Pilot project: The digitisation of archival material on the artists' association “Das Junge Rheinland” from the holdings of the Rhineland institutions and the connection and publication in a database
The Düsseldorf artists' association Das Junge Rheinland was one of the first artists' groups to be founded in Germany after the end of the First World War. From 1919 until its dissolution by the National Socialists in 1938, the association and its successor organisations (Rheingruppe and Rheinische Sezession) brought together well over 440 artists from the fields of painting, sculpture and graphics, architecture, design and typography, literature and stage art. Together they pursued the goal of creating local and national exhibition opportunities and visibility for the young art of their time.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Jungen Rheinland in 2019, the Gerda Henkel Foundation-funded research project ‘Das Junge Rheinland 1919-1932: Dynamiken eines Künstlernetzwerks" (2017-2020) analysed the structure and networking of the group. In addition to questions about the artistic spectrum, the changing personal composition, artistic exchange and political positioning, the focus was also on analysing all of the Jungen Rheinlands' publications, which made it possible to identify more than 50 artists who had not previously been attributed to the association. A comprehensive list of regional and supra-regional archive holdings on the Jungen Rheinland, compiled for the first time as part of the project, also revealed a previously untapped treasure trove of objects and sources on the formation of artists' networks, art criticism, the mechanisms of the exhibition system and the art trade in the 1920s and 1930s. These previously little-known materials shed a completely new light on the dynamics surrounding the people involved and show that artists in the Rhineland during the Weimar Republic have been insufficiently researched to date and that the role of this cultural region is still underestimated in art historiography. While art centres such as Berlin, Munich, Dresden and, of course, Paris and Vienna have received constant attention in research, the artists of the Jungen Rheinland have been largely marginalised, not least in terms of their exchange with other regions.
As part of the pilot project ‘The digitisation of archival material on the artists’ association Das Junge Rheinland from the holdings of the institutions of the Rhineland and the linking and publication in a database’, the previously undigitised or not even inventoried The archival documents and materials from three exemplary collections (from the Heinrich Heine Institute, the Düsseldorf City Museum and the Theatre Studies Collection of the University of Cologne), which have not yet been digitised or even inventoried, are now being recorded, indexed and digitised and brought together and made accessible in a scientific research database in order to form a basis for further research into the artists' association Das Junge Rheinland. The aim is to test the methodological approach, examine the technical requirements of the existing research database and make any necessary adjustments.
The project is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
Cooperation partner
Theatre Studies Collection of the University of Cologne
City Museum City of Düsseldorf
