Exhibition with works by Hans Kemmer and Lucas Cranach the Elder – Culture

As a witness to the origins of the Reformation and a collaborator in the invention of its image program, Hans Kemmer would be a godsend for research – if anything from him had been handed down in writing. But the Lübeck painter left no memories, and even about his life there are only a few scanty records. The address of his house in Lübeck is known and that he died on August 2, 1561. That is why the reconstruction of his life and work, which is currently being undertaken in the St. Annen Museum in Lübeck, is a process of circumstantial evidence that has to be fed predominantly from assumptions, comparisons and conjectures.

It is likely that Hans Kemmer was employed there in Lucas Cranach’s workshop soon after Luther posted the 95 Reformation theses on the castle church in Wittenberg in 1517. Presumably some works from Cranach’s prosperous art factory can be assigned in parts or perhaps even in whole to Kemmer. And then he was probably extremely successful in his hometown and in the Baltic Sea region in promoting the biblical and ecclesiastical reinterpretation in educational images. But half a millennium later you don’t really know.

The extensive Kemmer screening is an initial stimulus for researchers

Because Kemmer’s assumed journeyman time at Cranach falls into an era when even the most talented co-painters of large commissioned works were not named by name. And there is no written evidence of his presence at the epicenter of Christian reform. His work in the largest art workshop in late medieval Germany must therefore be derived from stylistic studies. And his own preserved work of 29 paintings, which is now being brought together for the first time with 22 exhibits in this exhibition, is so different in quality that the museum has attached a warning to a picture that is considered “secured” that it is “probably not by Kemmers Hand originates. “

The director of the St. Annen Museum, Dagmar Täube, does not want to suppress the fact that doubt is the constant companion when walking through this exhibition. The first solo exhibition by a painter in 500 years, who is hardly known even to experts, can only provide an incentive to do more research. And for this suggestion, “Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Kemmer” provides a first attractive platform. Two-thirds of the paintings on display come from Cranach, his workshop and his students, in order to demonstrate the tight bond between the artists through analogies.

The concrete traces of style and motif inventions with which Luther’s friend and best man Lucas Cranach shaped the painting of the new Christianity from the twenties onwards can be easily understood in Kemmer’s independent activity through the parallel hanging. Following Cranach’s example, he painted didactic church works, for example on the subject of “Christ and the Adulteress” or “Law and Grace”, which focused on fallible people and no longer on the transfiguration of saints. He adapted Cranach’s biblical female characters, whereby the absurd leaps in quality particularly catch the eye. There are only five years between the lovely “Judith” in great painterly sophistication from 1525, which is ascribed to Kemmer with a question mark, and his copy of Cranach’s “Salome”, which is only convincing in the cloakroom, but a kingdom of heaven, what the understanding of realism and beauty concerns.

Cranach’s workshop used models from the Renaissance

The portraits and devotional pictures of Lübeck merchants and spouses, for example in the opulent and romantic engagement portrait “Die Liebesgabe”, follow compositional principles that were transferred to German conditions in Cranach’s workshop from models of the Italian Renaissance and Dutch painting. Thanks to many international lenders, these comparisons of 64 works make it possible to understand the growing maturity of the portrayal of people at Hans Kemmer. If it can be said with certainty what comes from him.

Open detailed view

This exhibition is not about the baptism of an adept as a misunderstood genius. A strong echo can be felt at Hans Kemmer from Cranach’s security in staging religious content and the fine to lovely style of his people. Which is hardly surprising if he really was a journeyman in Wittenberg, where he had to precisely transfer his master’s designs. But after his return to the capital of the Hanseatic League, he remained so closely attached to this model in his most expressive pictures that one cannot speak of a truly independent artistic powerhouse in Lübeck. For the class of Cranach, Dürer, Holbein and Altdorfer, Kemmer lacked the courage to come up with a really original design.

What makes this exhibition and the accompanying catalog strong with the previously completed scientific research into the images is the three-dimensional consideration of a brief, decisive epoch in German cultural history from the perspective of a marginal figure. If you take the time to immerse yourself in the texts and comparisons, you will discover not only the artistic turn from worship to education, which realigned painting with the Reformation, but also the social context in art production on the threshold of mass culture.

Cranach – Kemmer – Lübeck. Master painter between the Renaissance and the Reformation. St. Annen Museum, Lübeck. Until February 6, 2022. The catalog costs 45 euros.