Tableau: Die ungelösten Probleme der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft / The Unresolved Problems of Civil Society

Texts by names (alphabetical order)

Familie Hartmann-Reinbeck
The Hartmann-Reinbeck family
Co-founder and chair of WKV
In Stuttgart, people did not speak of salons, but of ‘open houses’. These included the houses of the Rapp, Dannecker, Cotta, Hartmann and Reinbeck families. One interior view of the Hartmann-Reinbeck house shows the large art collection of the lords and ladies of the house: Johann Georg August von Hartmann, founding member and chairman of the WKV until 1836, succeeding Rapp, his wife Mariette, their daughter Emilie and her husband Georg von Reinbeck, also a founding member of the WKV, whom he succeeded as chairman after his father-in-law in 1842. Reinbeck was the first to decide that the WKV should also purchase works by ‘foreigners’, which at that time referred to artists from cities outside Württemberg, such as Munich or Düsseldorf. Emilie Reinbeck was a successful landscape painter. Her works were often represented in the WKV.

Texts by dates (chronological order)

1806–1816
Zensur
Censorship
‘In no other state in the Confederation of the Rhine was there as much censorship as in Württemberg under Friedrich. The special dependence on Napoleon is an insufficient explanation for the regulation and gagging of public opinion down to the smallest detail. Even in the time before the seven years of the Rhine Confederation, Frederick had created a set of censorious instruments for the suppression of any critical reasoning, which he merely needed to perfect … Six weeks after his death … Cotta was allowed the uncensored printing of a political magazine.’ (from: Baden und Württemberg im Zeitalter Napoleons, exhibition catalogue, vol. 1.2, p. 816)

1807–1865
Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, Stuttgart und Tübingen
Morning Journal for the Educated Classes, Stuttgart and Tübingen
Twenty years before the WKV, the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta and Gottlob Heinrich Rapp founded the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (‘Morning Journal for the Educated Classes’, renamed the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser – ‘Morning Journal for the Educated Reader’ – in 1837), which heralded a new type of journal. It served, also through the supplement ‘Kunst-Blatt’, as a central organ for imparting skills and standards for evaluating art and culture, aimed at the emerging bourgeoisie. The Morgenblatt appeared, alongside the political Allgemeine Zeitung, in the publishing house of Cotta'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. The majority of the editors-in-chief were founding members of the WKV.
Editors-in-chief
1807–1808: Karl Christian Heinrich Grüneisen (father of Carl Grüneisen1)
1808–1811: Georg Reinbeck2
1811–1817: Friedrich Haug3
from 1815: Friedrich Rückert
1817–1823: Therese Huber
from 1823: Georg Cotta
1824–1826: Johann Friedrich Cotta4
1827: Wilhelm Hauff (published here Die Bettlerin des Pont des Arts and Jud Süß)
1827: Gustav Schwab5
1828–1865: Hermann Hauff
[1, 4, 5: founding member of the WKV
2: founding committee and member; 1836–1842 chairman of the WKV
3: founding member and society committee of the WKV]

1812
Heinrich Rapp
‘The first art exhibition in Stuttgart’
in: Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, May 27 and June 5, 1812
‘What should the accomplished artist do among a crowd that does not understand him? It is therefore a reciprocal exercise that is the first condition for the true flourishing of the great business of education; and nothing can promote this faster than opening up the paths for the public to arrive at knowledge through seeing and comparing, and from knowledge to judgement. Seen from this pure and true point of view, public art exhibitions are extremely beneficial...' Over the next three editions of the Morgenblatt, descriptions of the exhibited works and arts and crafts objects follow. Luise Duttenhofer's participation is also mentioned. It was Rapp himself who had initiated the first art and industry exhibition in Stuttgart.

c. 1820
Unbekannt, Der Denker-Club. Auch eine neue deutsche Gesellschaft
Unknown, The Thinkers Club. Another New German Association
Caricature of freedom of speech in Germany
Left sign: ‘Important question to be considered in today's meeting: How much longer will we be allowed to think?’
Right sign: ’I. The president opens the meeting at precisely 8 o'clock / II. Silence is the first law of this learned society / III. So that no member may be tempted to let his tongue run free... muzzles will be handed out on entry / IV. The subject, which is to be thoroughly discussed in each session through mature reflection, is clearly written on a board in large letters / V. Each member of this association [rest covered]’

1826–1830
Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder
‘But what is this great task of our time? It is emancipation. Not just the emancipation of the Irish, the Greeks, the Frankfurt Jews, the West Indian blacks and similar oppressed peoples, but the emancipation of the whole world, especially Europe, which has come of age and is now tearing itself away from the iron grip of the privileged, the aristocracy.’ (Chapter 29, Vol. 3, 1830). Heinrich Heine is alluding, among other things, to the revolt of enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791, which led to the independent state of Haiti on January 1, 1804. Authors of the time who were influenced by Western thought do not differentiate, as Heine does here, between the racist oppression of the colonised by the bourgeois colonialists and the rigid power structures that prevail between European citizens and their rulers.

