Johannes Grebe-Ellis
Just in time for the 200th anniversary of the "West-Eastern Divan", the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn presented a new exhibition entitled "Goethe. Transformation of the World", a comprehensive exhibition of the poet's work and influence. In cooperation with renowned Goethe collections, curators of the Klassikstiftung Weimar and the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn succeeded in documenting Goethe's work in almost all of his artistic and scientific fields of activity and in making visible the impact of this work on his time and beyond to the present day. In nine radially arranged rooms, the audience was offered nine perspectives on biographical motifs, which became Goethe's starting points for an almost inexhaustible transformation of the world. Among the exhibits displayed in the room on the Theory of Colours were Goethe's prisms, his colour teaching card game and the large wall chart on the Theory of Colours, as well as artistic references to the Theory of Colours by W. Turner, C.D. Friedrich, P. Klee, J. Albers and others. An unmissable highlight of the room, which captivated the patron of the exhibition, the German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, at the opening, was the oversized, tetrahedron-shaped water prism, which invited visitors to explore the edge spectra described by Goethe. A second water prism was located in the roof garden of the exhibition as part of an ensemble of "Goethe's Gardens".
"To be able to contribute to this exhibition with our two tetrahedral prisms," said physicist Dr. Matthias Rang from the Natural Science Section at the Goetheanum, "is of course an honour". Strictly speaking, it was only a matter of time before such an invitation came. Because the approximately 40 installations developed by Rang and his colleague Nora Löbe over the past 10 years on Goethe's Theory of Colours represent a unique ensemble of interactive exhibits in terms of inventiveness as well as technical and aesthetic quality of execution, which has already been shown many times under the title "Experiment COLOUR", most recently in 2018 in the "experience Colour" exhibition in Stourbridge (UK).
This article by Johannes Grebe-Ellis (Professor at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal) was published in a slightly modified version on 31 May 2019 in "Das Goetheanum" No. 22.
