Werner Tübke’s (1929–2004) outstanding contribution to post-war German art was recognized early on by the West German art critic Eduard Beaucamp. In 2023, Barbara and Eduard Beaucamp donated to the Städel Museum an impressive and representative collection of forty-six drawings and watercolours by Tübke, spanning all the creative phases of the painter and graphic artist. The Städel Museum is exhibiting this special gift, tracing Tübke’s metaphorical pictorial language, characterized by transformations and alienations.
About the Exhibition
His watercolours and drawings in graphite, pen and chalk are an essential part of his artistic œuvre, demonstrating a great deal of creative freedom and independence: in them he collected ideas, explored formal considerations and developed a wide variety of themes. Tübke, who lived in Leipzig all his life, was one of the most important painters of the former German Democratic Republic. Along with Bernhard Heisig and Wolfgang Mattheuer, he is considered one of the main representatives of the so-called First Leipzig School and occupies a unique position in German post-war art.
Drawing is an elementary need, everything else comes afterwards.
In his paintings, drawings and prints, Tübke created an autonomous and consistent body of work that is dense in both form and content. It is characterized by a realistic formal language, but the messages in his images often remain unresolved. Tübke was less concerned with the concrete representation of reality than with the “interpretation of existence”. In his multi-layered compositions, characterized by an imaginative and sometimes almost exuberant fantasy, he reflected the complexity of the world with its existential questions, needs and conflicts. With a keen sense of human vulnerability, he placed the individual at the centre of his art. Angels, unicorns and magicians, harlequins, veiled figures, bound, tortured and masked figures populate Tübke’s works. In his “world theatre”, as he called it, time is suspended and everything is imbued with memories through the creative appropriation of older art history.
Curator
Dr Regina Freyberger (Head of Prints and Drawings after 1800, Städel Museum)
Werner Tübke (1929–2004)
Burial in the wintry Tienshan Mountains, 1962
Werner Tübke (1929–2004)
Study for the composition of „Recollections from the Life of Judge Schulze II“, 1965
Werner Tübke (1929–2004)
Harlequin on the Beach, 1965
Werner Tübke (1929–2004)
Ikarus above the Vitosha Mountains, 1980
Sponsors & Patrons
Sponsored by
Heinz und Gisela Friederichs Stiftung
