Category: Artists

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Valuable Donations

The of a donation to a national gallery is often a curse but may reveal only much later as a blessing. More galleries across the world give due credit to their generous donors. The collection of impressionist paintings by Caillebotte figures today very promising in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The fine collection by Chistoph Müller endowed to today‘s “Kupferstichkabinett” exposed in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin has been on display in a small room. The „Kräuterblätter” (herbes on paper) by Kolbe 1815/1824 are fine pieces of etching with a focus on what might get lost in our biodiversity in coming years. Old trees were surely on his list (Oak trees 500+ years old). A collection of depictions of herbs and flowers a part of an ecological treasure which the generations after the painter and eventually the collector Christoph Müller began to value a lot. Some collectors are far ahead of their time by treasuring the past. (Image: Extract of „Kräuterblatt mit Schnitterin“ Kolbe 1815/24 Donation Christoph Müller shown in Gemäldegalerie Berlin 2026-5)

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Portrait of or about

In some galleries or for curators of an exhibition, the crucial question is not only the overall message, but the best positioning of artworks in the available space. In many national galleries what hangs next to another piece is rarely seen as an opportunity for exploration and experimentation. A recent visit to the “Gemäldegalerie“ in Berlin allowed to explore the vicinity of 2 paintings, which are very different in appearance. The one (by Pierre Subleyras 1740) is just entitled “Portrait of a woman”, the other one next to it, “Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Angels and Two Saints, Domenico Mondo 1773). The former portrait has almost a modern touch to it as the beauty consists in the simplicity of the person depicted, whereas the latter painting portrays a rather empty message of splendor and power. The conscious confrontation of portraits or paintings with each other is the high art of curatorship. It is even more pointed than a guided tour of a gallery as the simultaneous rather than the sequential confrontation is the issue. 

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Woman artist scandal

The painter Hermine Schmidt-von Preuschen, little known today, had to face strong forces in the established art community of her time. The skills and audacity she displayed at an early stage of her career as painter is epitomized in her work “Imperator Mors”. This painting dates back to 1887 and was rejected by the art academy in Berlin for their official exhibition. The woman artist was already at that time confident enough that her painting was of sufficient quality to deserve to be not only considered in the exhibition, but also to be seen by larger audiences. Similar to the refused painters of the impressionist movement, she decided to mount her own exhibition. The turnout to this proved to be quite a success according to the press cuttings presented as part of the exhibition in Berlin at the “Alte Nationalgalerie” 2026-5. Maybe it was the intended philosophical topic or message that killed the chances to be part of the art academy exhibition. “Imperator Mors” shows death or a skeleton to be the ultimate ruler of our fate. For all those who believe in some sort of life after death, this can be viewed as a “Scandal” in itself. The scandal created with such a depiction probably overshadowed the fact that the provocation came from a woman artist. Still very avantgarde for the end of the 19th century. (Image: Hermine Schmidt-von Preuschen and her painting Imperator Mors 1887)

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Brancusi polyartist

The joint exhibition by the “Neue Nationalgalerie” Berlin and the “Centre Pompidou” Paris has the simple title “Brancusi”. The name of the artist Brancusi stands for a very singular approach to take sculpture into the 20th century by way of abstraction. Brancusi used all sorts of materials like lime stone, bronze, wood and marble. Additionally, he was very conscious of the fact that especially for sculptures the “mise en scène” plays a vital role. Brancusi excelled in this in a rather unique way, mostly by confronting different materials with each other. Sculptures, for him, were architecture in miniature. Such a polyartist approach to sculpture pushed him to use photography and video to not only promote his own work, but to exploit these relatively new techniques to enhance the effect of his sculptures.
Maybe it took almost 100 years that by means of the “not-so-social media” not-instant, anytube and tikytok, this “modus operandi” would capture a whole generation of youth to follow in his footsteps without knowing it. The polyartist Brancusi is a unique milestone, not only using lime stone, on the trajectory of sculpture beyond the early 20th century. The links to other innovative artists chosing abstraction, Picasso or Modigliani, as well as musicians like Eric Satie, reflect the importance of social networks for mutual encouragement when treading new paths in art.

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Beeple Deeple People

The “Neue Nationalgalerie” in Berlin hosts in 2026-5 the work by “Beeple” artist Mike Winkelmann together with the “Andy Warhol Robot K-456” by Nam June Paik. The re-interpretations of robots and the imagined effects this new media has or shall have on our lives, this is the subject of a critical projection and the artist’s chosen form for a projection into the future.
In 1994 the “Andy Warhol Robot K-456” prefigures the pervasive decoration of the human body with screens as a futuristic way of communication with others. The communication practices in 2026 have changed with software and applications like DeepL, which allow real time translations of speech to our neighbors or distant cultures.
The installation “Regular Animals” brings to our attention the power of images in our daily communication. Warhol built his art around the topic of pop culture with the visual heroes of, for example, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as the best known pop images or icons of his time. In Beeple’s work, the dog robots’ conversation is only via instant images. These images are AI-edited and distributed rapidly at random across space, the floor in a well-delimited space. Space does no longer matter as distance as it is passed instantly. Perception and reception are transformed into a power-play via images and distribution channels. We are all transformed into “Beeple Deeple People” without noticing it, aren’t we?. About time that social science or sociology of the visual recons with these not so new facts of communication in the 2020s.

