"Mary - A Collage" Artist's Lecture on the New Altar of Mary by Norbert Kottmann

We Saale-Unstrut Association invites to a lecture on the new altar of Mary in the west choir of Naumburg Cathedral from an art-historical-comparative perspective

"The west choir of Naumburg Cathedral, with its unique donor figures, is one of the most important places in Germany in terms of art history. To change something about this sensitive spatial situation requires good content arguments and outstanding art. With the reconstruction of the Marian altar by Lukas Cranach and the new version of the destroyed panels by the painter Michael Triegel, this attempt was made.

But is it still possible in the year 2022 to paint an altarpiece with a depiction of Mary in a credible way? And in Protestant and increasingly atheistic (East) Germany?
Is it not a helpless anachronism to invoke an outdated iconography instead of using the critical visual language of "modernity"? Doesn't the installation of the altar considerably disturb the visibility and the visual relations of the famous donor figures?

The illustrated lecture will contribute to the discussion. The lecture will provide conceptual and content-related arguments for the altar to remain at its current location from an art-historical and contemporary perspective. In doing so, he will span the arc from the early medieval Marian altars to the Nazarenes in Rome, to the conversion of the Dadaist Hugo Ball around 1920, to the commission for Christian Schad in 1943-45 to copy the Stuppach Madonna by Mathias Grunewald in Aschaffenburg, to the "Madonna of Lourdes," a work by Katharina Fritsch in public space, at the 1987 Sculpture Projects in Münster, to the abstract glass windows of Gerhard Richter at the Cologne Cathedral and the new Old Town of Frankfurt and the related phenomena of reconstruction and "voting with one's feet", to the special love of the figurative, of the human image in East German contemporary art, and finally to the actual purpose of the new altar."
Norbert Kottmann

Norbert Kottmann, born 1961, grew up on a farm in the rural Catholic Westmünsterland, 1983-88, studied art and design in Aachen, freelance artist in Düsseldorf and Berlin, several prizes and scholarships, including Karl Schmitt Rottluff scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation, exhibitions including in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, last 2021 in the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, now art teacher at Max Planck High School in Groß-Umstadt near Frankfurt a.M., also active there as a city guide, -several publications and lectures on art history, regional history /focuses: Architectural history, Renaissance, German late Gothic and contemporary art.
2020 - Acquisition of a residential house + studio building in Naumburg/S.