German Painting Research Articles

German Art of the 19th Century through the Lens of The Greek Literary Magazine Kleiō (Clio): Academic Formalism Versus Modernism

We examine the work of 19th-century German painters as presented in the Greek-language magazine Kleiō published in Germany in the late 19th century. Through an extensive catalogue of paintings, the article highlights the themes that preoccupied German painters during this period. It places particular emphasis on their approach, aesthetic preferences, the decisive role played by the Academies of Fine Arts, and their attitudes towards the modern movements developing in France during the 19th century. It explores the reasons for which Kleiō magazine promoted academic German painting to its Greek readership. It reports the particularly close relations between Greece and Germany during this period and the fact that many Greek painters completed their studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Since for most of the 19th century, Germany was deeply influenced by the achievements of ancient Greek art, many German painters opposed modernism, instead upholding what they perceived to be the values and ideals of classical antiquity integrating them into German art

Otto Fischer (22 Mai 1886 — 9 April 1948) Veröffentlichungen zur asiatischen Kunst

Otto Fischer was born into a merchant family in Reutlingen on May 22, 1886. From 1904 he studied law, then art history in Tbingen, Munich, Vienna and Berlin and received his doctorate in 1907 with the dissertation Altdeutsche Malerei in Salzburg under Heinrich Wlfflin in Berlin. After study trips to Italy and France, he lived in Munich from 1909 to 1913 as a private scholar and was in close contact with the young artists of the Neue Knstler-Vereinigung Mnchen, which developed into the Blaue Reiter. In 1913, he habilitated in Gttingen with the thesis Die chinesische Malerei, which was published in a revised form as Die Chinesische Landschaftsmalerei. After serving in the war as a volunteer in 19151918, he was Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Stuttgart (now the Staatsgalerie) in 19211927, where he distinguished himself with exhibitions such as Neue Deutsche Kunst (1924) and Schwbische Malerei des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1925). In 19251926, he undertook a research trip to China, Japan, Java and Bali, which he described in two books. In 19271938, he was Director of the Kunstmuseum Basel and taught as a Professor Extraordinary at the university. In 1938, he retired to Ascona as a private scholar. He died in Basel on 4 April 1948. Fischers main areas of work and research were Old German painting and East Asian artthe fields to which, as can be seen already from his two dissertations, he applied himself in equal measure. His publications on German art are easily accessible, whereas his publications on the art of China, Japan and Southeast Asia reached only a comparatively small circle. In addition to his books on Chinese painting and sculpture, his work on Chinese art theory and Chinese stone rubbings as well as Chinese graphic art (color prints) deserve special mention. Fischers many-sided, sometimes controversial activities have been acknowledged several times in recent years (cf. literature on Fischer); the aim of this small contribution is to make Fischers publications on East Asian art known in their entirety. The material has been recorded after the scholars autopsy and is partly annotated. Perhaps the compilation will stimulate an art historian to appreciate Fischers contributions to East Asian art history in terms of content.

«New Objectivity. German painting after expressionism»

«New Objectivity. German painting after expressionism»

Idyllic story in the creation of modern nations narratives, on the example of German, Jewish and Ukrainian painting

The purpose of the article is to identify the features of idyllic artistic plots related to German, Jewish and Ukrainian national narrative. Try to evaluate their motivating mechanism. The methodology is the use of ideological and plot analysis, methods of comparison and generalization. The scientific novelty is to expand the understanding of the plot content of some works of German, Jewish and Ukrainian art, in the context of their nation - creative motivation. Conclusions. The period of creation of modern nations became a great challenge for art. An important motivating role belongs to the creation of the image of the "ideal being", the mandate to which the new community promised. Thus, the nation-creative plot is, in one way or another, connected with sacralization sentiments. German painting in the Romantic era operated with paintings of idyll, which, however, contains memories of the Middle Ages as an era of even greater perfection. Thus arose the motivating potential of "return" to the epic of the past. Jewish art culture is characterized by a tradition of associating the ideal being with the holy city of Jerusalem, a "return" to which also has motivating potential. In Ukrainian art, there are also plots of natural idyll, but the situation of "ideal existence" is connected with the inner state of man - the warrior "Cossack Mamaу", who gains personal freedom for creativity. As a result of the study, it was found that idyllic plots associated with the creation of modern national narratives in German, Jewish and Ukrainian painting have a number of common and distinctive features. Common features include the presence of sacred content and solidarity of the surrounding community. Distinctive features are different vector of orientation of the motivating plot. In art related to the German narrative of ideal nation existence, vector can be described as epoch-centric, with the Jewish narrative as city-centric, and with Ukrainian as anthropocentric.

