Kunstsammlung NRW
Auslese im Lokal Lieshout mit Selinde Böhm, Foto: Milda Drüke
this & that

Sundays in the Museum: Literature Encounters Art

A backward glance at an extraordinary matinee in the K20, by Maria Müller-Schareck

In 2010, on the occasion of the expansion of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout redesigned our museum café, located in the premises of the permanent collection, with specially designed furniture, lamps, shelving, etc. As the first guests entered the building after the reopening, the new books awaited their readers in the café, rechristened now as the Lokal Lieshout.

Since then, the event series Auslese – Bücher für die Sammlung (Reading/Selection: Books for the Collection) has been held 18 times, and little by little, novels, short stories, poems, and volumes of correspondence have come to fill the shelves, from which museum visitors can make their literary discoveries. These books were chosen by lovers of literature – whether amateurs or professionals – with an eye toward our collection, the artists represented there, and the periods during which they worked, and presented in the framework of Sunday matinee events. Responding to our invitation have been artists, musicians, literary specialists, poets, journalists, and legal scholars – all of them enthusiastic readers and friends of art.

No artwork without love

On August 3, 2014,  the 18th "Auslese" was conducted by the literary scholar Selinde Böhm, who is program director of the Heine Haus in Düsseldorf. As a framing topic for her selection of 15 titles, she chose love, without which no work of art – whether a painting, a composition, a sculpture, or a poem – can ever be achieved.

As an indispensable text, and one that continues to inspire right up to the present, she set Plato's "Eulogy to Eros" from the Symposium at the beginning, before speaking enthusiastically about the texts she regards as the most striking and enduring among those that deal with love: Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which the despairing lover is convinced that the only rescue lies in death; on Liebesverrat (Betrayal in Love), i.e. those faithless ones to whom the literary scholar Peter Matt has dedicated an entire book; about Liebesfluchten (Flight of Love; Bernhard Schlink), and Bei Regen im Saal, (In the Rain in Saal), Wilhelm Genazino's story about the difficulties of life and of love; about the affectionate play of the child in nature (Patti Smith), and about a touching love letter written by André Gorz to his terminally ill wife. Selinde Böhm selected incisive passages from each of the books she brought, and entrusted them to her highly perceptive reciter, her husband Rudolf Müller.

Conclusion with double applause

The diverting ninety-minute performance concluded with a double applause: the first was for the poems of Kurt Schwitters and Heinrich Heine, selected from love poems from around the world; the second, prolonged round of applause was for the lecture – as thought-provoking as it was entertaining – by our reader/selector Selinde Böhm. Her books stand in the shelves of the Lokal Lieshout, awaiting their future readers.

 

Selinde Böhm's selection:

  • Roland Barthes: Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 1988/2012
  • Georges Bataille: Die Tränen des Eros, Matthes & Seitz, München 1993
  • Byung-Chul Han: Agonie des Eros, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2012
  • Wilhelm Genazino: Bei Regen im Saal, Hanser Verlag, München 2014
  • André Gorz: Brief an D. Geschichte einer Liebe, Rotpunktverlag, Berlin 2008
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1.Fassung von 1774, Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart  2010
  • Niklas Luhmann: Liebe. Eine Übung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 2008/2014
  • Peter von Matt: Liebesverrat. Die Treulosen in der Literatur, Hanser Verlag, München 1989
  • Cees Nooteboom: Die folgende Geschichte, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 2002
  • Platon: Sämtliche Dialoge, Meiner Verlag, Leipzig 2004
  • Evelyne Polt-Heinzl/Christine Schmidjell (Hg.): Liebesgedichte aus aller Welt, Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart 2013
  • Bernhard Schlink: Liebesfluchten, Diogenes Verlag, Zürich 2000
  • Patti Smith: Traumsammlerin, Kiepenheuer und Witsch, Köln 2013
  • Stendhal: Über die Liebe, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a.M./Leipzig 2007
  • Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Nackt, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2014