From London to Venice
Whistler & Masuyama
April 26 to July 5, 2026
Kunstforum Ingelheim – Altes Rathaus
After more than 25 years, the innovative and fascinating work of the American James McNeill Whistler is being presented again for the first time. Famous in the rest of the world, Whistler is to be rediscovered here.
James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) revolutionized artistic printmaking with etchings and lithographs in the second half of the 19th century.
The exhibition focuses on Whistler’s etchings and lithographs, which depict views of London and Venice. Portraits of people from his personal circle form a third thematic area, showcasing the sensitive side of the artist, who was considered eccentric. The diverse range of motifs on display reveals his mastery of unusual techniques.
Whistler’s life was marked by numerous travels, which constantly offered him new motifs and were captured directly on site in graphic works. After moving from the East Coast of the USA to Paris at the age of 21, he settled in London in 1859. Through his art, he explored the city on the Thames and created numerous prints until the end of the 1890s, which depict then-unusual views of the river, its banks and bridges, ships and harbor scenes, as well as people in their everyday lives.
Fond of travel until a year before his death in 1903, Whistler repeatedly spent longer periods in various European cities and was consequently a well-connected artist. For example, he lived and worked in Venice for over a year in 1879/80. There, he created etchings of the waterside of magnificent palaces and typical Venetian bridges on the one hand, but above all, motifs with passages, courtyards, or workshops beyond the tourist attractions.
At the same time, new photographic works by the Japanese artist Hiroyuki Masuyama are being shown. His works are montages in which today and yesterday are superimposed and fitted together.
Hiroyuki Masuyama (*1968) bridges the gap to the present. The Japanese artist traveled in Whistler’s footsteps to London and Venice.
There he found the places where Whistler created his etchings and took photographs of the current situations: contemporary buildings, vehicles, ships, or people in modern clothing. In the newly created works, Masuyama has superimposed the current views of these places over Whistler’s historical prints. They reveal how significantly the Thames embankment, for example, has developed over the past 150 years, and how minor the changes in the Italian lagoon city have been in comparison. As in earlier works, Masuyama once again visualizes his main theme here, which has run through his artistic work since 1997: the connection of space, time, and change.
For a deeper understanding of Masuyama’s art, a group of older works in the basement forms the fourth part of the exhibition: with extremely impressive, partly walk-in installations, large-format lightboxes, or delicate paper works. They are united by the idea that every space – whether small like a patch of grass or vast like the universe – continuously changes with the passage of time, albeit with varying intensity.
The works of both artists are an invitation to a “journey” in which past and present repeatedly touch, blend, complement, and combine to form significant historical documents.
Like other Impressionist artists, Whistler also collected Japanese woodcuts. His intensive engagement with them is evident in the composition of his own works. Selected examples by renowned Japanese woodcut artists such as Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, or Kitagawa Utamaro therefore flank some of his prints.
For art-historical contextualization, Whistler’s works are also juxtaposed with selected prints by some British, French, and American contemporaries: The sheets by Seymour Haden, Frank Short, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Marcellin Desboutin, or Joseph Pennell make the mutual stylistic influences comprehensible.
The exhibition comprises a total of approximately 125 exhibits.
A thematically coordinated, varied accompanying program rounds off the exhibition: popular and new guided tour formats, lectures by experts, workshops on etching techniques, the “Art Day & Night,” and more.
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