The history of reading is as old as the history of writing, and thus the portrayals of readers in the visual arts to the ancient world and beyond. In European painting, book illumination and sculpture, reading is anchored in the biblical context and directed towards religious texts. In the Netherlands, which since its rise to maritime trading power were increasingly shaped by bourgeois values, emerged in the course of the 17th century, the first images of "private" reading.
This privacy and intimacy constituting reading through the reader separates the reader from the outside world like a mysterious, invisible wall, defining the atmosphere of the images of readers, who have become an important motif in European painting since the eighteenth century. These depictions of "private" reading are the subject of the planned exhibition, with emphasis on the 20th century.
However, the exhibition is not just about reading pictures but also about reading the pictures with works by Cy Twombly, Henri Michaux or Jean Dubuffet. Paul Klee developed the basic structure of many of his paintings as well as the artists mentioned above from writing or writing. He compared the writing and gesture of writing with the process of image creation and image reception, a fundamental and new conception of twentieth-century art.