Lecture with Dr. Joachim Schnitter | garden historian and freelance landscape architect | Hamburg, admission: 10 euros
At the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and an important protagonist of the garden reform, initiated a residential and cultural project that is almost forgotten today. He persuaded families he was friends with to build modern country houses with innovative gardens in the vicinity of his own summer cottage and deliberately close to a painting school he had encouraged. Philanthropists, painters, art collectors, merchants, architects, a teacher and an actress formed an exclusive circle of artistic and social life on the "Sunderberg" in the Harburg mountains, whose wider circle included personalities such as Max Liebermann and Fritz Schumacher. Lichtwark's book "Der Heidegarten" (The Heath Garden), which had an "enlightening effect like a bright spotlight" on garden artists of the time, can be traced back to this country house colony.
In works of painting, graphic art and photography as well as contemporary text sources, the country house colony is depicted as part of the Lebensrefom movement and placed in the interplay between painting and garden art. Lichtwark's dream of an intimate perception of nature, a garden art oriented towards the "Lower Saxon-Althamburg" and a cultural togetherness is shown here as an "art of living".
