Gerhard Rühm
Für Lidice

Gerhard Rühm’s contribution to the exhibition Hommage à Lidice 1967 at Galerie René Block is a small montage work. Like the artist’s name in the Schablone für Zeitungsleser (Template for newspaper readers) (EB12), an exclamation mark 11 cm high and 1 cm wide was punched out of black cardboard for this work. The artist glued the two die-cut parts next to the openings on the cardboard. A picture taken from a newspaper is attached behind the openings. This created three picture planes. Rühm chose a section of a documentary photograph from the Second World War as the motif. In 1967, it was not possible to photograph this subtle work in such a way that the both poetic and accusatory character of the montage could be reproduced in the catalog print. It was therefore decided to multiply the work and include it in each catalog as an original work. The various newspaper images resulted in 400 unique copies. Apart from a few copies, they are unsigned.
The exhibition Hommage à Lidice commemorated the village of Lidice near Prague, which was destroyed by Wehrmacht soldiers in 1942 in revenge for the assassination of Heydrich, the deputy Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia. The male villagers were killed, the women and children deported. The exhibition was to be donated in its entirety to a museum planned at the time in Lidice. In addition to Gerhard Rühm, the artists H.P. Alvermann, Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, HJ Dietrich, Gotthard Graubner, KH Hödicke, Bernhard Höke, Jörg Immendorff, Bernd Koberling, Konrad Lueg, CO Paeffgen, Palermo, Sigmar Polke, Chris Reinecke, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Günther Uecker, Wolf Vostell, Stephan Wewerka and Lambert M. Wintersberger took part in this action of solidarity 25 years after the massacre.
Thirty years later, René Block repeated the call to commemorate the victims of this crime for the next generation of artists. In 1997, ten female and 21 male artists took part in the project Pro Lidice, so that a total of 52 works could be handed over as the basis for a museum.
In 2015, 23 female and 21 male artists from 23 countries took part in the third call by René Block under the title Remember Lidice.
A museum was set up in Lidice for the works of a total of 96 artists.
Text: Katrin Seemann