Изображение распятия в немецкой живописи и графике 1920–1940-х годов

Изображение распятия в немецкой живописи и графике 1920–1940-х годов

‘Painting like nature’: Chance and the Landscape in Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Photographs

This essay demonstrates that Gerhard Richter's overpainted photographs make a critical intervention within the context of a return to figuration and the landscape genre in West German painting of the 1980s. It situates the overpainted photographs within an alternative understanding of chance as natural process, and argues that, by reappropriating a former tradition of randomness at a time when Germany's past was resurfacing in political and cultural discourses, Richter redefines the landscape against various ideological recuperations of the genre, from the Third Reich to neo-expressionism.

The German Painting Circles of the Early 20th Century and Anti-Semitic Views of Emil Nolde

The German Painting Circles of the Early 20th Century and Anti-Semitic Views of Emil Nolde

1963. Quelle mémoire pour l’art allemand ?

The official celebration of the Traité de l’Elysée (22 January 1963) may be considered as an occasion to point out the elusive relationship between art and politics, particularly from the german art point of view with the examples of some artists of great reputation nowadays, Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Jorg Immendorff, A.R. Penck, Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Blinky Palermo. The topic of memory underlines their differences when occurs the moment of an independent way for german painting and sculpture in the late RFA.

From Economic Equality to “Mommy Politics”. Women Artists and the Challenges of Gender in East German Painting

This article looks at the impact that East Germany 's gender policies had on the visual arts and especially women painters across four decades. The first two sections focus on women 's participation in the national art exhibitions in Dresden during the Ulbricht and Honecker years, looking at how their artwork responded to official gender policies, and at the emergence of three women – Heidrun Hegewald, Gudrun Brune, and Doris Ziegler – as nationally prominent painters. The third section focuses on the paintings and agitations of Angela Hampel in the 1980s as an example of a new phase in the pursuit of gender equality in East Germany, one abruptly cut short by the unification process. Ultimately this article argues that East Germany 's gender policies, despite not having achieved the stated goal of true equality, had a positive impact on women artists, and especially painters, in East Germany, increasing the number of women included in major exhibitions, encouraging greater complexity in their work, and ultimately fostering a socialist-feminist critique of lingering patriarchal biases.

Exhibiting Postwar German Art in the 1950s: The Politics of Exclusion

Abstract Exhibitions mounted during the Cold War frequently advanced ideological messages, yet the cultural initiatives of the divided Germany have received little attention. The first major postwar surveys of German modernism held in English-speaking countries – A Hundred Years of German Painting at London’s Tate Gallery (1956) and German Art of the Twentieth Century at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1957) – offered West German curators opportunities to convey important cultural and political messages to foreign audiences. Both exhibitions concentrated on Expressionism, but also included a sampling of postwar abstraction from West Germany. Politically engaged examples of German modernism, however, were almost entirely excluded. Positioning these exhibitions within the context of West Germany’s postwar cultural reconstruction, this article considers the curatorial motivations for these artistic choices and examines the exhibitions’ critical reception. Basing this study on documents from both museums’ archives, I contend that these exhibitions, which were sponsored by the West German government, functioned as mediums for cultural diplomacy.

