Feel the Soul?

In connection with the COVID-19 situation, which has created new guidelines for museum visits, the museum has developed a virtual exhibition format that does not require physical presence at the museum but can be experienced directly from a screen at home in the living room or from a mobile device in the company of family and friends – 24/7. The project is supported by Augustinus Fonden.

The first virtual exhibition is curated by Swiss artist and curator Stefan Banz. It presents a poetic narrative about figurative and nature-loving painting staged through daring, cross-historical juxtapositions of works. In the virtual model of Willumsens Museum, you can move through the exhibition halls and zoom in on individual works.

The exhibition is based on a rarely recognized movement in painting and the recently rediscovered American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864-1941).

Introduction

This artist-curated virtual exhibition is a poetic tale of figurative and nature-loving painting staged through daring, cross-historical juxtapositions of works. With a strongly visually oriented concept, crafted by Swiss artist and curator Stefan Banz, the exhibition “Feel the Soul?” constitutes a digital work of art in itself.

The exhibition takes as its starting point a rarely recognized movement in painting and the recently rediscovered American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864-1941). With a figurative, romantic and nature-loving painting that stood out even as modern art let abstraction and geometric shapes reign, Eilshemius defied all expectations of what art should be in the 1910s and the following decades.

Eilshemius is a true "artists' artist", who has been taken in and collected by important figures in 20th and 21st century art, including Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha and Ugo Rondinone, but who has been rejected as an outsider by the established art world since the 1940s. Hyped, hated, loved by artists and rejected by serious critics - just as JF Willumsen was to a large extent.

By bringing Eilshemius into dialogue with Willumsen and a wide range of other artists, this exhibition points to a special nerve in figurative painting, which can be traced through the last 100 years or so and which today stands strong in contemporary art. All the artists in the exhibition have in common that they do away with the easy division of figurative painting as opposed to abstract or conceptual art. The works are at once romantic, immediate, heartfelt, ironic and conceptual. They play with a painterly tradition and at the same time draw on popular culture and kitsch. It is painting that is immediately visually appealing, but which also resists and “irritates” good taste.

The exhibition is part of Willumsens Museum's research-based and strategic effort to critically rethink 20th and 21st century figurative art. In doing so, we join Willumsen with other wild, misfit and controversial voices from past and present. Rather than focusing on Willumsen, this exhibition is in his “spirit” and challenges his works in an innovative, international context. Through the staging of an artist curator, Willumsen's colleagues and heirs occupy a virtual model of the museum and reflect back on the artist.

This exhibition was originally intended for Willumsens Museum with physical artworks in the halls. In connection with the COVID-19 situation, which has created economic uncertainty and new guidelines for museum visits, the museum has transformed the exhibition into a virtual format. We are happy to test this experimental format as a supplement to our physical exhibitions.

This exhibition will be followed by another artist-curated virtual exhibition, which will launch this spring.   

Both exhibitions are supported by the Augustinus Foundation and will be available for one year from the launch date.

Presentation

Before I really got to know Louis Michel Eilshemius' work, there were already two questions that occupied me: Why was Marcel Duchamp so interested in his oeuvre that he, together with Katherine S. Dreier, was prepared to organize Eilshemius' first solo exhibitions at the legendary Société Anonyme in New York in 1920 and 1924? And was he perhaps even influenced by his work? 

From around 1909, Eilshemius developed a highly unusual artistic strategy on his own, which basically contained two main elements: first, he tried to paint as many paintings as possible within a given period of time without subsequently changing them. And second, he simultaneously began to exhibit his pictures in highly ornamented, painted frames. These frames are not only unusual inventions, but also have an exceptional painterly quality that makes his works unique.   

His painting is also light, poetic, inspired, subtle, romantic, spontaneous, timeless and respectful of the motifs depicted. It is now as it was then, committed, wonderful and current, and it was created surrounded by an emerging avant-garde that ignored it. Eilshemius' pictures make visible the longing for authenticity, for the transformation of the ordinary and the charm of integrity. This was undoubtedly what Duchamp intuitively sensed when he was so captivated by Eilshemius's large painting, Supplication (Prayer), at the Society of Independent Artists' first annual exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York in 1917.  

