Principles of Romantic Painting
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Change as a program — this phrase alone
makes it understandable why, in Romantic art, there were
literature, music, painting and drawing, but no Romantic
architecture or sculpture. It was Novalis who, in his Heinrich
von Ofterdingen of 1802, created the erotic myth of the "blue
flower," which soon burgeoned into a myth of longing and
yearning for the faraway: The color blue as a symbol of the
nocturnal, of tender, longing sensations. Painting might be
called the medium of the unlimited; ever since Goethe's treatise
on color, painters became preoccupied with the symbolic
potentials of light and color,
Philipp Otto Runge
(1777—1810) and
Turner foremost.
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Caspar David Friedrich
Monk by the Sea
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Lending color and light
a dominant role enabled Romantic painters to
abandon the rational scheme of perspective in
favor of an indeterminate space, suitable for
conveying universal ideas.
Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840) created the exemplary specimen in
his Monk by the Sea, and Turner, again,
took the principle to an extreme that almost
recalls modern abstraction.
This explains why in many countries, especially
England and Germany, landscape became the
principal motif of Romantic painting. In the
landscape, nature as the arena of higher powers
was to be revealed.
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The infinite expanse of the ocean, the
sublime Alpine realm, the panorama view to the far horizon, but
also "Waldeseinsamkeit", or sylvan solitude — a key term of
German Romanticism coined in 1797 by Ludwig Tieck — could evoke
the divine presence in elemental nature and make the observer
feel it; yet they might equally express human isolation in the
face of the limitless universe. Ultimately the natural
environment was not depicted for its own sake, but as a mirror
of internal mental and emotional processes.
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Carl
Gustav Carus (1789-1869), significant painter and
theoretician, saw the goal of landscape pictures in rendering
states of mind transparent through corresponding moods in
natural life. In this sense,
Runge ranked landscape as the
central subject of the art of the future. Yet some Romantic
landscape artists concentrated on natural history and the
processes of growth and decay. This explains the key role played
by landscape cycles illustrating the times of day or seasons of
the year, symbols of the natural cycle. It also explains the
signs of the historical past so frequently seen in Romantic
landscapes: Gothic cathedrals, monasteries and castles, ruins,
cairns, populated by monks, eremites and knights; and in many
cases the evidence of geological study in the landscapes, which
revealed the natural forces of formation and erosion - factors
that could lead beyond Romanticism to a more objective and
prosaic approach to landscape.
Another characteristic motif of Romantic painting was the
framed view, a landscape seen from an interior through an open
window or door. Carus introduced two of his Nine Missives on
Landscape Painting of 1831 with a suggestive description of an
interior, making reference to Goethe's
Faust (II, Act 2): "Enclosed space suits the artificial
best. The universe can hardly hold the natural rest." The
tension between the landscape expanse outside and the intimacy
of the enclosed room conforms perfectly with Novalis's dictum of
evoking an "aura of the infinite" in the finite.
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Caspar David Friedrich
Woman at a Window |
In
Caspar David Friedrich's
Woman at a Window of 1822, the
dark interior has been interpreted as standing
for the constricted, earthly world which
receives its light only from the window,
symbolizing the supernatural world. The opposite
bank of the river below the window has been said
to represent the Beyond in the religious sense,
while the ships' masts rising into the frame
stand for a Christian recasting of the classical
motif of the underground river across which
Charon ferries dead souls.
Though weighty objections have been made to
this strictly theological interpretation, the
isolation of man from nature in the picture
remains indisputable. The figure seen from the
back, leaning against the window — the artist's
wife — seems imprisoned in the small, sparsely
furnished room and the linear gridwork of the
composition. Only the middle pane of the window
is open, underscoring by contrast the glazed
upper aperture that separates the brilliant
expanse of sky and landscape from the somber
room.
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In Caspar David
Friedrich in his Studio, Georg Friedrich Kersting
(1785-1847) shows the artist leaning on a chair, musing
before his easel. The painted canvas is hidden from view.
What goes through Friedrich's mind in the process of
painting can only be surmised from his absent gaze. The
single window of the bare room is entirely closed, the lower
part shuttered; only at the top is a section of grey-blue
sky visible. "A painter who sees no world within himself
should desist painting," Friedrich once declared. Here a
painter who recreated the world out of inward vision is
shown at work in a darkened room, into which a tiny excerpt
of the exterior world reflects what he struggles to evoke,
the glory of a higher existence as a refuge for the troubled
soul.
