In Flux: A Story About Water

This compact but rich show delves into the many facets and meanings of water as represented in the past 400 years of art history

Installation view. In Flux: A Story About Water, Arp Museum, Remagen, Germany, 17 November 2024 – 27 April 2025. Photo: Helmut Reinelt.

Arp Museum, Remagen, Germany
17 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

by SABINE SCHERECK

Dedicated to the dada artist Hans Arp, the Arp Museum is a modern building with large windows offering magnificent views of the Rhine. Ships passing in both directions make clear that this is a busy and important waterway – not only transporting goods up and down Germany, but also connecting Switzerland with the Netherlands. With the river being such a prominent feature of everyday life here, it is easy to understand why it prompted the exhibition In Flux: A Story About Water.

In 2023, the Museum Barberini also hosted a show based on one subject: the sun. While it looked at how the sun was presented throughout art history on a grand scale – from antiquity to the present day – and how its cultural meaning changed over time, the exhibition at the Arp Museum includes many interesting perspectives on the river and water, such as it being a force of nature capable of destruction as well as saving lives by providing food with its fish and enabling the transport of goods to other places. Although the exhibition is relatively small, it offers plenty of cues to further pursue the ideas laid out. To convey these ideas, the curator, Susanne Blöcker, has largely drawn on the Rau Collection for Unicef, which is housed at the museum. Altogether, 48 works, most of which are from the 1600s to the present day, are on show.

When entering the exhibition, a wooden statue of John the Baptist is not what you might expect, yet it brings into view the meaning of water within religion – at close quarters and further afield. The cleansing nature of water is not only valued in Christianity as represented here by Jacopo della Quercia’s John the Baptist (1425), but also, for example, in Islam, where feet are washed before prayer, and in Judaism, where a woman takes a ritual bath before her wedding. In addition, the Christian statue here tells of how deeply steeped in religion this part of Germany is.

Johann König, The Sacrifice of Noah after the Flood, 1627. Photo: Horst Bernhard.

The first painting along the wall, The Sacrifice of Noah after the Flood (1629) by Johann König, picks up the religious theme and is a neat bridge to the next: water as a force of nature. This series encompasses a waterfall, ships on a stormy sea and a thunderstorm over a flat summer-dry sandy landscape as presented in the paintings The Cascade of Tivoli (1825) by Johann-Martin von Rhoden, Pierre-Jacques Volaire’s Storm (1766) and Jan van Goyen’s The Thunderstorm (1637).

Johann-Martin von Rhoden, The Cascades of Tivoli, 1825. Photo: Mick Vincenz.

While these pictures are similar in style, emulating realism, there is also a Monet, Flood (1881). Its impressionist style differs not only from the other images in this series, but also from other works by Monet himself. Known for his rose-tinted colour pallet and pleasing peaceful landscapes by the waterfront, here bold strokes of blue and grey paint cover the canvas, plunging the viewer into a cold, wet and windy setting. There seems to be no escape from the wet: the extremely high water level makes it look as if the trees are standing on water and from the sky, the rain is swishing down with gusts of wind. This picture is a treat to see and unlike many others by Monet, including his paintings of the Thames, now on show at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Next to Monet’s Flood is a large-sized monochrome photograph of the cliffs of Étretat on the north coast of France as the sea washes around them. Étretat (after Schirmer) (2006) by Elger Esser is a clever choice, also harbouring many layers of meaning. One, starting with the motif: Étretat was popular with many impressionist painters, not least Monet, who painted it several times to catch different moods, depending on light and weather conditions. This connection to the past and impressionist artists is enhanced by the fact that these cliffs were also seen through the lenses of many early cameras. Photographers of that period were equally keen to capture the effects of light in nature and often chose motifs also favoured by the impressionists. Esser is a highly interesting contemporary artist, who fits perfectly into this exhibition. Paying tribute to his predecessors, he focuses on historical landscape photography. In other sections of this exhibition, his works blend in so well that only by looking closely at the label does it become apparent that this is a contemporary piece. Following in the footsteps of many landscape painters, Esser has travelled through France, Scotland, Italy and the Netherlands and his works are owned by prestigious institutions, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Elger Esser, Ile d'Arun, 2019. Directprint, silver-coated copper plate, shellac, 47 x 62 x 4 cm. © Elger Esser/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2024.

The final item in this room, a wooden palm-gilded cherub’s head (18th century, artist unknown), brings the section full circle, also on more level than one. The story behind the cherub is telling. During the flood of the nearby Ahr in July 2021 almost 3,000 works of art were damaged. Many drifted for almost 14 days in dirty water. After their recovery, museums and workshops across Germany undertook their restoration. This cherub’s head was among them. It symbolises the destructive and, in a way, also the transformative power of water, as well as the strong religious beliefs still held in the Rhineland – just as John Baptist presented it in the beginning.

The second room looks at the relationship between mankind and water in terms of cultivating land and civilisation. Riverbanks were a preferred site for settlements as the water enabled agriculture and the waterway provided a connection to other places and opened up exchange.

In the arts, water is captured with its many ways of shaping the landscape, for example, the riverbanks in Alfred Sisley’s Saint Mammès, la Croix-Blanche (1884) and the watermill in Esser’s Beaupréau en Mauges, France (2024), a photograph that does not look like a photograph at all at first sight. The sumptuous greeny-yellow trees and shrubs along the motionless river drenched in sunlight evoke the serenity of a hot summer’s day. In its middle nestles a little white house. Remarkable also is his Ile d’Arun (2019), in which the island’s trees are reflected in the water. It also stands out because of its unusual material: dry ink on silver-coated copperplate coated with shellac, gives the image a mysterious shine depending on the angle from which it is viewed. It is a delight to see this shimmering material bringing a new element to the artistic cosmos here.