Real or Ideal - A Study on the ‘Reality’ in German Painting in the 1430’s

15세기 아방가르드 미술은 토스카나와 플랑드르란 두 지역을 중심으로 진행되었다. 이 시기의 미술을 지난 세기의 사조인 국제고딕양식과 비교해보면 변화의 흐름을 확연히 깨달을 수 있다. 소위 “아름다운 스타일”로 일컬어지는 국제고딕양식과 달리 15세기 전반기의 미술은 사실주의를 특징으로 한다.BR 이 글은 1430년대 독일 남서부에서 활동한 세 작가의 주요 작품을 분석하고 있다. 세 작가는 각기 고유한 방식으로 지난 세기의 중세적 전통을 극복하고 있다. 파노프스키에 의해 ‘아르스 노바’로 명명되는 15세기의 사실주의가 이 지역에서 태동한 것은 결코 우연이라 할 수 없다. 당시 이곳은 문화적, 종교적, 상업적 교류가 활발했던 곳으로 마치 용광로와 같은 역할을 담당했다.BR 세 화가의 작품은 사실성의 추구란 점에서 공통분모를 갖는다. 루카스 모저가 그린 티펜브론의 막달라 마리아 제단화에서 인간과 자연은 더 이상 상징이 아닌 존재하는 대상으로 다가온다. 모저의 화면에서 공간은 고딕식 첨두아치의 프레임에도 불구하고 일목요연한 풍경으로 묘사된다. 그림 속 공간이 실제 공간과 소통할 때 관람자는 그림이 묘사하는 사건에 더욱 몰입할 수 있게 된다. 한스 물처가 시도하는 관람자와의 소통은 개성적인 인물군을 통해서다. 물처의 인물은 대체로 투박하고 험상궂다. 물처의 거친 인물들은 고딕적 우아함과는 거리가 멀어 선들은 서로 부닥치거나 꺾이기 십상이다. 파렴치한 인물들은 알지 못한 채 예수를 죽음으로 내몬 시대적 무지를 표현한다. 때문에 물처가 창조한 인물의 스타일은 역사적 사실주의에 해당된다. 슈바벤 출신으로 바젤에서 활동한 화가 콘라트 비츠의 〈구원사 제단화〉는 1430년대 작품으로는 매우 혁신적이다. 무엇보다 비츠는 인물의 존재감표현을 위해 그림자를 즐겨 구사하는데, 이로 인해 인물들은 입체감은 물론 단순하게 표현된 공간 속에서 존재감을 부여받는다.BR 북유럽르네상스의 특징이 되는 사실주의가 태동하게 된 배경으로 여러 가지 시대적 정황이 설명되었다. 현실에 대한 새로운 관심은 사상사적으로 당시 대학에서 꽃을 피운 유명론의 영향을 간과할 수 없다. 하지만 그보다는 ‘사실주의의 발견자’로서 당시 성행했던 종교적 경건운동인 ‘데보티오 모데르나’를 들 수 있다. 새로운 헌신운동으로 해석되는 ‘데보티오 모데르나’는 궁극적으로 예수를 본받기 위하여 십자가상과 같은 극적인 주제를 강조하는데, 이러한 실제를 방불케 하는 묘사를 통해 신자들은 종교적 사건을 현실 속 사건이듯 보다 효과적으로 경험하게 된다.

German Painting in the Cold War

This essay was first published as “Figures of Memory in the Course of Time” in the exhibition catalog edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures (New York: Abrams in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA], 2009), 224–39. It is reprinted here with the permission of LACMA. The artworks mentioned in the essay are easily accessible in the catalog.

War and representation: humanism in German painting, 19457

The broadly held perception that Germany's 1950s economic regeneration was a catalyst for its cultural recovery has been reinforced unduly within a historiography emphasizing art's re-emergence after 1945 through the achievements of artists in the West at the expense of their eastern counterparts, whose contributions were seen as devalued by being politically compromised. Such narratives overshadow the achievements of German painters who tried to discover a renewed purpose for art by salvaging a humanist tradition from the moral and physical wreckage of Nazism. This revealed conflicts between those seeking to maintain continuities with Germany's past, and those viewing 1945 as a decisive break with history. This article suggests that the humanist themes they invoked provide another context for continuing debates around memory, suffering, guilt, blame and reconciliation. In that sense, humanism transcended the schisms that emerged over painting's form and content and whether to remould art along socialist lines or to restore more liberal and elitist principles.

ATR-FTIR imaging for the analysis of organic materials in paint cross sections: case studies on paint samples from the National Gallery, London

The potential of attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) imaging for the characterisation of the chemical components of paint cross sections from old master paintings was investigated. Three cross sections were chosen to cover a variety of the analytical problems encountered in samples from paintings. The binding medium and degradation products in a green paint sample from a fifteenth-century Florentine painting were imaged, as well as a thin layer within a cross-section from a fifteenth-century German painting, and multiple thin surface coatings on a painting of the 1760s by Peter Romney. The application of chemometric methods for further analysis of the large data set generated for each sample was also explored. The study demonstrated the advantages of ATR-FTIR imaging, which allowed images to be obtained with high spatial resolution (ca. 3-4 microm) without the need to microtome the sample. The gain in sensitivity in detecting trace materials and the information derived from the location of these compounds in the sample was especially valuable, improving interpretation of the FTIR analysis and extending knowledge of the sample composition beyond that obtainable with other analytical techniques.

