"The other side" The phenomenon of multiple talents in the arts

Description

Edited by Hermann Mildenberger, Annette Seemann, Stephan Dahme.
Commissioned by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Frankfurt am Main 2021

- "The Klassik Stiftung Weimar has now shed light on the phenomenon of multiple talents in the arts in the wonderful volume The Other Side. It is not just a coffee-table book of the finest quality, but a grab bag of surprises full of serious and amusing erudition." -
Christine Brinck, Zeit

- "In all, this splendid book offers more than 50 essays, mainly on artists from the late 18th to the early 20th century." -
Wolfgang Hirsch, Thüringer Allgemeine

This volume of essays is the first to examine the phenomenon of multiple artistic talents in Europe from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 20th century on this scale. Based on the ideal of the natural unity of several talents in the "uomo universale" of the Renaissance, multiple talents became increasingly important again in the course of the Enlightenment and with the beginning of modernity.

More than 30 authors from a wide range of academic disciplines examine this development using selected examples. Poets who painted and painters who composed poetry, but also writers and painters who composed, are each presented with the "other side" of their work and the diverse interaction of their talents. A European cosmos opens up, ranging from Johann Wolfgang Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Victor Hugo to John Ruskin, Wilhelm Busch, August Strindberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Klee and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The opulently illustrated volume is rounded off with an outlook on the further development of the phenomenon in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in view of new artistic concepts that transcend the classical boundaries of the genre.