Tableau: Bezähmung der Wildheit durch die Schönheit / Taming Wildness with Beauty

TEXTS: ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

Texts by names (alphabetical order)

Christiane Luise (Louise) Duttenhofer
(* 1776 in Waiblingen; † 1829 in Stuttgart)
Luise Duttenhofer and her husband, the engraver Christian Duttenhofer, who was involved in the founding of the WKV, belonged to Stuttgart’s upper middle classes and were frequent guests at the various salons. She wanted to become a painter, but her family refused to allow her to train as one. Instead, she took up scissors. In her papercuts, she uses criticism, satire, and irony to comment on the vanities of her contemporaries and her own role in society.

Texts by dates (chronological order)

1770–1794
Hohe Karlsschule (or Carlsschule)
Solitude Palace, later at Schlossplatz
The Military, Art and Trade Academy was established in 1770 at Schloß Solitude, initially as a school for the children of widowed soldiers to be trained as gardeners and plasterers. As a “militärische Pflanzschule” or military academy it shifted its focus from pure welfare to the selection of gifted students, which was usually done by the duke himself. Beginning in 1771, sons of cavaliers and officers were accepted to be trained for future ministerial, court, and military service. In 1773, art instruction was given its own status. The aim was to qualify local artists for royal projects. At the end of 1775, the academy moved to Schlossplatz and took up residence in the barracks behind the Neue Schloss. In 1782, it became the first university to combine a military academy, art academy, and business school, attracting students from Germany and abroad (including Friedrich Schiller). In 1794, the school, infamous for its rigid and restrictive education, was closed. This resulted in “a serious turning point in the lives of the artists who had previously been tied to the court and its commissions” and “meant that the now ‘starving’ artists had to reorientate themselves towards the emerging bourgeoisie.” (from Baden und Württemberg im Zeitalter Napoleons, exhib. cat. 1987, vol. 1.2, p. 585)

1787–1803
The Württemberg Cape Regiment of the Dutch East India Company
To finance his expensive lifestyle, Duke Carl Eugen von Württemberg (1728–1793), who was also the founder of the Hohe Karlsschule, hired out around 3,200 Württemberg soldiers to the Dutch East India Company (EIC, 1602–1798) beginning in 1787. The so-called Cape Regiment had the task of protecting the colonial trading company’s bases in Cape Town and at the Cape of Good Hope: on the one hand from the uprisings of the indigenous population, and on the other from attacks by the rival colonial power Great Britain. In 1791, the regiment was transferred to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and Jakarta (then Batavia), two locations that had also been forcibly appropriated by the EIC. The Cape Regiment existed until 1803 and provided regular income for three other dukes, including the future first King of Württemberg. Frederick mainly used it to fill his war chest, while Carl Eugen entered it in the books as private income. Thus, not least, the Hohe Karlsschule, which produced numerous artists who, like Johann Heinrich Dannecker and Eberhard von Wächter, were later associated with the WKV, was financed by a colonial enterprise.

1788–1819
Xaver Hohenleiter
The artist Johann Baptist Pflug (1785–1866), who exhibited several times at the WKV, devoted himself, among other subjects, to that of the “robber” or “gangs of robbers” in his works. In this context, he was given permission to portray prison inmates and one of those he came to know was Xaver Hohenleiter, known as the “Black Veri” (1788–1819). Hohenleiter, who grew up in poverty, came to epitomize the delinquent in southern Germany. He was wrongly accused of murder and died by being struck by lightning in a prison tower. Gustav Schwab dedicated a poem to his dramatic death. Pflug refers to him several times in his genre paintings, thus contributing to the creation of the legend. It seems that both the fears and, as in Pflug’s romanticizing and stereotyping images, the longings of bourgeois society for freedom and independence are projected onto Hohenleiter.

1804
Stigmatizing and Sanctioning the “cheeky ramblings of so many dissolute scoundrels”
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a special passport system was introduced in the Kingdom of Württemberg to exclude marginalized groups such as Sinti and Romani people, migrant workers, beggars, the unemployed, and the homeless. People who had not been issued a passport or did not carry it with them were expelled from the country or not allowed into the country at all. If a stated occupation was considered insufficient to make a living, even a passport was of no help to the person concerned. Edicts against “impudent roaming” were published and “Jauner lists” were drawn up.

1807
“Police decree against vagrants and other persons dangerous to public safety”

1807
Police Violence and Racial Profiling
“In 1807, the first state police force was set up, a 200-strong Landreuter Corps. Initially responsible for “vagrants and crooks”, it was expanded in 1811 to become the Royal Gendarmerie, a kind of state security police. The gendarmes were to be distributed throughout the country and “patrol all streets and byways ... and keep an eye out for anything that could be detrimental to public safety, ... stop all beggars, vagrants and other suspicious people they come across and hand them over to the proper authorities ....” (from Baden und Württemberg im Zeitalter Napoleons, exhib. cat. 1987, vol. 1.2, p. 999)

1812
The Festinjagen (Dianenfest)
On November 9, 1812, King Frederick of Württemberg held a magnificent hunting festival to celebrate his birthday, during which 823 animals and a forester were killed. The festival had been planned years in advance. Over 10,000 people from all over the country were conscripted to help with the hunt. They had to round up the game and prepare the infrastructure. In order to ensure large stocks of game, Frederick had issued a hunting ban lasting several years. The elaborate festival architecture was designed by court architect Nikolaus Friedrich Thouret. The festival aroused great resentment among the population. While the court painter Johann Baptist Seele celebrated it in his painting as a triumph of man over beast, Luise Duttenhofer’s silhouette sharply criticizes the exploitation of the peasants that went hand in hand with it.