1827
August Friedrich Köstlin
Gründungsmitglied des WKV
Founding member of WKV
from 1846 August Friedrich von Köstlin
(*1792 in Nürtingen; † 1873 in Stuttgart)
The political career of the lawyer August Friedrich Köstlin led him to the Privy Council. When he opposed the secret council's harsh treatment of officials who had supported the 1848 revolution, he lost his position. From 1861 he served as minister of education and cultural affairs. Through his brother Heinrich, he met Gustav Schwab and other protagonists of the Swabian Poetry School, which he joined. He occasionally supported his brother's reform efforts in two psychiatric institutions. He was also involved in the arts at various levels. In addition to his voluntary work for the WKV, he was a part-time director of the State Art School (today's Stuttgart Art Academy) and the State Art Collections (today's Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) from 1842 to 1867.
Köstlin was the brother-in-law of Henriette Köstlin, a daughter of Gottlob Heinrich Rapp. His son Karl, initiator and chairman of the Heilbronner Kunstverein, ran the then ultra-modern cell prison in Heilbronn. His great-great-great-niece Ulrike Meinhof died in the high-security prison in Stuttgart-Stammheim in 1976. His great-great-great-cousin Reinhard Köstlin (1875–1957) worked as a colonial official in German East Africa from 1905 and published an article in the catalogue of the Stuttgart Colonial Exhibition in 1928.

1830er Jahre (1830s)
Französische Zustände: Die Birne
French conditions: the pear
In France, the ‘citizen king’ Louis-Philippe, who ruled after the July Revolution of 1830, had proclaimed freedom of speech. The resilience of this statement was immediately put to the test by the journalist and artist Charles Philipon and his colleagues at the weekly magazine La Caricature, which was founded in the same year. In the first trial, which concerned the limits of caricaturing the royal head, Philipon tried to convince the jury, with the help of a sketch, that the depiction of the king could not be punished just because it resembled a pear. Philipon was convicted and retaliated by publishing the same sketch in his magazine, in which the king's head gradually approaches a pear. He ended up in court again. Nevertheless, the pear became a popular motif for making fun of the king. It went viral, so to speak.
In 1832, Philipon published another satirical magazine, Le Charivari, which also became the subject of a court case. Philipon responded to the legal requirement to print the court ruling in the magazine itself by printing the verdict in the form of a pear.

1831
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) writes in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände about Eugène Delacroix' painting La liberté guidant le peuple (1830)

1831–1832
Heinrich Heine from Paris
At the end of 1831, in an article written for his series ‘French Affairs’, published in the Allgemeine Zeitung, Heinrich Heine reported in detail on the ‘Pear Affair’ in Paris. In a subsequent article, he writes: ‘The Temps notes today that the Allgemeine Zeitung is now publishing articles that are hostile to the royal family, and that German censorship, which does not allow the slightest expression against absolute kings, does not exercise the slightest restraint against a constitutional king. The Temps is the most intelligent magazine in the world! With a few mild words, it achieves its ends much more quickly than others with their loudest polemics. Its clever hint has been sufficiently understood, and I know at least one liberal writer who now, with the permission of the censor, does not consider it appropriate to his honour to use the hostile language against a citizen king that would not be allowed against an absolute king.’ (in: Allgemeine Zeitung, Cotta'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1832)

1976
Deutsche Zustände: Im Gedenken an Günter Routhier
German Conditions: In Memory of Günter Routhier
‘Presenting the connections between cultural and political processes has been one of the main objectives of the Württembergischer Kunstverein's exhibition activities for many years,’ writes Tilman Osterwold, director of the WKV from 1973 to 1993, in the foreword to the catalogue of the 1976 exhibition Die politische Lithographie im Kampf um die Pariser Kommune. He also points out that a large part of the lithographs shown came from the Frankfurt collector Helmut Poetter, who wanted to donate them to the People's Republic of China after the exhibition to mark its 25th anniversary. And as if that weren't remarkable enough, at the end of the catalogue there is a letter from the Duisburg public prosecutor's office from the same year, addressed to the communist Gerhard Schneider, who was a member of the Frankfurt working group for the exhibition. The professor of Romance languages and literature, who had been suspended from his teaching post at the University of Frankfurt in 1975 because of his close ties to the KPD, had publicly commented on the death of the worker Günter Routhier. Routhier had died in 1974 as a result of a police assault at the Duisburg Labour Court. The incident triggered a wave of protest at the time and was described as murder by many on the left, including Schneider, which led to numerous lawsuits. The letter from the public prosecutor's office announces a preliminary investigation against Schneider ‘for defamation of the state and insult’ and also contains a statement from the accused.

1984
Olaf Metzel, Stammheim
The sculpture was created in 1984 for the group exhibition Kunstlandschaft Bundesrepublik. Part of the word ‘Stammheim’ was painted over by unknown persons during the exhibition. Metzel accepted this as a reaction to his work. He never dismantled the sculpture. In 2001, it was to be demolished at the instigation of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Finance – allegedly to restore the building to its ‘original state’. It was only through a widespread wave of protest that the demolition was prevented.

2005
Deutsche Zustände: Im Gedenken an Oury Jalloh
German conditions: In memory of Oury Jalloh
On 7 January 2005, the fugitive Oury Jalloh was killed by police violence in a prison cell in Dessau. Although this has been proven by numerous pieces of evidence, the state denies the crime. Oury Jalloh – That was murder!