In the case of any movement in art which emblazons
continual change on its banner, which sets out to explore
unknown and uncharted territory, a common denominator from
artist to artist and country to country will be difficult to
find. This makes it all the more important to look at
individual nations and painters, with an eye to discerning
further characteristic traits of Romanticism.
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Georg Friedrich Kersting
(b Gustrow, Mecklenburg, 22 Oct 1785; d Meissen, 1
July 1847). German painter. He trained at the academy of art in
Copenhagen from 1805 to 1808, adopting the clarity and
brilliance characteristic of the Danish school. In 1808 he went
to Dresden, where he met and associated with Caspar David
Friedrich and his circle. With Friedrich, Kersting went on a
walking tour through the Zittau Mountains and the Riesengebirge
in July 1810. Kersting was also a close friend of the painter
Gerhard von Kügelgen, at whose house he was a frequent guest.
His first two portraits in individual interiors (a genre he was
to make his own), Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio
(Hamburg, Ksthalle) and Gerhard von Kügelgen in his Studio
(Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle), attracted much attention on their
exhibition at the Dresden Kunstakademie in 1811. Kersting
continued to produce works of this very appealing type, linking
the sitter with his surroundings: they are an epitome of early
Romantic interest in the spirit of the individual and point
beyond the ephemeral, genre-like aspects of the subject to a
symbol of the interaction between man and the space in which he
works or lives. In 1812 Kersting painted The Embroiderer,
The Elegant Reader and Man at a Desk (all Weimar,
Schlossmus). For the last of these, Kersting used the young
painter Louise Seidler as a model. Seidler was instrumental in
enabling Kersting to send several of his works to Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar in 1813. Goethe strongly
recommended that Grand Duke Charles Augustus buy The
Embroiderer, and he also encouraged further sales by
promoting a lottery.
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Georg Friedrich Kersting
Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio
1811
Oil on canvas, 51 x 40 cm
Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Georg Friedrich Kersting
Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio
1812
Oil on canvas, 51 x 40 cm
Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Georg Friedrich Kersting
Man Reading by Lamplight
1814
oil on canvas
Oskar Reinhart Foundation, Winterthur
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Georg Friedrich Kersting
On Outpost Duty
1815
Oil on canvas, 46 x 35 cm
Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Georg Friedrich Kersting
At the Mirror
1827
Oil on canvas, 46 x 35 cm
Kunsthalle, Kiel
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Georg Friedrich Kersting
Am Stickrahmen
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German Painting
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Joseph Anton Koch
Heroic Landscape with Rainbow
1805
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Romantic artists in Germany found little in
eighteenth-century painting that inspired them or could be
adapted to their purposes. In Southern Germany and the
Alpine provinces, the reign of Rococo and its brilliant
final culmination in ecclesiastical art, lasted into the
1770s. In other regions, toward the end of the century a
French-influenced neoclassicism with a certain idyllic mood
and atmosphere began to spread. An example is the work of
Asmus Jacob Carstens (1754-1798), who waived color to
produce compositions reminiscent of
Michelangelo, the themes
of which occasionally had a sentimental tendency. Yet it
would be mistaken to call them Romantic, since there had
always been streams within European neoclassicism that
avoided all academic pedantry and infused the classical
vocabulary with emotion.
For similar reasons it is likewise problematical to
associate the "heroic" or "ideal" landscapes of the Tyrolean
Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) with Romanticism.
Problematical, but not impossible, for as the artist himself
said, in good Romantic manner, "Let the creative soul take
the separate part, the tiniest detail into itself and shape
out of itself the whole, as if at one fell swoop, under a
lightning flash of the idealizing imagination."
In Heroic Landscape with Rainbow, the 1815 version of which
was acquired by the Munich Academy as an outstanding example
of a genre usually scorned by such institutions, Koch showed
that neoclassicism could seamlessly blend into Romanticism.
The picture spirits the viewer into a distant, byegone realm
populated by shepherds and shepherdesses. From the
foreground, the eye is led by clear compositional lines over
copses and lush river valleys to sunny plateaus and rugged
mountains, over whose slopes spread classical and medieval
towns as idyllic symbols of communal life. The rainbow,
symbol of God's grace, links heaven and earth, classical and
Christian forms of existence, into a harmonious, cosmic
unity. Melancholy and sweet, the sense of the past binds
itself to the present, as Friedrich Schiller once wrote. In
contrast,
Koch's Scbmadribach Vails exhibits a sharp-focus
verisimilitude that would bear fruit less for Romantic art
than for the naturalistic streams of the nineteenth century.
