Spirit of an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings from the Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Rating:
Summary: All They Ever Painted
Review: In 2001, the National Gallery of London and the National Gallery of Art in DC exhibited about 70 of the most important 19th-century paintings from the Nationalgalerie of Berlin, Germany. The SPIRIT OF AN AGE catalogue grouped them, as Romantic landscapes; Nazarenes and late Romantics; Color, light and air; Biedermeier realism; the Kaiserzeit; Escaping to Italy; Pure painting; Embracing the French avant-garde; and Secession.

Caspar David Friedrich was at the core of German and European landscape traditions. His first landscape, The cross in the mountains or Tetschen altarpiece, was of a mountain, on top of which the sun's rays shone on a crucifix, above the trees.

In 1810, Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr went to the Franciscan monastery of Sant'Isidoro on Monte Pincio, Italy. There, they and 3 others were known as Nazarenes, for their Biblical-style clothes and devoutly communal lifestyle. They favored friendship pictures and reciprocal portraits, such as Overbeck's The painter Franz Pforr.

Color, light and air were what Carl Blechen's 3 fishermen on the Gulf of Naples was about. The trio became dreamy white notes in a red, white and blue fanfare. The brilliant blue sky gave airy space and light undimmed by clouds to the darker blue sea.

Gottlieb Biedermeier was a minor literary character standing for middle-class values. So Biedermeier art meant keeping things simple, as in Johann Erdmann Hummel's grinding and installing of a great granite bowl.

With the Kaiserzeit, the German present became an obsession. Huge reparation payments from victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war went into rapid industrialization, as in Adolph Menzel's The iron-rolling mill.

Escaping to Italy was what young German artists did so well. One of these German Romans was Anselm Feuerbach. He painted characters from antiquity, as his Medea, in a beautiful Italian seascape. He also painted Italian common people, such as his mistress Nanna Risi, as Iphigenia and Madonna.

Gustave Courbet's visit to Munich in 1869 brought on Pure painting. Young painters tried his directly applied painting out on domestic portraits, humble still-lifes and simple local landscapes. So without preliminary drawing and with broad, short brushstrokes, Leibl brought the Burgomaster Klein's face to life just by the play of light over it. A few sure brushstrokes formed the hands just by fine shades of color.

By century end, artists ran secession movements, for progressive art, such as Fritz von Uhde's Little heathland princess. He painted, close-up and full-length, a country girl about 6 years old. Holding her hands behind her back and her upper body straight, she seemed to stare back at the viewer. What a way that would have been to end the exhibition!