Düsseldorf, Business, 8 March 2023 By Rose Fedi

High-profile opening

The Hetjens Museum lives and breathes international togetherness.

Azulejos - façade decoration of the Iberian Peninsula with a focus on Portugal. Today's high-profile opening showed that the Hetjens Museum lives and breathes international togetherness. The German-Portuguese friendship was celebrated in the presence of 4 Consuls General. Lidia Nabais, Patron and Consul General of Portugal opened the exhibition in the presence of her counterparts, the Consuls General of Spain, Greece and the Netherlands.

Opening Azulejos, 8 March 2023

German Ceramics Museum director Dr Daniela Antonin with art historian Pauline Guimaraes. ©AM

Düsseldorf, 8 March 2023: The new exhibition of the Hetjens - German Ceramics Museum, directed by Dr Daniela Antonin, features the azulejos, tiled façade decorations and one of Portugal's most important cultural assets. At today's high-profile opening, it became clear once again that the Hetjens is a venue for international get-togethers, a museum where friendships between countries are cultivated. The appreciation of the German-Portuguese friendship therefore took up a lot of space. Mayor Clara Gerlach, who confessed to being enthusiastic about her summer holiday in Portugal, praised the Hetjens as a place where international togetherness is lived. The Portuguese Consul General Lidia Nabais paid tribute to the leading women of the museum on the occasion of today's International Women's Day. Also present were her 4 counterparts, the Consul General of Spain, Don Juan Sunyé Mendía, the Consul General of Greece, Basilis Koinis, and the Consul General of the Netherlands, Peter Schuurman. The Chairman of the Museum Planning Committee and art publisher Dr Alexander Fils gave his talk mainly in Portuguese. The guests were given a detailed insight into the fascinating history of the tiles by art historian Pauline Guimaraes. However, she also noted that only a few azulejos are in circulation and this is a good development as they are protected by laws in 2017 as one of the most important cultural assets and should no longer go abroad.

The exhibition is open from 9 March to 27 August.

Street scene from Portugal ©Unsplash

Azulejos (Source Hetjens)

Azulejos are artistically painted and colourfully glazed wall tiles. They decorate interiors, gardens and in some places even exterior facades.

The first clients were clergy and nobility who had churches, cathedrals and palaces decorated with tiles. The Portuguese King Manuel I (1469-1521) was impressed by the tile decorations he had become acquainted with during his stays in Spain, so that he commissioned extensive orders of various azulejos for the royal summer residence in Sintra. Some of them are still preserved today.

The term azulejo developed from the Arabic Al zulej, meaning small polished stone, and originally referred to the Roman-Byzantine mosaics of the Near East and North Africa. With Islamic expansion and the conquest of large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, the Arab-Moorish dominion of al-Andalus (711-1492) came into being, which shaped the culture and language of the region for almost 800 years. This influence was also evident in architecture, where ceramic tiles with colourful geometric designs were used as wall coverings. The traditional method of manufacturing from individual pieces of mosaic was simplified by henceforth combining the pattern on a single tile.

Spanish trade and manufacturing centres were Seville, Málaga, Toledo and Valencia, from where Spanish-Moorish tiles also reached Portugal from the 15th/16th century.

Inspired by different cultural and aesthetic influences from Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, Portugal developed its own artistic forms of expression over the centuries. For example, the diplomat and patron of the arts Athanasius Raczynski (1788-1874), who was in the service of Prussia, described the azulejos as a characteristic element of architecture and an important component of Portuguese culture in his writing on the arts of Portugal.

By Rose Fedi

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