The most promising point of departure for the Romantic
painters was eighteenth-century art into which aspects of
the sublime had already entered, especially depictions of
terrifyingly beautiful mountain vastnesses. Such pictures of
a visionary and quite Romantic cast were painted by the
Swiss artist Caspar Wolf (1735-1798), who had worked for a
period with Loutherbourg in Paris.
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Joseph Anton Koch
The Schmadribach Falls
1821
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Caspar Wolf
(b Muri im Aargau, bapt 3 May 1735; d
Heidelberg, 6 Oct 1783).
Swiss painter and draughtsman. His Alpine canvases and studies
are the most important achievements of 18th-century Swiss
landscape painting. Coming from a family of cabinet makers in
the village of Muri, he went to Konstanz in 1749 to study under
Johann Jakob Anton von Lenz (1701–64), the episcopal court
painter. From this period date four figure studies in a
sketchbook (1751). Wolf then worked as an itinerant painter in
South Germany (?1753–9), being recorded in Augsburg, Munich and
Passau. In 1760 he was back in Muri, painting landscapes,
altarpieces and decorations on wallpaper and stoves, notably the
Landscapes with Biblical Stories and Parables, the
Episodes from the History of the Habsburgs, and the
Legend of St Benedict (1762–3) on the wallpaper and panels
of two rooms of the Schloss Horben near Muri. Predominant among
the paintings and drawings of the 1760s were landscapes with
wild rock formations, clearly showing his training in South
German Rococo.
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Caspar Wolf
Felslandschaft, Motiv aus dem Tobel bei Muri
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Caspar Wolf
Felslandschaft, Motiv aus dem Tobel bei Muri
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Caspar Wolf
Hohlenansicht
1779
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Fichte's philosophy, which raised the self-conscious ego to
the measure of all things; Goethe's Wilbelm Meister, a "Bildungsroman"
with its voyages of discovery into the human soul; and the
French Revolution — these three were declared the greatest
tendencies of the age by Friedrich Schlegel in 1798. The
intellectuals of Germany, a land hobbled by particularism
that still bore the pompous title of Holy Roman Empire, a
feudal country without capital or cultural center, without a
politically responsible middle class or industry, initially
saw in the French Revolution of 1789 a chance not only for
political but for spiritual renewal. The emancipated
citizen, they thought, would join ranks with the people of
other nations to form a cosmopolitan society, throwing down
all intellectual and emotional frontiers. Schlegel, again,
stated that it was a revolutionary mission to establish the
Kingdom of God, which would be identical with the beginning
of progressive development and modern history.
Yet disappointment soon set in as the consequences of the
revolution became ever clearer. The subsequent wars of
liberation against Napoleon demanded thinking in terms not
of universal but of national politics. Still, with the early
Romantics the idea of the nation-state remained bound up
with the desire for bourgeois emancipation and for a new,
progressive attitude to life, as when Schleiermacher, in
1807, linked the neo-Protestant movement with the emergence
of the German nation.
The usual distinction made in German Romanticism between a
Protestant northern and a Catholic southern stream is
superfically correct; it is true to say that much of
southern German painting was strongly determined by Catholic
subject matter and aims, and therefore was relatively
conservative in orientation. Still, painters in northern
Germany saw themselves beholding not so much to
Protestantism as a confessional dogma as to a religiosity
that was universal in the sense described above - that is,
humane and cosmopolitan. A revealing example in this regard
is Friedrich's Tetschen
Altarpiece of 1807/08, which after
many alterations of plan was finally installed in the palace
chapel of a Catholic prince, without artist or
liberal-minded buyer seeing any obstacle in the sacred
content of the painting.
Friedrich's mind was not beclouded by mysticism to nearly
the extent that some of his contemporaries and many of his
modern commentators maintain. Certainly he was a Romantic —
but one who kept his eyes open to his environment and era.
