Exhibition about artists' colonies: We eat salad, yes, we eat salad

The title of the exhibition that opened on Friday in the Berne Art Museum is, all in all, well chosen: “Journey to Freedom”. Is the emphasis on the tourist, the world-interesting - or on the movement out of constraints and conventions? The art temple was built in 1879 as a – so to speak – architectural gesture of power by the advancing bourgeois classes. At the same time, the artist colonies to which the show is dedicated were built, for example on Capri or at Monte Verità. Conquered at the height of the bourgeois classes, they were located far away from the academies of aesthetic production in the capitals.

The headline could have been “Journey to Self-Determination,” but perhaps that was too complicated. What matters is the movement itself, the journey into the unknown. This exhibition shows over 60 paintings - and they are all connected to places and landscapes that make you fantasize about idylls - not cities that are falling apart at the seams like Copenhagen, Berlin, Rome or London.

The art places were difficult to reach, one had to make an effort to travel to them, even to stay there, to find accommodation, to paint pictures. Capri as a dream island off Naples, only accessible by rocking boats; the Monte Verità in Ticino, Switzerland, barely accessible above Lake Maggiore; Skagen, a dreary fishing village at the tip of Jutland, barren and, when the first artists came, only conceivable as a place for them because a small railway line had been built there through sandy and rather grayish landscapes.

But the groups of artists were colonists, for them there was no question that they wanted an alternative life there, a lot of pioneering work was necessary, but time and resources were available, almost all art people had some kind of family background.

Much of what is now commonplace as a bourgeois lifestyle found its first symbolism there. Breathing exercises against illnesses, gymnastics to feel the body, vegetarian food experiments, experimental things in sexual terms, open marriages, feminism and the living out of queer desires - the life reform movement, as this historical precursor to the green alternative movement was called, had its first breakthroughs in the art world in the 19th century.

For women in particular: Living in Skagen or on the hill above Ascona also meant being able to do without constricting corsets.

On the other hand, there was always scorn and ridicule towards the dropouts, for example when the anarchist and writer Erich Mühsam wrote “an alcohol-free drinking song” after a visit to Monte Verità in 1905: “We eat salad, yes, we eat salad / And eat vegetables early and late. / Fruit is also part of our diet. / Anything else that grows is spurned.”

The paintings have been well chosen by the curators Livia Wermuth and Andreas Schwab - the latter, who lives near Bern, is the author of the book "Time of the Dropouts. Journey to the artist colonies from Barbizon to Worpswede", in fact the inspiration for this show and at the same time its catalog. It's good that both decided to add texts to the pictures as fact-checking instances and not to let them disappear behind a QR code: The artists used the real residents in the villages as objects in their paintings - but what about the real lives of the, well, native people, beyond artistic fantasies?

However, as much as the view of authenticity and real authenticity seems to be calibrated, the image of a young man working on a fishing net remains enigmatic: when, wherever, has a young, flawless man, physically unaffected by any aging, ever been seen naked while doing his work? Or when, like in a painting from Capri, did a young woman walk through the streets with half of her upper body bare-breasted? Or what might the painter have thought of a group situation of fishermen in the sea when he put them on canvas with smiling faces?

Isn't there, by no means complicated, a kind of desire for exotic people? Or did it have to be shown aesthetically that way because the pure, laborious documentation would have had little appeal on the painting market in the metropolises? If they are non-bourgeois human objects - then at least they have winning faces because of their fate of having to work physically brutally hard.

The only highlight seems to be, and the exhibition also says this in its instructive accompanying text, that shortly after the “discovery” of these places, especially on Capri and in Skagen, the indigenous people began to capitalize on the (which they were in fact) tourists themselves: as servants, with postcard stands, with restaurants and all the business that is now popping up everywhere in places that are on the bucket lists of the world's inhabitants: You have to go there...

Because, apart from Monte Verità, which plays no role in Ticino's tourism marketing, these artist colonies have in a certain sense become hot spots of their time: places to see and visit beyond official museum arrangements. Who would know about Worpswede today if Paula Modersohn-Becker, Rainer Maria Rilke and Heinrich Vogeler hadn't settled there for a while? Exactly: a geographical nightmare without charm in the middle of a moorland landscape.

The fact that the exhibition in Bern manages without the genre-typical fame holders like those just mentioned is very attractive in terms of content. So none of the celebrities distract from the actual topic: the freedom to move away from conventions, to dare, not to think without alternatives, even to fail, to get some air other than around and in the art academies, even if they are agricultural.

This subtle, quite unintentional interaction between the colonization of overlooked locations and the usefulness of the new guests for the original inhabitants of these landscapes may have had another effect, as the exhibition also suggests: the birth of the Instagramability of interesting regions of the world.

Artists and their paintings, which were the first classic works of art - photography as a genre had just been born - functioned like advertising for the country and its people beyond their own metropolitan bubble. It doesn't matter that it also had a lot to do with exoticism, conquering the world without war and exploiting supposedly original ways of life. For the natives, as it appears in many of the pictures shown, the initially gentle invasion of their guests brought them closer to the world.