There is another work by Esser that draws the visitor’s attention: the large Les Andelys II (2018), which depicts a stunning, vast mellow yellow sky at dawn (or dusk?) over the dark silhouettes of trees on the horizon. Both are mirrored on the water stretching out in front, giving the scene an air of enchantment. The painting also echoes the many images seen at the exhibition A Different Impressionism: International Printmaking from Manet to Whistler, at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, where a horizon over water is a favoured motif.

Frédéric Bazille, Fisherman with Net, 1868. Oil on canvas, 137.8 x 86.6 cm. Photo: Mick Vincenz.

Brook in the Forest (19th century, unknown artist) holds a prime place within the exhibition. It mesmerises with its magical sight of a brook, which, like a miniature waterfall, gently flows over moss-covered stones towards the viewer. All images here emanate such peace and tranquillity that the mind easily drifts off to a calm and comforting place. The move from water as a source of mental wellbeing to a source of physical wellbeing by providing food is marked by Frédéric Bazille’s Fisherman with Net (1868). There is more to it than the title gives away. This is no old bearded man smoking a pipe and wearing a hat pulled down over his face to protect him from the elements and placed against a grey stormy background – quite the contrary: it shows an idyllic scene straight out of a picture book on Greek mythology, where young, strong, athletic men bask naked on a sun-dappled green meadow beneath some birch trees by a river. Here, one of them with his back to the viewer is just about to cast his net into the river, of which just a small strip can be seen in the foreground. In the background, another youth is seated in the grass pulling a thorn out of his foot. This is a reference to a Hellenistic sculpture, which shows a boy doing precisely that. Drawing on ancient Greek motifs was fashionable at the time – think of the works by Frederic Leighton – but featuring naked men so prominently was not a done thing and Bazille’s large painting caused an uproar when it was first shown at the Salon in Paris in 1869. Its undeniable homoerotic element may have been an additional, unspoken reason for its initial rejection.

The remaining pictures on the wall poignantly show still lives of fish. Again, the fish here are not mere providers of nutrients but also bear meaning within the religious context that seeps through this exhibition: first, fish symbolised the disciples of early Christianity and second, it is associated with fasting during the period of lent before Easter just as much as a meal generally on Fridays to commemorate Good Friday.

Claude Monet, The Pyramids of Port-Coton, 1886. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 65.6 cm. Photo: Peter Schälchli, Zurich.

The final sections illustrate water, or to be precise the sea, as a place for longing for distant places and a place for recreation and leisure spent by the beach. The room presents another distinctive Monet: View of Amsterdam (1874). It shows Amsterdam’s typical architecture along a quayside. Ships in the distance give an inkling of the port. Here, too, murky grey and brown tones dominate. The dreary weather is owed to the fact that Monet stayed in the city during the cold and blustery months of January, February and March in 1874. Yet, the painting, too, is a refreshing sight and reveals another side of Monet’s comprehensive body of work. However, the images placed to catch your eye when entering the room are Monet’s The Pyramids of Port-Coton (1886) and Paul Signac’s The Sea, Opus 211 (1890), which are different in style and mood. While Monet fills the canvas with deep blue hues applied in bold brush strokes to represent the sea, leaving only a small strip of bright blue for the sky at the top, Signac, in his trademark pointillist-style, has the horizon set just above the middle. With its light blue sky, slightly more intensive blue tone for the water and a yellowish-green sand or grass in the foreground, the atmosphere is much lighter, calmer and more pleasing.

Paul Signac, The Sea Opus 211, 1890. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81.5 cm. Photo: Horst Bernhard.

The change in mood creates another great transition in the exhibition’s narrative, from the world “beyond the sea” to the coast as a place of leisure. Lined up on the wall are Eugène Boudin’s Beach of Trouville (1868), Raoul Dufy’s The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1906) and Paul Mathieu’s Sainte-Adresse (1915), a seaside town located to the north of Le Havre. In Boudin’s work, the sky is a gritty grey and the group of people, seen from behind gazing at the sea or chatting, mainly stand together in a cluster to protect themselves from the wind, whereas the beach in Dufy’s scene is presented as a friendly place with gay colours and flowing lines. Created almost 40 years later, Dufy’s work shows a seaside resort at a time when tourism had become much more established than during Boudin’s period. In addition, the view is not out to sea any more, but towards the buzzing life at the beach and the representative buildings at the seafront. Mathieu, too, chose bright colours for his beach promenade in Sainte-Adresse, evoking the bliss of a summer holiday.

Raoul Dufy, Beach at Sainte-Adresse, 1906. Photo: Peter Schälchli, Zurich.

Altogether, the imagery in this exhibition has transported the visitor mainly to France and the Netherlands. Yet, near the end, there is one small painting that looks towards the north: Vast Fjord Landscape (1877) by Hans Fredrik Gude, a Norwegian landscape painter who studied in Germany. Admittedly, it does not portray a particularly distinctive scene, but it does add another facet to the wide panorama that covers the theme of water.

This is a remarkable exhibition: dense in layers of meaning, opening up many perspectives and following a well thought-through narrative. One can only hope that it will have a chance to travel to widen the view to visitors at other locations.