Building in Harmony with Nature (Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün)

Signed and dated Ann Böttcher 2008 verso.

Building in Harmony with Nature (Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün) was originally part of Ann Böttcher’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake. Ahead of the opening, in Nordenhake’s gallery space in Berlin, Nordenhake wrote the following in the press release:

She will be exhibiting a new series of drawings and collages, which continue her personal investigation into national identity’s historically burdened relationship to the landscape. Her delicate, meticulous drawings leave an immediate aesthetic impression on the viewer. However, the research process behind her work reveals, upon closer inspection, a visual archaeology of the facts, myths, memories and values by which “culture” attempts to represent “nature”.

As Anders Kreuger later put it in “Spruce Quotes” (essay in Ann Böttcher. Works 2000 – 2020, exhibition catalogue, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, 2021) about the works from the exhibition mentioned above: “she curated photographs, press clippings, photocopied passages from books and her own drawings and notes on index cards into an essay-exhibition touching on diverse topics from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE to the engineer who first thought of putting up electrified fences along the Autobahn”.

When Kreuger refers to German engineers and Autobahn, it is easy to think of this very piece. The blue index card, in Böttcher’s handwriting, in the lower left corner references a specific book, namely: Reichsautobahn – Mensch und Werk.The book, which was published by a Nazi publishing house in Bayreuth contained photographs by Erna Lendvai-Dircksen (1883 – 1968). Lendvai-Dircksen was a German photographer known for a series of volumes of portraits of rural individuals from throughout Germany. This may all seem rather harmless, but she also, during the Third Reich, photographed for eugenicist publications and was commissioned to document the new Autobahn and the workers constructing it.

The commission came from, none other than, Generalinspektors für das deutsche Strassenwesen Reichsminister Dr. Ing. Fritz Todt (who also wrote the foreword to the book in question). Fritz Todt (1891 – 1942) was a German construction engineer and senior figure of the Nazi Party. He was founder of Organisation Todt, a military-engineering organization that supplied German industry with forced labour (killing countless people along the way) and served as Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition in Nazi Germany, directing the entire wartime military economy.

For the attentive, and historically versed, viewer, Böttcher’s source material thus opens up for a frightening “reading” of the artwork’s historical background. As so often in Böttcher’s case, these combined drawings and collages are multi-layered works whose dark core lies far beyond the decorative surface found in the elegant drawing of a fir tree. Another work in the same series also quotes German-language writer Elias Canetti (1905 – 1994), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981: “For a German, forest and army are so intimately connected that either can equally well stand as the crowd symbol of the nation; in this respect they are identical”. 

Reviewing Böttcher’s enormously popular exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall (Ann Böttcher: Works 2000 – 2020) in the spring of 2021, Emil Ivedal (Art critic) wrote the following about Böttcher’s series Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün:

The same method is used in the suite Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün (2008), consisting of collages of photographs, postcards and post-it notes that frame the Third Reich's quest to project its racial ideological ideas onto nature and the indomitable spruce as an identity-bearing symbol for the German people. Next to the collage are Böttcher's own cartoon fir trees encapsulated as museum objects in wall cases. The only difference is that Böttcher's hanging spruces no longer rise towards the sky but are bent towards the ground like weeping trees, seemingly weighed down by the ideological burden.

Provenance
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin.
Bukowskis, Stockholm, Sale 646, Contemporary Art & Design, 26 April 2023, lot 380.

Firestorm Foundation.

Exhibitions
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün, 15 March – 26 April 2008.
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, The Netherlands, Meer Licht/More Light, Palaeis A/D Blijmarkt, 2011.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation