Discovery of the Abstraction - Turner, Hugo, Moreau

Yesterday afternoon I took the opportunity to visit an interesting arts exhibition at the Schirn, a widely renown exhibition hall for modern art, based in Frankfurt. I longed to see this exhibition for several months now especially because I wanted to see the pics of one of my favourite painters William Turner. But also the title of the exhibition "Discovery of the Abstaction" caught my interest.
The other main artists, Victor Hugo and Gustave Moreau presented in this exhibition weren't familiar to me. But this definitely changed during this afternoon. I was lucky that I arrived in time for a guided tour through this exhibition which took about one hour. It turned out that the three artists mentioned above (and many other) created works without recognizable subjects long before the abstraction was declared as an avant-garde form in the 20th century. The three followed completely different approaches.

William Turner reduced landscapes to its essentials (in a kind of metaphysical way  - I don't know much about that principle though)  such as:



SEASCAPE WITH STORM COMING ON



RED SKY OVER A BEACH

Whilst Hugo, known as a poet and novelist, painted mainly for his own pleasure:



LANDSCAPE WITH BRIDGE



COMPOSITION ABSTRAITE

The paintings of Hugo (mainly in black and white) showed a high intensity and also some kind of melancholy. At his era this was not considered as negative or avoidable but as the source of creativenes - I think I live in the wrong era .

The paintings shown from Moreau were mainly sketches, theoretical studies of color and composition as well as randomly creating paintings which was done this first time in an exhibition.



SKETCH



INTERIOR



WATERCOLOUR PALETTE

But also some important literature and theoretical studies were part of this interesting exhibition which I enjoyed very much and the guided tour helped a lot to understand the background and the wieder context in which these painters/artists should be put.

But the evening wasn't over yet .

On the way to the next location I took these two ineresting night pics from the exhibition hall with the dome in the background:





Later this evening I met with a vietnamese friend of mine to check out an thai/vietnamesian restaurant located in a housing area not far away from the city centre of Frankfurt. They reopened this restaurant not long time ago so the name was different again . Nevertheless we wanted to give it a try. So we entered the restaurant. The interior was homy and put together with much dedication such as the china. I orded some fish with fruits and veggies in a sweet-sour sauce which was really delicious . My friend ordered a vietnamese specialty and enjoyed her meal as well though she always has to complain about sth because she loves to cook and started to compare the south-vietnamesian food offered in the restaurant to the north-vietnamesian food she used to cook . Nevertheless she had several pleasant conversations with the servant.

We had did a lot of girl's talk about many, many stuff and as ever when you enter a place favoured by vietnamesian expats you meet someone you know. So we did not think about the time which passed by in a fly so both of us came home pretty late .