1814
Taming Wildness with Beauty.
This was the comment of Johann Heinrich Dannecker and Gottlob Heinrich Rapp on Dannecker’s Ariadne auf dem Panther from 1814, which the artist had begun in 1803 without a commission from Duke Carl Eugen, an extraordinary fact, since in 1776 he had committed himself to the ducal service for life. He also asked the duke for permission to sell the work as he wished. In 1810 it was purchased, still unfinished, by the Frankfurt banker Simon Moritz von Bethmann.

1827
Founding Member of WKV
Senior Government Councilor of the Upper Police Department Karl Eberhard Wächter,
from 1806 Karl Eberhard von Wächter
(* 1758 in Vaihingen an der Enz; † 1829 in Stuttgart)
After studying law at the Hohe Karlsschule, Karl Eberhard Wächter entered the service of Duke Carl Eugen as government secretary and was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 1794. When Duke and Elector Frederick assumed the title of King, and the territories of Old and New Württemberg were merged, the government was reorganized in 1806. In the course of this, Wächter rose to the position of Senior Government Councilor of the Upper Police Department. On September 11, 1807, he issued the “Police decree against vagrants and other persons dangerous to public safety”. Twenty years later, he founded the WKV with other prominent citizens of the city.

1929
Congress of Vagabonds
On  Pentecost 1929, the First International Congress of Vagabonds (as they called themselves) took place on Stuttgart’s Killesberg, very close to the Weißenhofsiedlung, which had been built two years earlier and represented the new way of living at the time. Gregor Gog, founder of the “Brotherhood of Vagabonds”, had called for this political gathering. The target group were people who, for a wide variety of reasons, lived on the streets voluntarily or involuntarily, who were excluded from bourgeois society or deliberately withdrew from it. Gog and his fellow campaigners called for a refusal of all wage labor and for preferring the street to the factory as a way of effectively fighting back against and bringing down the exploitative system of capitalism. “General strike for life!” was the motto of the meeting.
In 1982, Michael Haerdter conceived the exhibition Wohnsitz: Nirgendwo. Vom Leben und vom Überleben auf der Straße, which focused on homelessness in Germany since the nineteenth century. The Stuttgart congress was dealt with in detail. After Berlin, the exhibition travelled to the WKV and other venues.

2015
The Beast and the Sovereign
Catalogue of an exhibition by the WKV and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), which took place at both locations. At MACBA, where the exhibition was first shown, a sculpture by Ines Doujak was censored because it allegedly denigrated the former Spanish king it resembles. After strong public protests, the sculpture was finally shown. But the curators responsible at the time at MACBA, Valentín Roma and Paul B. Preciado, were fired. A public event was held at the WKV on this subject, with the participation of Martin Fritz (2018–2022), who later became chairman of the WKV. One of the biggest crises at MACBA has still not been publicly addressed there to this day.

Captions (selection)

Pompeo Batoni, Duke Carl Eugene of Württemberg, 1753

Joseph Anton Koch, Caricature of the art practice at the Hohe Karlsschule, 1791

1780
Ink drawing by Viktor Heideloff
Friedrich Schiller, who studied at the Hohe Karlschule from 1773 to 1780, secretly reads from his play Die Räuber (The Robbers) to friends in the Bopserwald near Stuttgart. He initially published the play anonymously in 1781.

Christian Gottlieb Schick, Wilhelmine Cotta, 1802

Luise Duttenhofer, Angelika Kauffmann in her studio in Rome, ca. 1804

Luise Duttenhofer, Sculptor Johann Heinrich Dannecker works on his bust of Schiller. In the background his sculpture of Ariadne, 1805–1806

Unknown, discriminatory and stereotypical depiction of a “gang of robbers,” Heidelberg, 1812

Unknown, Bürgergarde zu Fuß und zu Pferd in Stuttgart, 1813

Johann Baptist Seele, Das Festinjagen (Dianenfest) bei Bebenhausen, 1813–1814

Luise Duttenhofer, Slavery always remains a bitter, bitter draught, 1815

Johann Baptist Pflug, portrait studies of prison inmates (sitters unknown), 1819

Luise Duttenhofer, Heinrich Rapp, proclaiming the fame of his brother-in-law Dannecker as the creator of the statue of Christ, after 1820

Karl Jakob Theodor Leybold, Dannecker mit seiner Christusstatue, 1822

Johann Baptist Pflug, Die Räuberbande des Schwarzen Veri, 1824

Luise Duttenhofer, probably a self-portrait, ca. 1830

Gustav Schwab, Sagen des klassischen Altertums (1838–1840), title page by Alfred Renz, Stuttgart, 1925

Congress of Vagabonds, Killesberg, Stuttgart, 1929

1929
General Strike for Life
Manifesto of the Vagabonds’ Congress in Stuttgart

1982
Wohnsitz: Nirgendwo. Vom Leben und vom Überleben auf der Straße, exhibition of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, at various locations, and WKV

1987
Unknown, montage on the cover of the exhibition catalogue Baden und Württemberg im Zeitalter Napoleons, Württembergisches Landesmuseum exhibition at the WKV

2001–2003
La bête et le souverain
Seminar by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, published posthumously in different languages

The Beast and the Sovereign, exhib. cat., 2015