multiformity and the inconsistency of their reproductions. Secondly, we wanted to offer a more specific contextualization and, in terms of scale, a different point of view for some of the recurrent typologies like Sistine Madonna, political and religious portraits, militaria and similar. To do so we made use items from another important collection of the Museum der Dinge, namely of the dollhouse collection. Borrowing the miniature furniture from the dollhouses we recreated some the most typical rooms where, according to our research, the usual Wandschmuck prints were serving their decorative sentences in their pre-museum time. A typical dining room with a neatly framed miniature landscape prints was made, a sleeping room with romantic prints, a hotel room with anonymous natura morta, but also a chinese room with Mao Zedong portraits, an GDR interrogation room with the portrait of Honeke and so on.