Nor was it simply Teutomania that made
Friedrich a
Francophobe. It was the conviction that Napoleon had
betrayed the French Revolution (which admittedly many
Romantics initially idealized) and had humbled Germany. At
this point, such motifs as cliffs, boulders, oak, fir, and
pine trees began to take on a new prominence in Friedrich's
art. These were allusions to things German, if very covert
ones, since French censorship had continually to be reckoned
with. The call to arms ardently followed by his artist and
poet friends Kersting, Theodor Korner (1791-1813),
Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (1777-1843),
Philipp Veit
(1793-1877) and Ferdinand Olivier
(1784-1841), was not for
Friedrich, however, who considered himself too old to fight.
But he did sponsor a portion of the equipment for the
Voluntary Corps formed to oust Napoleon.
Friedrich's example made Dresden one of the key centers of
Romantic art. For Johan Christian Clausen Dahl
(1788-1857), Carus, Kersting,
Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1797—1855) and many others, the landscape of the region was
the prime theme, in which individual mental powers, a
divine, cosmic omnipotence, and the Utopia of a harmonious
future coverged. Most of these artists were initially
receptive to the ideal of a progressive human and political
development, as propagated at the start of the century by
the Jena circle of philosophers and writers.
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Ernst Ferdinand Oehme
Dresden (1797) - Dresden
(1855)
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Ernst Ferdinand Oehme
Kirchenportal
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Ernst Ferdinand Oehme
An Autumn Afternoon near Bilin in Bohemia
1842
Oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig
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Ernst Ferdinand Oehme
Stolpen Castle
1830
Oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig
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It was Philipp Otto Runge , who lived in Hamburg, who
provided the most detailed theoretical underpinning for the
new, Romantic painting, declaring landscape to be its
foremost mission. Landscape, Runge said in effect, was not
simply the visual compilation of a natural scenery, but
revelation through sensation or sentience. By the same
token, even a human face or a scene with figures could
become a "sentient landscape."
This perhaps explains why he considered the pure colors to
be symbols of a limitless, divine illumination of the
universe, which unfurled itself between the poles of light
and darkness. Runge developed visual allegories whose
pantheism, the belief that God was inherent in every element
of the self-existing universe, was most clearly expressed in
his cycle of Four Seasons, conceived in 1802/03. The planned
cycle united Christian and classical mythological motifs,
plants and landscape in ornamental compositions intended as
metaphors for human existence. For obvious reasons,
Runge 's
cerebral and frequently mystical art would not find
successors to nearly the same extent as did Friedrich's more
cogent symbolism.
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The Nazarenes
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The Nazarenes, the Catholic branch of the German Romantic
Movement, envisioned a national art based on medieval
Christian traditions. For the generally sentimental
treatment of their nostalgic and politically conservative
themes, they preferred, unlike their northern German
colleagues, the linearly contoured, closed form. The story
of the Nazarenes began in 1809, when a few students in
Vienna, disaffected with the neoclassicism taught at the
academy, formed an "order," the first artists' group in the
Romantic era to be inspired by the cult of friendship. They
called themselves the St. Luke's Brotherhood, after the
Evangelist and patron saint of painters. Conditions for
membership were a rejection of academic norms and an
adherence to certain ethical and religious principles. From
Vienna, the group moved in 1810 to Rome, where they settled
in the secularized monastery S. Isidoro. The founding
members, who included Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869)
and Franz Pforr (1788-1812), were joined over the following
years by others, such as Peter von Cornelius (1783-1867),
Wilhelm von Schadow (1788-1862),
Johann and Philipp Veit,
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872),
Johann Anton Ramboux (1790 - 1866),
Joseph Ritter von Fuhrich (1800 -
1876), and Ferdinand Friedrich Olivier (1791 —1859). Due
to their long hair parted in the middle, the Romans mocked
them as "Nazarenes."
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Johann Ramboux
Adam and Eve after Expulsion from Eden
1818
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Their appearance and dress amounted to a programmatic
statement, for it was not classical antiquity but the "holy"
Middle Ages they sought in Rome. The contemporaries of
Albrecht Durer (1471 —1528) and the Italian painters before
Raphael, especially
Fra Angelico (c. 1387-1455) and
Perugino
(c. 1445 —1523), became the models for the Nazarenes'
attempt to revitalize painting by infusing it with profound
sacred feeling and a Catholicism accessible to the people.