In my extensive publication, Eilshemius: Peer of Poet-Painters (JRP|Ringier, Zurich, 2015), I show how Duchamp's enthusiasm for this outsider is also expressed in his own works. For example, the invention of “Rrose Sélavy” – his female alter ego – directly reminds us of the passage in Eilshemius's work of fiction The Devil's Diary (1901), in which he describes how the devil (implying himself, the artist) transforms himself into a woman through self-hypnosis in order to see the world from a female perspective. The nymphs, who emerge through a kind of peephole in Three Nudes (Three Nude Figures, c. 1909-13, private collection) anticipates Duchamp In the Manner of Delvaux (In the guise of Delvaux, 1942), while Duchamp's The Green Ray (The Green Ray, 1947) bears a striking resemblance to Eilshemius' Boat through Opening (Boat Through Opening, ca. 1909-13, Collection Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC). And when Duchamp visited the artist in his home and studio in 1920 to discuss his first solo exhibition at the Société Anonyme, he saw paintings lying and floating everywhere, covered in a layer of dust several centimeters thick. Eilshemius had expressly forbidden the cleaning assistant to remove the dirt from the pictures. Shortly thereafter, Duchamp chose to have his unfinished work, The Large Glass (The Big Glass, 1915-23), lying on the floor of his studio to collect dust, and actually had Man Ray photograph it six months later as Dust Breeding (Dust Cultivation, 1920). With his countless depictions of nymphs at waterfalls, Eilshemius had the most direct influence on Duchamp's last major work, the diorama Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas … (1946–66, Philadelphia Museum of Art)          

Without Duchamp as an advocate, Valentine Dudensing, one of the most successful art dealers in New York, would not have become aware of Eilshemius's work, nor would the city's most respected art critic, Henry McBride, have become one of his most loyal supporters; nor would such an important American collector as Duncan Phillips have begun to buy the painter's works. This in turn encouraged the MET, the Whitney Museum and MoMA to also acquire pictures by him. Eilshemius was instantly known and experienced an unprecedented demand. In 1939, there were three major solo exhibitions in New York at the same time – at the Valentine Gallery, the Kleemann Galleries and the Boyer Galleries. By today's standards, this would be the equivalent of Iwan Wirth, David Zwirner and Larry Gagosian all showing a solo exhibition of his work at the same time.         

His naive non-naivety, concrete abstraction, outdated foresight, ingenious imperfection, thoughtless thoughtfulness, unintentional inventiveness, accidental conceptualism, knowing ignorance, dreaminess and tenderness, or the spontaneity and pace of his works are perhaps precisely some of the most important reasons why Eilshemius has remained an artist for artists to this day. He inspired Marcel Duchamp for some of his most significant, most memorable and finest works and concepts. George Gershwin (1898–1937) was one of his first collectors, and Milton Avery (1885–1965) and Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) two of his earliest admirers, who were later followed by Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Balthus (1908–2001), Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), John Baldessari (1931–2020), Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), Jeff Koons (b. 1955), Peter Schuyff (b. 1958), Merlin James (b. 1960), Verne Dawson (b. 1961), Ugo Rondinone (b. 1963), Caroline Bachmann (b. 1963), Nicolas Party (b. 1980) besides myself. 

In that sense, the exhibition provides Feel the Soul? provides a broad overview of Eilshemius' paintings and at the same time juxtaposes them with works by artists who worshipped and adored him, to make visible how his soulful spirit lives on and continues to influence artists and their work today.

Stefan Banz (b. 1961): Artist, curator, writer. Has published books and articles on Marcel Duchamp, Louis Michel Eilshemius, Jeff Wall, Jacques Derrida, Joseph Beuys, Jules Verne, Fischli|Weiss, Diego Velázquez, Edouard Manet, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Nauman and Frank Zappa. His publication "Eilshemius: Peer of Poet-Painters" won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award in New Mexico and the Eric Hoffer Book Award in New Jersey in 2016. As an artist, solo exhibitions at e.g. Art Museum Lucerne; Migros Museum, Zurich; OK–Offenes Kulturhaus, Upper Austria, Linz; MAMCO, Geneva; Museum Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Institute Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt; Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing and Lucerne; Ars Futura Gallery, Zurich. As a curator, he has curated the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, been director of the Kunsthalle Lucerne and worked as curator at Galerie Hauser & Wirth. In 2009, he founded the Association Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (www.akmd.ch) and has since been artistic director of KMD – Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art, “the world's smallest museum”.

Stefan Banz

(translated into Danish by Gitte Broeng)