"The Apelles Artists' Association in Weimar" and "Brendel's Barbizon. Historical photographs and early landscape painting" Exhibition from 24.01.2026 - 19.04.2026
"The Apelles artists' association in Weimar."
With this exhibition, the Schwaan Art Museum is focusing on a largely forgotten but art-historically significant group: the Apelles artists' association, founded in 1895 in the Prellerhaus in Weimar. Apelles is actually the name of the famous Greek painter and contemporary of Alexander the Great, who lived around 375 BC and is considered the most outstanding painter of antiquity. Apelles was associated with numerous painters who had close ties to the Schwaan artists' colony, including Franz Bunke, Rudolf Bartels, Paul Drewing, Paul Tübbeke, Otto Tarnogrocki and many others.In response to an increasingly conservative understanding of art at the Weimar court, the artists joined forces to make their works more visible and to create new exhibition opportunities. Although they did not pursue a uniform style, their works impressively demonstrate the stylistic development of landscape painting between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Their journeys took them to important places of art: Barbizon, Schwaan, Scheveningen, Knokke, Dachau, Gothmund, Paris and, of course, Weimar. There they met other artists, exchanged ideas and further developed their painting styles. The exhibition makes this diversity visible and at the same time sheds light on the role of the artists' colonies as places of inspiration and artistic progress. Works from the collection of the Schwaan Art Museum are on display, as well as selected loans and archive material that vividly document the history of the Apelles Association.
Parallel to the exhibition:
"Brendel's Barbizon. Historical photographs and early landscape painting"
This complementary part of the exhibition is dedicated to the use of early photography in teaching at the Weimar art academy and shows how these images were used to convey the "Barbizon School". Together, the two presentations provide an exciting insight into the artistic trends that had a lasting influence on modern landscape painting.