This religious emotion was accompanied by a "neo-German"
patriotism supposedly rooted in the people. Thus until about
1830 the Nazarenes embodied a form of Romanticism that, its
eyes turned back to the Utopian ideal of the medieval caste
society, fought the republican ideas introduced by the
Enlightenment and French Revolution. Their subjects,
biblical, symbolic, or taken from ancient German history and
legends, were treated in a naive, popular, gracefully
linear, narrative style.
The Nazarenes prime aim was to exalt mural painting in this
style to a new, grand and national art. They were able to
put it into practice to only a modest extent, in projects
such as the frescoes for the Palazzo Zuccaro, residence of
the Prussian Consul General, Bartholdy, in Rome (1816—1817),
and thereafter frescoes in the Casino Massimo. Cornelius was
the only member of the group to work on a monumental scale,
from 1818 in Munich and then in Berlin.
Still, in pursuit of their ideal of a revitalized religious
mural painting, for a few decades the Nazarenes received
greater international attention than any other movement in
German Romantic art. Their significance for cultural history
lies not least in their contribution to a rediscovery of
German medieval and early Renaissance painting, which, for
example, was given a prominent place in the museum by
Philipp Veit, director of the Stàdelsches Kunstinstitut in
Frankfurt from 1830.
Apart from the two key movements mentioned, there were many
other German artists who pursued Romantic or partially
Romantic aims on their own. The two most significant were
Karl Blechen (1798-1840) and
Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann
(1797—1840). Blechen, after an early influence from
Friedrich, gradually developed a more realistic and daring plein air approach to landscape.
Rottmann's idealistic
landscapes developed from Romantic beginnings into a
monumental picturesqueness, a dramatic, painterly approach
that ultimately eludes stylistic classification.
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Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann
(b Handschuhsheim, nr Heidelberg, 11 Jan 1797; d
Munich, 7 July 1850). German painter. He was taught by his
father the university drawing master Friedrich Rottmann
(1768–1816); among his fellow students were Carl Philipp Fohr
and Ernst Fries. In 1815 Rottmann painted a large watercolour,
Heidelberg Castle at Sunset (Heidelberg, Kurpfälz. Mus.).
The idealistic forms and romantic lighting are derived from the
Scottish painter George Augustus Wallis (1770–1847) who stayed
in Heidelberg from 1812 to 1816 on his return from Rome where he
had been friendly with Joseph Anton Koch. Rottmann’s first
picture in oils was derived from two famous paintings in the
collection of the Boisserée family, the Pearl of Brabant
by Dieric Bouts the elder or the younger and the Seven Joys
of the Virgin by Hans Memling (now both Munich, Alte Pin.).
Such a synthesis of two different sets of images was to typify
much of Rottmann’s later work. At around the same time Rottmann
painted his idealized view of Eltz Fortress. However, his
most beautiful early work in oils is Heidelberg Castle at
Sunset with Crescent Moon (c. 1820; Heidelberg,
Kurpfälz. Mus.). This work already contains many individual
motifs that are important in interpreting the content of
Rottmann’s later work.
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Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann
View of the Eibsee
1825
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Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann
Taormina with Mt. Etna
1829
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Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann
Sicyon with Corinth
1838
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Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann
Die Insel Delos
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Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann
Inntal bei Neubeuern
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After the fall of Napoleon, Metternich marshalled the
forces of restoration at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and
the "Carlsbad Edicts" led to a "persecution of demagogues,"
that
is, of university staff and journalists suspected of
fomenting revolution. The two great German powers — the
Austrian empire and the Prussian monarchy — maintained the
old feudal and clerical prerogatives, as the congeries of
small and miniscule states cultivated a mind set of
submissive parochialism. Not until the German Uprising of
March 1848 -the same year as Marx and Engels published their
Communist Manifesto - would the parliamentary idea enjoy a
brief heyday.
However, the preceding "Vormarz" period had seen the defeat
of the great national and democratic tendencies, as the
bourgeoisie ensconced itself in submissive humility and
forsook the public sphere for the private. In 1848, Victor
von Scheffel (1826-1886) published two poems in the Munich
satirical magazine Fliegende Blatter whose titles translate
as "Biedermann's Cozy Evenings" and "Bummelmaier's Lament."
