Special exhibition "Wanderlust for Rügen and Vilm"

The special exhibition "Wanderlust for Island of Rügen and Vilm" shows tempera paintings, oil paintings, lithographs, watercolors and etchings by artists who traveled to the islands of Rügen or Vilm and were inspired by the special landscape. The show focuses on fourteen tempera paintings and two paintings by the Swabian impressionist Eugen Kucher, who traveled to Rügen in 1929 and translated his impressions into paint.

Eugen Kucher was born on August 12, 1889 in Enzweihingen and moved to the village of Degerloch (Baden-Württemberg) at the age of seven. He initially worked as a room and parlor painter, but from 1910 he found a permanent position as a stage painter at the Royal Court Theatre in Stuttgart, which later became the Württemberg State Theatre. His work there was interrupted by the events of the First World War and his military service from 1915 to 1918.

Kucher returned to Degerloch after the end of the First World War and was once again employed as a theater painter at the Königliches Hoftheater. He died on April 12, 1945 during a train journey to Aalen in the course of an air raid.

The special exhibition is complemented by black and white lithographs by Hermann Robert Catumby Hirzel (1864-1939). The city museum is also presenting individual works by Adolf Fischer-Gurig (1860-1918), Wilhelm Körber (1902-1991) and three watercolors by Berthold Grahl (born 1943). In connection with this year's Caspar David Friedrich anniversary year and the focus on Romanticism, the oil paintings "Steep Coast at Sassnitz" by Carl Hummel (1821-1906) and "Eichen und Hünengrab am Strand von Rügen" by Ferdinand Konrad Bellermann (1814-1889) round off the special exhibition. Hummel and Bellermann visited Rügen and Vilm together with Friedrich Preller the Elder in 1839.