Overview

Margarethe Geibel: The Goethe House Series
Sep 6, 2025–Dec 14, 2025

“This exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of a portfolio of twenty-four color woodblock prints by Weimar-born German artist Margarethe Geibel (1876–1955). The series reveals Geibel’s inventive adaptation of Japanese printmaking techniques popular in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. It also provides a figurative walk through a cultural treasure—the house and collections of renowned German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who, like Geibel, called Weimar home.

Geibel accomplished the first eighteen prints in the series between 1908 and 1911, and the remaining six in 1916 and 1917, during the First World War. Her multiple returns to certain rooms over the cycle reveal a changing relationship with the house, as well as a shift in her color sensibility and graphic technique from bright colors and bold contrasts to more muted tones and textural carving of the woodblocks.

As the concept of a German nation state developed over the course of the nineteenth century, Goethe’s worldview and writings gave voice to a collective German cultural and linguistic identity as well as an emphasis on education. Thus, for those like Margarethe Geibel, born into the young German nation, Goethe’s house stood not only as a locus of culture and beauty but as a symbol of what it meant to be German. These innovative prints present both Geibel’s vision of its interiors—and her reflection on them—as spaces of memory and meaning.”

— Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art