A few years later some other author telescoped these into "Biedermaier,"
a pseudonym under which he launched a vitriolic attack upon
the petty bourgeois complacency of the pre-1848 period. This
philistine "new inwardness" also suffused the painting of
the time, which can be characterized not so much in terms of
a definite style as in terms of its underlying attitude. It
was humble and unambitious, expressing itself in
small-format compositions for sitting rooms, featuring
tightly framed portrayals of local landscapes or towns with
figurative staffage, or in individual and group portraits
infused with reserved if somewhat prosaic dignity. It was in
such work that Biedermeier painters gave their best.
Romanticism blended seamlessly into Biedermeier. This is
just as true of the genre scenes in constricted interiors
painted by Kersting as it is of the landscapes and
fairy-tale subjects done by Adrian Ludwig Richter
(1803—1884) and Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871). In paintings
that have lost none of their general appeal even today,
Richter transformed the early Romantic, cosmically evocative
landscape of the soul into the "garden arbour idyll," a
genre named after the then popular household journal, Die
Gartenlaube. In Richter's pictures, nature enfolds people
like a charming ornament, a domesticated nature in which
they feel just as at home as within their own four walls.
Peace and quiet is the prime civil right; and where better
to find it than out of doors, though not so far out of doors
that one loses sight of home. Too much strangeness or
unfamiliarity would have disturbed one's recuperation after
a long day at the mills. Two of Richter's print sequences
were indicatively titled Beschaulkhes und Erbauliches and
Furs Haus, or Things Tranquil and Edifying and For the Home.
Even greater popularity was attained by
Schwind, be it
through his frescoes in the Munich Residence (begun 1832)
and a series of watercolor designs for Hohenschwangau
Castle, for the Wartburg in Thuringia (begun 1853) or for
the Vienna Opera House (begun 1866), or be it through his
fairy-tale cycles and paintings such as Rubezahl of 1851
—1859. The most popular and beloved Biedermeier artist of
all, however, was Carl Spitzweg (1808-1859), whose whimsical
visual anecdotes, for all their idyllic character, tacitly
caricatured the narrow-mindedness of his fellow citizens.
His humorously ironic themes should not blind us to the
free, well-nigh impressionist paint handling that came to
the fore especially in Spitzweg's late period.
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The Romantic vision of a continual progress from the finite
to the infinité entailed a rejection of every
self-contained, classical view of the world, in favor of
both formally and substantially open compositions. Many of
the artists' contemporaries dismissed this openness as being
tantamount to mere indulgence in mysticism. A number of
Romantic artists in fact became tragic outsiders. The
failure of their Utopian goals plunged them into melancholy,
into a cult of friendship with a handful of kindred spirits,
into a retreat to solitude in nature. At such existential
extremes, these attitudes remained limited to the "pure"
Romanticism of the first two or three decades of the
century. Still, Romantic traits continued to suffuse a large
part of German painting throughout the nineteenth century,
being present in the Biedermeier, but above all in the more
naturalistic landscape tendencies to follow.
The final third of the century, however, witnessed a true
burgeoning of the Romantic attitude. Examples are the
paintings of Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901), shot through with
melancholy, a mood of death, and mythological symbolism, as
well as and especially the artistic program of the Bavarian
"fairy-tale king," Ludwig II. In the spirit of Richard
Wagner's musical dramas, Ludwig began in 1868 to have his
neoromantic Neuschwanstein Castle decorated with scenes from
Tristan and Isolde, Lohengrin, Tannhauser, and Parsifal.
Though the Romantic attitude does not fully explain Ludwig's
palaces, it does explain his immersion in a built dreamworld,
as well as his wish that it be demolished after his death.
But there can be no doubt that all this was a far cry from
early German Romanticism around 1800 and its political and
prophetic aspects. Now Romanticism merely served as a means
of escape from a disenchanted reality, and into the magic
realm of distant times and climes, an escape in which the
nouveau riche bourgeoisie increasingly began to participate
from 1850 onwards. Sitting rooms were plunged in dimness by
pseudo-oriental curtains that kept banality at bay;
knick-knacks and travel souvenirs embodied middle-class
visions of escape and meaning, or reminiscences of a
medieval era of leaded-glass and knight's manors. Home was a
place for reverie, while real life took place outside, in
the counting-houses and mills, the barracks and government
offices.
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Arnold Bocklin
The Island of the Dead
1883
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see collections:
Karl Blechen
Moritz von Schwind
Carl Spitzweg
Franz
Ludwig Catel
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