Dr. Kathrin Kinseher: "What paint should we use?"

Controversy about painting materials and research in Munich. A contribution to the life and works of Adolf Wilhelm Keim.

In the 19th century painting was plunged into a dramatic crisis because the promising and widely-used paints from tubes and the new industrial pigments soon turned out to be unreliable as far as colour-permanence and durability were concerned.

As a result, in easel-painting as well as in wall-painting, permanent damage quickly occured and confronted artists with insoluble problems.

At the Munich Art Academy a consultation service was promptly instituted to provide painters with technical advice, and the Bavarian capital became the centre of a widely-recognized controversy about painting materials among scientists, artists and painting-technologists – the so-called Munich Farben-Streit.

Using the example of the chemist and entrepreneur Adolf Wilhelm Keim, a passionate spokesman in this dispute, this book illuminates an exciting chapter in the history of materials in modern art, which subsequently led to the founding of the Doerner Institut.