German Painter Research Articles

"The Judgment of Paris" by Lucas Cranach the Elder: Nature, Allegory, and Alchemy

AMONG THE GREAT German painters of the sixteenth century Lucas Cranach takes a special, and rather controversial, place. Though his humanist friends at the university of Wittenberg, Christoph Scheurl and Philipp Melanchthon, stated emphatically that he would be surpassed only by Albrecht Durer, and even in spite of the high opinion Diirer himself had for Cranach,' he has been treated with condescension and even scorn by art historians more often than not. Significantly this was done for the very same reasons that incited Direr's and Scheurl's ad-

Lemkes bataljmålningar på Drottningholm och deras förlagor

Summary On the command of King Karl X Gustaf, the Quartermastergeneral Erik Dahlbergh recorded in drawings the campaigns of the Swedish army in Poland and Denmark in 1657–1660. A number of these drawings were engraved in Paris in 1667–1674. Further illustrations remained to be done, and these were executed in Sweden in 1688–1690. Simultaneously the history of Karl X Gustaf was written by the famous historian Samuel Pufendorff, and the engravings were used to illustrate his work, De rebus Carolo Gustavo ... gestis 1696. In the same way Dahlbergh illustrated the war fought against Denmark 1673–1678 by King Karl XI. These drawings were never engraved. In 1683 the German painter Johann Philipp Lemke, a specialist in battle pieces, was called in to translate these graphic works into monumental paintings for the royal palace of Drottningholm. Ten large paintings of the battles of Karl XI were executed during the 1680ies, and another ten followed in the next decade, illustrating the feats of Karl X Gustaf. For the first series Lemke followed Dahlberghs drawings, now in the Royal Library. For four of the paintings in the second series the engravings executed in Paris were used, but the rest of the scenes painted were not engraved until 1688–1690, and for these preparatory drawings were executed at that time. It is argued here that four of these drawings were made largely by Lemke and by Lemke and Dahlbergh in collaboration (Figs. 8–12). The excellence of draughtmanship singles them out from Dahlberghs oeuvre. A basis for comparison of the drawing style of the two artists is readily found in the drawings Lemke made after Dahlbergh in preparation of the series of paintings of Karl XI's battles from 1683 on (Figs. 2–3). Notwithstanding his diligence Dahlbergh was an amateur, who had difficulties with foreshortening and movement of the body. Lemke was in full command of the means of expression, using outline and washed boldly. Recognising Lemke as the author of these drawings involves two consequences. First, it sheds new light on the many preparatory drawings by Lemke, preserved in the National‐museum, and makes it easier to distinguish the development of the compositions (Figs. 14–16). Secondly, it helps to explain the different character of the four paintings. They are free creations by Lemke, (Figs. 17–19) not determined by Dahlberghs wish for topographical exactness, as are the other ones (Figs. 18–19).

The German image

Abstract This important book is not a technical history, nor is it ‘sociological’ in any scientific sense; its main thrust is rather in the realm of ‘the history of ideas’ and ‘the history of taste’, and it is thus intimately concerned with human values and attitudes. In this way, and because human nature transceinds national boundaries with conspicuous ease, Fritz Kempe's work is not ‘merely’ about Germany, but about photography and people in general. Without constraining system and without claims to exhaustive coverage, the book manages to get at the spirit and core of relationships by discussing 24 topics, which range from local history (‘Bremen, Wannover, Kassel’) to episodic accounts (‘On the secret magic of the hruman image’). That is its special charm, and also its lasting testament, because photography is really too complex a field to permit a stereotype presentation, if the finer nuances of the human response are to be given their due. If anything is lacking—but it would be chnrlisll to expect a single volume to cover every base—it is a more extensive discussion of the daguerreotype's influence on German painters.

Frederic Bazille and Early Impressionism

This exhibition is the first one entirely devoted to this artist in the United States. It enlarges upon the scope of past exhibitions at the Art Institute in being more than a retrospective of one artist. Bazille met Renoir, Sisley and Monet in the studio of the Academic painter Gleyre. All artists worked together, sharing studios and models. Together with Bazille's work paintings by these other artists will be shown, as well as paintings by lesser known artists, such as the German painter Otto Scholderer who appears next to Bazille in Fantin-Latour's Atelier des Batignolles. Also included will be painters of the South of France (Bazille was born in Montpellier) such as Eugene Castelnau, a personal friend of Bazille and Paul Guigou. The catalogue will include an essay on Bazille and early Impressionism, and another on Bazille and Edmond Maitre, a dilettante friend of his whose influence on the group of young painters was tremendous. The catalogue will also present for the first time in English the correspondence of Bazille with his parents. All works will be reproduced, fully catalogued and commented on. The exhibition was made possible through the generosity of many private and public collections, including the Musde Fabre, Montpellier, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. It will be shown in Chicago only. A short film on Bazille, realized by Roger Leenhardt, will be shown in connection with the exhibition.

Synaesthesia and the Paintings of Caspar David Friedrich

One of the most important concepts of the German Romantic movement is the doctrine of Synaesthesia, in which the expressive power of all art forms blends together with philosophy in creating the ultimate artistic experience. True German Romantic art is thus never pure; it is latent music, painting, and poetry and is experienced on several levels. The doctrine of Synaesthesia, which received its first formal declaration in the Athenäum of the Schlegel brothers, encouraged the development of the multifaceted genius of a poet-musician-philosopher such as Wackenroder or Wagner and the literary-painterly-musical art of Kleist, Tieck, and Eichendorff. Completing this synaesthetic triad is the North German painter, Caspar David Friedrich. As painter, philosopher, and poet, he is an integral part of this artistic Gesellschaft and his works are the finest example of the doctrine of Synaesthesia in the German Romantic visual arts.

