Maria Luiko, Trauernde, 1938
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Maria Luiko, Trauernde, 1938
Neptunbrunnen, Alter Botanischer Garten München
Public Art Munich – Past Statements, 19 Sept 2022 – 31 March 2024
The Old Botanical Garden was built at the beginning of the 19th century according to the plans of Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell. From 1854 onwards, the garden was also the site of the Munich Glass Palace, where countless important exhibitions of contemporary art took place. In 1931, the Glass Palace burned down.
In 1935, the National Socialists commissioned the sculptor Joseph Wackerle and the architect Oswald Bieber, two artists included on Adolf Hitler’s „God-gifted list,“ to redesign the Old Botanical Garden. The site, which was home to the Glass Palace, — at the time Munich’s most important exhibition venue for contemporary art — had initially been designed as a place of recreation, education and culture for the citizens of Munich. The construction measures carried out by Wackerle and Bieber, however, visibly aimed to transform the park into a place shaped by National Socialist ideology that closely connected with the adjacent Nazi party district around Arcis-, Briennerstaße and Königsplatz.
Statues of Neptune had been a popular motif for decorative fountains since the Renaissance. The Munich fountain was directly modeled on the Fountain of Neptune in Florence, the Fontana del Nettuno in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, in which the figure of Neptune became the symbol of a contemporary and earthly ruler.
The Neptune Fountain by Wackerle and Bieber is formally aligned with the central axis of the Munich Palace of Justice. During the National Socialist era, countless politically motivated court proceedings took place in this building, where people accused for ideological reasons faced occupational bans, concentration camps or death sentences.
For the series „past statements. Denkmäler in der Diskussion“, organized by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich, the monstrous figure of Neptune is temporarily cloaked in tarpaulin. The tarpaulin is printed all over with the motif of a hand print by the Munich artist Maria Luiko. The woodcut from 1938 which bears the title Mourner shows a head covered with a cloth. The only physical indication of a mourner are the hands of an anonymous woman holding the cloth and a hint of a blouse with a floral pattern.
The artist Maria Luiko created this Trial Print No. 1 of Woman, Mourning in 1938, one year after Wackerle and Bieber’s Fountain of Neptune was built on the site of the Glass Palace where Maria Luiko had regularly exhibited her paintings between 1924 and 1931. At this time, however, Maria Luiko, a German Jew, was only allowed to pursue her artistic activities in an extremely limited form (that is, only within the framework of the Jewish Cultural Association). The location of the Jewish Cultural Association on Promenadeplatz 12 in Munich was in the immediate vicinity of the Old Botanical Garden.
Maria Luiko was born Marie Luise Kohn in Munich in 1904. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1923 to 1928 and simultaneously at the Munich School of Applied Arts. After her studies, Kohn, who chose the artist’s name Maria Luiko, was very active as an artist, producing drawings, water colors and oil paintings as well as silhouettes, lithographs, woodcuts and linoleum prints; her works were shown in important group exhibitions in galleries and in 1931 even in New York and Denver/Colorado. After 1933, Kohn, who was a member of several artists‘ associations, was excluded from the Reichsverband bildender Künstler, which amounted to a professional ban, and was no longer allowed to use her artist name Maria Luiko. Her parents‘ wholesale business was forcibly closed down and expropriated in 1938. After all attempts by the family to leave Germany had failed, Marie Luise (Maria Luiko), Elisabeth and her mother Olga Kohn were deported in November 1941 from the Milbertshofen freight station to Kaunas in Lithuania along with almost 1,000 other people persecuted as Jews by the Gestapo. They were murdered by the SS and their accomplices just a few days after their arrival on November 25th.
Maria Luiko, Trauernde (Woman, mourning), 1938 Woodcut, proof no.1, Courtesy of the Jewish Museum Munich, Maria Luiko Collection, Photo: Franz Kimmel
Sound track # 202 of Memory Loops memoryloops.net. This sound track can be found on the drawing of the city map on the internet on Loristraße 7, the residence of the Kohn family, Blutenburgstraße 12, the studio of Maria Luiko and on Promenadeplatz 12, the address of the Jewish Cultural Association in Munich.
The project is part of the program „past statements“, a cooperation between Public Art München and the Institute for City History and Culture of Remembrance, City Department of Arts and Culture.