Since Sunday there is an extra chair at the Baroque dining table in the reception room of the Bismarck Museum, a department of the Obere Saline Museum in Bad Kissingen. The upholstered armchair, along with a 1.80-meter-high wooden coffee table with lamp arm from the workshop of artist Hermann Amrhein (1901-1980), is on loan from the Spessart Museum in Lohr am Main as part of the annual campaign of exchanges that for twelve years has been carried out by 20 museums in Lower Franconia “Art goes strange … and beyond the border”.
In exchange for a ring, the Bad Kissinger Museum gave the Museum für Franken in Würzburg three terracotta medicinal water bottles, which had been produced in the Bolzano brothers’ factory in the 1850s.
“These two exotic pieces of furniture history should show our visitors what artists and furniture manufacturers can come up with,” Bad Kissingen museum director Annette Späth explained on a special tour to her guests on Sunday, who were able to see both. the exhibitions in the Bismarck Museum for the first time.
Contrast to the baroque furniture
These two “museum cheaters” of the mid-1920s have a “very personal character” and thus form a stark contrast to Bismarck’s historicist furniture, the baroque furniture of the bishop princes and the stuccoes of the Rococo room. “You can think a lot about the furniture,” Späth concluded from this visual impression.
Hermann Amrhein was born in Lohr am Main, the son of a baker in what is now the Betty Friedel House on the main street. After staying for several years in Stuttgart and Berlin, she returned to his hometown in 1929. A versatile and extremely prolific artist, he not only designed furniture, lamps and caskets, but also worked as a sculptor, wrote poetry and novels.
Since 1922 he has been studying the anthroposophical teachings of Rudolf Steiner and has brought this influence to his works. “The artist elaborates the soul that resides in the material and allows the work of art to influence the room with lively gestures. In the Obere Saline Museum, the furniture now meets formal baroque and historicist worlds with the original furnishings of the Bismarck baths, “says the relevant section of the enclosed booklet.
“Amrhein’s furniture doesn’t have right angles where it’s not absolutely necessary,” describes Christa Schleicher, research assistant at the Lohr Spessart Museum. Rigid shapes such as rectangles or squares dissolve in Amrhein’s furniture. “His furniture does not correspond to the contemporary taste of the society of the time,” she added. Hermann Amrhein believed that art was above all contemporary taste.
The Spessart Museum owes several works of art and furniture from his father’s estate to a foundation founded by his daughter Monika Amrhein in 1994 for the benefit of the city. Two exhibits from this estate can now be viewed in the Bismarck Museum until November 6, Wednesday to Sunday from 2pm to 5pm.
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