The Schack Gallery in Munich German Painters, 1850–1880

(1974). The Schack Gallery in Munich German Painters, 1850–1880. Art Journal: Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 211-218.

The Schack Gallery in Munich German Painters, 1850-1880

The Schack Gallery in Munich German Painters, 1850-1880

The Nazarenes. A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome

The Nazarenes. A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome

German Abstract Painters

When the war was over and our men slowly wandered home from the prison camps, it was natural that every prediction about the future of German painting should end in uncertainty. The basic intellectual structure of the nation had been demolished. As far as art was concerned, the clearcut consistency that had characterized the development of German painting since the turn of the century had been brutally interrupted and the harmonious interplay with the art of other European countries had been destroyed. The German painter was completely isolated; the masters who might have given new morale to the new painters were no longer alive. Klee had died at Locarno in 1940, Kandinsky at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. The greatest painter of the “Brucke” group had shot himself at Davos in 1938. With the passing of Klee, Kandinsky, and Kirchner, the pillars on which a new art might have been organized were shattered.

A Group of Unknown Drawings by Matthäus Gänther for Some of His Main Works

Drawings of the great South German and Austrian fresco painters of the Baroque have, as a rule, not travelled very far. As those artists were first of all religious painters, and their works adorn churches, abbeys, and monasteries, the contents of their studios, such as sketches and projects went, after their death mostly into the libraries and print collections of the big monasteries. Nowadays, the largest and most comprehensive assemblies are concentrated in the Albertina in Vienna and in the Graphische Sammlung in Munich. These most representative collections were mainly built up from former ecclesiastic property. In spite of the collecting activity of the museums of Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of those drawings still remain in their quiet ecclesiastic hiding places, as art commerce did not search for them so eagerly as for the works of the earlier periods. Collector's taste in Central and Eastern Europe, however, did not neglect them. Many splendid examples can be fo...

Philipp Otto Runge and the Mythology of Landscape

Philipp Otto Runge, with C. D. Friedrich the greatest German painter of the Romantic period, has not yet met with an evaluation equal to his importance in the history of ideas.1 It is true that upon his “rediscovery,” almost a century after his death, he was hailed, because of his treatment of light and color, as a forerunner of the great Impressionists; and his relation to Nature was interpreted as foreshadowing the most significant artistic conception of the nineteenth century: the landscape. Today these statements, originally made through the perspective of late Impressionism, will appear to many as an oversimplification. Runge's cautious, essentially linear style, unlike that of his great English contemporaries, seems to point as little forward to Renoir and Monet as backward to the painterly tradition of the preceding centuries. And while from his earliest youth he had spoken with astounding conviction of his mission to create a new art of landscape (Landschaftskunst), he had, strangely enough, calle...

Notes on an Unpublished Uncial Fragment of the Seventh Century

precedent than on his own personality. Every artistic impulse originates within himself, deriving from an inexhaustible reserve of phenomenal inner strength. Even when employing older traditions, he develops them into an individual style which remains remarkably free from all foreign influences, whether of places or people. DUrer seems to have exercised comparatively little influence on him. Ntirnberg, although a bustling center of artistic enterprise, served him rather as a stimulus than as a teacher. Its lively atmosphere was suitable for creative art, but there is no evidence of his contact with the famous masters of his time, who were fellow-townsmen as well as contemporaries. He prefers to remain himself, rooted in his personality rather than in the soil of his native heath, confident of his strength and his superiority. Despite the eminence of Adam Kraft and the progressive spirit of Peter Vischer and his sons, Veit Stoss, the Ntirnberg sculptor who ventured to work in wood, stone, and possibly even bronze, remains the most dominating personality and the most forceful plastic artist of Franconia. Among German sculptors, he resembles Backofen more than Riemenschneider; among German painters he is less like Dtirer than Grtinewald.1 His form and expression in art, always individual and characteristic rather than typical and classic, are personal and German. Like many another German artist compared to an Italian contemporary, Veit Stoss impresses us as naturalistic rather than idealistic, irrational rather than rational. He prefers, on one word, like so many of his countrymen, to become expressionistic in art rather than to remain purely representative.2

BERLIN

<h3>Racial Physiognomy</h3> Last month, Professor Hellpach, instructor in psychology at the polytechnic in Karlsruhe, and now minister of public instruction in Baden, delivered an address before the Heidelberg Naturhistorischmedizinische Verein on the influence of heredity and environment on physiognomy or facial expression. As distinct from the inherited manifestations and qualities of constitution and race, which are comprised under the term "genotype," Hellpach distinguishes a "phenotype," which is characteristic of the tribe or clan. Marks of the phenotype become stamped on the face at about the fifteenth year of age, and are dependent on the place of residence or the environment. The influence of the genotype breaks its way through and manifests itself also in children born in the new environment of parents of a different stock or even in children who were brought to a new region in their early childhood. Hellpach referred to statues of German painters (using for

III.—Notice of the Life and Works of Lucas D'Heere, Poet and Painter of Ghent, with reference to an anonymous Portrait of a Lady in the possession of the Duke of St. Alban's and to the Portrait of Queen Mary of England in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries

The fact that the Society of Antiquaries possesses one of the most important and the earliest dated of the portraits ascribed to the hand of Lucas D'Heere, the poet-painter of Ghent, may cause the Fellows of the Society to take some interest in the life and works of this artist.Lucas D'Heere is not one of those painters whose life has fallen into oblivion through want of biographers. Carel van Mander, who in 1604 published his precious collection of biographies of Flemish, Dutch, and German painters, was actually a pupil of D'Heere, and included a full notice of his master's life in his series, which, from the intimate connection between the two painters, may fairly be accepted as authoritative. Further his biographies are avowedly based on a similar collection made by Lucas D'Heere himself.