In the Schaenen Gallery, Floor 2L
This exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of a portfolio of twenty-four color woodblock prints by Weimar-born German artist Margarethe Geibel (1876–1955). The series reveals Geibel’s inventive adaptation of Japanese printmaking techniques popular in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. It also provides a figurative walk through a cultural treasure—the house and collections of renowned German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who, like Geibel, called Weimar home.
Geibel accomplished the first eighteen prints in the series between 1908 and 1911, and the remaining six in 1916 and 1917, during the First World War. Her multiple returns to certain rooms over the cycle reveal a changing relationship with the house, as well as a shift in her color sensibility and graphic technique from bright colors and bold contrasts to more muted tones and textural carving of the woodblocks.
As the concept of a German nation state developed over the course of the nineteenth century, Goethe’s worldview and writings gave voice to a collective German cultural and linguistic identity as well as an emphasis on education. Thus, for those like Margarethe Geibel, born into the young German nation, Goethe’s house stood not only as a locus of culture and beauty but as a symbol of what it meant to be German. These innovative prints present both Geibel’s vision of its interiors—and her reflection on them—as spaces of memory and meaning.
This exhibition was curated by Andrew C. Weislogel, the Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art, and supported by the Jan Abrams Exhibition Endowment. Our thanks to Dillon Bush, BArch ’27 and the 2025 Nancy Horton Bartels ’48 Scholar for Collections; Professors Verity Platt and Annetta Alexandridis and the Cornell Cast Collection; Dr. Douglas Brent McBride, senior lecturer in the Department of German Studies; and Drs. Carlo Schmid and Armin Kunz of C. G. Boerner Gallery, Düsseldorf and New York, for their contributions and support.