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Pictures at an exhibition

The playlist on Spotify, which accompanies the exhibition “Unforgettable” in Ghent, is an interesting extension of the unforgettable artists into today and tomorrow. You may be inclined to share your opinion in the way Maria Iskariot does it in “Dat find ik lekker” or more like Sophie Straat in “Dansen met de dood”. Anyway, women artists are coming front stage and this is great news despite all the backlashes we, unfortunately, witness in the 2020s. The curator of the playlist Murielle Scherre has managed to take us, a bit like the exuberant Modest Mussorgsky in his “Pictures at an exhibition”, beyond the marvelous exhibition rooms to a broad exploration of contemporary women artists’ world of imagination in music, visuals and songs. A great intergenerational accomplishment. 

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Forgotten but Unforgettable

Many women painters and artists who worked during the 17th and first half of the 18th century have been forgotten until recently. The galleries of the time and many years later gave little attention to the women artists of that time. Most of them were relegated to be of minor importance in the course of art history. The exhibition of the Museum of the Fine Arts Ghent in Belgium has accomplished to rectify this place of women painters in art history. The fine pieces of art, ranging from painting to sculptures, were frequently signed by men, probably to achieve higher market values and become visible in the public sphere at all at their time.
The exhibition is a kind of a revelation of how difficult it was for women to move from an “object of art” to be the subject painting including painting themselves. This also dealt with the view or regard of others towards women. Additionally, the exhibition features a section on “Social Expectations”, which deals with the expectations of the Flemish and Dutch societies towards women. Family values, marriage, wealth and social status were of utmost importance.
These women painters were forgotten far too long, but have staged their comeback as “Unforgettable” in the 21st century.
(Image: “Pictura at an exhibition” taken in the MSK Ghent 2026-4)

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AI data Input

If you ever wondered where the information from AI and AI chatbots comes from, you will not be surprised that this webpage schoemann.org is regularly solicited for such purposes. The number of crawlers, that do so, is quite large. The ability to trace what exactly they are harvesting on your website, is quite a tricky issue. At least a basic awareness of how the internet has been transformed in the last few years becomes evident through the comparison of unique visits, many through search engines like Google search or others, with the amount of contacts by AI-associated crawlers (see slide from own webpage below).
During he last month up to 2026-4-27 there were about 75.000 contacts, compared to 93.000 during the previous month.
At first sight, AI chatbots have largely outnumbered the “personal visits” of my webpage (see evaluate web analytics). On the other hand, I have no information of how many visits are, (at least potentially) re-directed hints from AI chatbots to my content.
In terms of “traffic” for a webpage, the information of how the AI-driven or AI-assisted search operates with other persons’ contributions will be the challenge of the coming years. If AI chatbots had to pay 10 cents per visit, I would have a comfortable pay every month from this content use. The issue of AI paying for access to reliable and high quality content has to be dealt with sooner rather than later. You may prompt a chatbot on this issue.
Meanwhile: My New Book on AI is out Now 2026-4-28:
“AI and Social Science: Potentials versus Limitations” by Dr. Klaus Schoemann, online reading and free download (here) before implementation of Paywall later on.

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Before and After

It is not always easy to precisely identify the state of before a transformation from the state of after a transformation. In human developments we can observe lengthy periods of for example puberty. Other transformations of biological changes might be more obvious to identify like a broken bone, but a broken heart transformation might be less obvious as it might occur gradually and progressively rather than abruptly. Much the same can be said about illnesses like diabetes or cancer. The task of science is to study the whole process and this includes the theoretical model of such transformations. The arts have dealt with this complexity before and many artifacts take care to show or make explicit the kind of transformation they have undergone. The woodwork by Birkenmaier (before 1687, in catalog of Metamorphosis exhibition, Amsterdam 2026. Image below) is an early example of being honest about original piece and the evolution of the piece of art into the transformed “oeuvre”.

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Metamorphosis

In the antique writings of Ovid “Metamorphosis” there is an extensive description and mystery about the metamorphosis of several characters. The narrative about various forms of metamorphosis has influenced our perception of change as having a mystic component. The arts before the enlightenment have drawn lots of sceneries of metamorphoses across the centuries. Maybe in form of sculpture this narrative has continued to be present even into the 20th century. The exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the essays in the catalog testify to this long shadow of Ovid’s original narrative. No need to mention Kafka as another adept of “Verwandlung” or Rodin, who reveals persons as semi-detached from stone. Wood and the return to ashes shows us the come and go of metamorphosis of human beings. Imagining mankind as a sequence of metamorphoses is a metaphysical as well as sociological perspective of our presence on our planet. (Image: Daphne transformed into a Laurel tree, Bernard Salomon, 1557).