Democratic Humanism in German Painting, 1945-1949: Cultural Division and Public Reception

This article addresses the immediate post-war debates surrounding artistic production and more specifically the plural and often contradictory critical responses to visual artists who, also for quite contrasting reasons, saw the possibility of re-engaging with a humanist tradition as a way for art to rediscover its meaning and future purpose in a post-fascist world. Art became a metaphor for a country still in shock about its past and uncertain about its future as tensions emerged between those in the west hoping to rebuild continuities with the legacy of German visual cultural heritage, and those in the east who saw 1945 as the chance to construct new cultural foundations within in the context of the new Cold War social order. The analysis focuses on how these hotly-contested debates were constructed in Germany’s two most significant early post-war art periodicals, Bildende Kunst and Das Kunstwerk . By examining the critical responses to major exhibitions in both eastern and western occupation zones with a discussion of some of the key debates, editorial features and most-debated artists, it offers a new interpretation of how diversely painters, critics, cultural commentators and the art-going public interpreted and appropriated the humanist rubric to suit their own agendas. Despite this, humanism successfully managed to bridge the growing divisions between proponents of the restoration of art’s liberal principles and those who seeking to politicise its function to socialist ends.

Just How New is ?New German Painting??

Just How New is ?New German Painting??

Romantics, realists, revolutionaries: masterpieces of 19th-century German painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig

Romantics, realists, revolutionaries: masterpieces of 19th-century German painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig

Right-Pointing Double Angle Quotation Mark]Sehet, welch ein Mensch! [Left-Pointing Double Angle Quotation Mark]. Geschichte oder geistliche Auslegung des Lebens Jesu in der deutschen Malerei und Graphik um 1500

The writer discusses depictions or spiritual interpretations of the life of Christ in German painting and graphic art in around 1500. In the course of the 15th century there was a growing awareness of the differences between texts and images when it came to depicting scenes reflecting God's saving grace. As a result of this awareness, paintings, because of the nature of their medium, were not considered capable of depicting such scenes as history. That is, they could not offer a form that vouched for the truth content of the depiction. The writer, using depictions of the “Ostinatio Christi” as examples, focuses above all on two issues: the way in which the pictorial presentation of an event described in Biblical texts became a phenomenon specific to painting (a phenomenon censored before and during the Reformation) and the attempt by painters to reveal the before and after of the depicted moment, thus presenting a “complete” history.

Painting materials research in Munich from 1825 TO 1937

Munich has been a centre for painting materials research since early in the nineteenth century. The Bavarian monarchs stimulated this study by their patronage and their unusual search for permanent painting materials, which led to the early study of ‘synthetic’ painting materials and collaborative study among artists and scientists. Many of the great German painting technologists and scholars worked in Munich, among them Ernst Berger, Max Doerner, Alexander Eibner, Franz Fernbach, Adolf W. Keirn and Max von Pettenkofer. Late in the nineteenth century several institutions devoted to painting materials research were founded, and Munich's present-day centre for painting materials research, the Doerner-Institut, evolved from these early institutions. Although important contributions to our knowledge of painting materials and techniques took place in Munich, these contributions are generally little recognized.

Mellem myte og virkelighed

Summary This article deals with the cultural writer Georg Brandes's role as a go‐between between Danish and German art of the late 19th century. It is pointed out that Brandes, in spite of his aesthetic background in French naturalism around Taine and Zola, also had close connections with the cultural avantgarde in Germany, for example with the poet Paul Heyse, the sculptor and graphic artist Max Klinger and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One of the reasons for this is that Brandes took part in the fight of the German avantgarde against Friedrich Hegel's platonic philosophy. Paul Heyse was the first German cultural personality who Georg Brandes befriended. Through him he got into one of the most important centres of German realism and another benefit was the connection with modern German painting. Of course Brandes was interested in Franz von Lenbach's realistic portraiture but first of all he was intrigued by Arnold Böcklins painting Villa am Meer (1865) as at token of his dream away from bourgeois hegelianism. This was in the middle of the 1870's and later in the same decade Brandes became a close friend of the young painter, graphic artist and sculptor Max Klinger. In spite of his naturalistic point of view Brandes willingly admired Klinger's symbolic paintings, which he found quite modern. In an elegantly illustrated article (1881) Brandes described Klinger as a left‐wing artist, who analysed society's social and sexual problems in a very original manner. Not only because of his early advocation of Friedrich Nietzsches philosophy (1889) but also because of his great interest in modern German art, Brandes was much ahead of his Danish contemporaries. It was only later—in the 1890's that Danish painters were inspired by the art of Böcklin and Max Klinger. For example Oluf Hartmann's more or less vitalistic works from the turn of the century seem quite impossible without the knowledge of works by Böcklin, Klinger and Edouard von Hoffmann. Furthermore it is impossible to understand Edvard Weie's paintings of nymphs and pans without taking into consideration that dream about the liberating force of the mythical subject, that Brandes in his epoch‐making lectures and articles had pointed out may years before.