Be­tye Saar will be award­ed the twen­ty-sixth Wolf­gang Hahn Prize from the Ge­sellschaft für Mod­erne Kunst. This recog­ni­tion of the artist, who was born in Los An­ge­les in 1926 and is still lit­tle known in Ger­many, is high­ly time­ly, the ju­ry con­sist­ing of Yil­maz Dziewior, di­rec­tor of the Mu­se­um Lud­wig; Chris­tophe Ch­er­ix, Robert Leh­man Foun­da­tion chief cu­ra­tor of draw­in­gs and prints at the Mu­se­um of Mod­ern Art (Mo­MA) in New York; and the board mem­bers of the as­so­ci­a­tion de­cid­ed. Be­tye Saar has been cre­at­ing as­sem­blages from a wide va­ri­e­ty of found ob­jects, which she com­bines with draw­ing, prints, paint­ing, and pho­tog­ra­phy. Guest ju­ror Chris­tophe Ch­er­ix on Be­tye Saar: “Be­tye Saar’s work oc­cu­pies a piv­o­tal po­si­tion in Amer­i­can art. Her as­sem­blages from the 1960s and ear­ly 1970s in­ter­weave is­sues of race, politics, and su­per­na­t­u­ral be­lief sys­tems with her per­so­n­al his­to­ry. Hav­ing grown up in a ra­cial­ly se­g­re­gat­ed so­ci­e­ty, Saar has long held that art can tran­s­cend our dark­est mo­ments and deep­est fears. To­day, the emer­gence of a new gen­er­a­tion of artists min­ing her poig­nant le­ga­cy attests to how pro­found­ly Saar has changed the course of Amer­i­can art. The 2020 Wolf­gang Hahn Prize not on­ly ac­knowl­edges her ex­traor­d­i­nary achieve­ments and in­fluence, but al­so rec­og­nizes the need to re­vis­it how the his­to­ry of art in re­cent de­cades has been writ­ten.”

#M­Lx­Be­tye­Saar #WH­P2020

Af­ter a long pe­ri­od in which the sub­ject was ta­boo, an in­creas­ing num­ber of mu­se­ums are open­ing up to a trans­par­ent ac­count­ing of coun­ter­feit works, exchang­ing in­sights, and, if ne­ces­sary, de­cid­ing to write off works from their col­lec­tions. With a stu­dio ex­hi­bi­tion on the Rus­sian avant-garde, the Mu­se­um Lud­wig is ask­ing ques­tions about the au­then­tic­i­ty of works in its col­lec­tion. Thanks to Peter and Irene Lud­wig, in ad­di­tion to Pop Art and Pi­cas­so, the Rus­sian avant-garde is one of the fo­cus­es of the mu­se­um’s col­lec­tion, with more than 600 works from the pe­ri­od be­tween 1905 and 1930, in­clud­ing some 100 paint­in­gs.

For vari­ous rea­sons, works of ques­tion­able au­thor­ship have cont­in­u­al­ly found their way in­to pri­vate and in­sti­tu­tio­n­al col­lec­tions. Works by Rus­sian avant-garde artists were coun­ter­feit­ed par­tic­u­lar­ly of­ten (due to their de­layed re­cep­tion af­ter Stalin­ism, for in­s­tance). Even re­cent­ly, paint­in­gs from this pe­ri­od which turned out to be coun­ter­feits have been pre­sent­ed in mu­se­ums. The Mu­se­um Lud­wig is al­so af­fect­ed and is cur­rent­ly sys­te­m­at­i­cal­ly in­vesti­gat­ing its col­lec­tion of paint­in­gs with the help of in­ter­na­tio­n­al scho­lars. This re­search rep­re­sents an im­por­tant con­tri­bu­tion to the in­ter­na­tio­n­al dis­course on the Rus­sian avant-garde. One goal is to iden­ti­fy and distin­guish in­cor­rect at­tri­bu­tions in the mu­se­um’s col­lec­tion.

Cu­ra­tors: Ri­ta Ker­st­ing and Pe­tra Mandt
#o­rig­i­na­land­fake

Em­press Elis­a­beth of Aus­tria-Hun­gary, called Sisi, col­lect­ed pho­to­graphs in the 1860s, but kept them pri­vate through­out her life. To­day the Mu­se­um Lud­wig holds eigh­teen of her al­bums with some 2000 pho­to­graphs. They show the no­bil­i­ty—­many of them mem­bers of Sisi’s fam­i­ly—as well as cele­bri­ties and art­works. The most renowned are from her “al­bums of beau­ties,” high­ly staged por­traits of other wo­m­en. Sisi used th­ese pho­to­graphs to shape her own im­age dur­ing her months-long stays in Venice, Madei­ra, and Cor­fu. In th­ese years she ma­tured in­to a more en­er­get­ic, self-con­fi­dent fig­ure whose beau­ty be­came le­g­endary. In the late 1860s, at the age of 31, Sisi de­cid­ed not to be pho­to­graphed any­more. The pre­sen­ta­tion out­lines the con­nec­tions be­tween her al­most ob­ses­sive col­lect­ing of por­traits of wo­m­en and the im­age of her­self that she cre­at­ed.

Cu­ra­tor: Miri­am Szwast
#M­Lx­Sisi