WIf you ever thought “spaghetti hair” was the thin strands that some people grieve over, you can see real wavy hair here. The tiny Eva, but perhaps she is more of an allegory of the feminine per se, the cliché of a cis woman, so to speak, could also simply cover up her voluptuous nudity with her bottom-length curls. Instead, she longed for a good 400 years, stretched out her right hand as if to pick the forbidden fruit, stretched upwards to the side.
Exactly where, since 2019, the arm of the white female figure, that “Eva” of the famous Furienmeister, created around 1610, stretched into emptiness, fullness has now emerged. “Splendid White” takes place in a specially furnished cabinet towards which the figure is reaching: the completion of the Reiner Winkler collection in the Liebieghaus sculpture collection in Frankfurt.
In 2018, the majority of the Reiner Winkler (1925-2020) collection went to the Sculpture Museum and has been exhibited as “White Wedding” since 2019. Winkler donated the house, the Städelsche Museums-Verein, the Städel Museum itself, the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Federal States and the Hessian Cultural Foundation made the purchase of the rest of the collection possible. They are extremely small works, which one bends over in almost complete darkness. But because almost all of them shimmer and shine in an almost unearthly creamy white, they stand out from the dark all the more strongly, illuminated in their showcases.
Liebig house
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“Splendid White”: The Reiner Winkler Collection
Questions about the material and cultural history
The few individual ivory objects in the Liebieghaus have been given prominent siblings, many of them now fit perfectly into the white abundance from Winkler’s art cabinet, some sub-genres such as the so-called combination figures made of ivory and wood are only now represented as examples. And they raise questions, even more than about the material itself, about cultural history, about the motifs of these often complex works.
Why were there genre scenes, peasants, craftsmen and very often beggars and jugglers, whose ivory bodies shimmered almost bare under the dark rags made of fine wood? Were they intended for the mocking amusement of baroque aristocratic buyers? Today they tend to generate the opposite reaction. A closer look reveals the delicacy of the work and the amazing ambivalence in almost every one of these mostly tiny sculptures. Why is Eve’s arm stretching out there, like that of the beggar woman, as strong, full of sinews and veins as a man’s?
Today, visitors almost shy away from the material ivory. Questions about its origin, animal welfare and processing are always among the first questions that visitors ask, says Maraike Bückling, head of the collection for art from the Renaissance to Classicism and curator of the two parts of the donation, which have now matured into a joint exhibition. Where does the ivory come from? Isn’t it horrible to make art out of elephant tusks? Bückling explains it patiently, again and again, even wall boards do the same thing at the beginning of the course: When the works of art that can be seen there were created, neither poachers nor the pleasure-seeking super-rich were illegally slaughtering an endangered animal species.
A fascinating substance
More than 400 years ago, however, elephant hunting was a very dangerous and not always successful business, with few weapons – and elephants seemed to be in abundance, estimates at several million. It’s dramatically different today. There are only about 400,000 African elephants left, despite all bans, several dozen elephants are killed every day just for the sake of their tusks. The “white gold” is particularly popular in Asia.