Departure of King Wilhelm I for the army on July 31, 1870

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Departure of King Wilhelm I for the army on July 31, 1870 (Adolph von Menzel)
Departure of King Wilhelm I for the army on July 31, 1870
Adolph von Menzel , 1871
Oil on canvas
65 × 78 cm
Old National Gallery , Berlin

The departure of King Wilhelm I for the army on July 31, 1870 is a painting by Adolph von Menzel from 1871. It depicts the boulevard Unter den Linden in Berlin, on which a crowd of Prussian King Wilhelm I driving by in a carriage . on the occasion of the beginning of the Franco-German War . The picture has belonged to the Berlin Old National Gallery since 1881 .

description

The painting has the dimensions 65 × 78 cm, is executed using the technique of oil on canvas and bears the signature Ad in the lower right corner . Menzel Berlin 1871 . The inventory number of the Nationalgalerie is AI 323.

It is a commissioned picture from the banker Magnus Herrmann, a friend of Menzel's, who soon sold it to the art dealer Hermann Pächter, the owner of the R. Wagner gallery. Even before 1877, the Nationalgalerie under the director Max Jordan expressed its interest, but failed because the price was too high. The purchase was only successful in 1881 through Pachter's mediation and accommodation.

In his picture, Menzel shows the Berlin boulevard Unter den Linden in a strongly perspective composition . An unmistakable crowd cheers for the Prussian King Wilhelm I, who is sitting next to his wife in a carriage and driving towards the Brandenburg Gate to reach the Berlin Potsdamer Bahnhof . Wilhelm traveled to the armies of the German Confederation , which stood on the Rhine during the Franco-German War, in order to lead the war under Prussian supremacy as commander-in-chief. The Berlin Palace is in the background of the painting , but it is only vaguely visible, the other royal buildings, such as the Royal Opera , do not appear at all. The tower of the recently completed Red City Hall , on the other hand, is painted more clearly, which points to the increasing importance of the bourgeoisie after the war (Menzel completed the painting in 1871 after the war), which the artist had recognized. Both the shadowy castle and the town hall are the only buildings that can be clearly identified. The bourgeois facades on the right edge of the picture, on the other hand, are fictional and, due to the strong view from below, appear oversized in their almost vertical perspective cornice line . With their neo-baroque ornamentation, with a hotel in the foreground, these building facades represent the prosperity of the self-celebrating bourgeoisie in a time of economic boom .

Detail of the royal couple

Apparently a strong gust of wind blows through the street and swirls the patriotic flag decoration (the French impressionists never depicted the French tricolor as unrecognizable as Menzel did the black-white-red of the North German Confederation ). The flags on Linden-Boulevard show the strongly intertwined German colors of the Confederation as well as blue-and-white flags with the Brandenburg eagle, although these are hardly swirled. A special feature is the easily recognizable flag of the Red Cross , which is almost in the perspective vanishing point of the painting. Menzel points here to the victims of wars that have always been important to him. Some of his drawings and watercolors deal with them ( two fallen soldiers lying on straw ; three fallen soldiers in a barn ; dying soldier , all related to the German War of 1866).

Adolph Menzel is said to have portrayed himself with the little man with a white hat turned away from the king

In the midst of the submissive homage, the cheers and cheering gestures of the crowd, the white-clad carriage of the monarch acts as a strong contrast that attracts the beholder's gaze. The king greets with his right hand on the pimple hood , in truth he wore a simple “travel cap” while his wife Augusta fights back tears and holds a handkerchief in front of her face. Some of the characters in the picture turn away from the king and do other things, others are clearly identifiable. The buyer of the picture, Menzel's friend and banker, Magnus Herrmann and his wife are said to be on the rear balcony. Similar drawings by the two are in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett. In addition, Herrmann's daughter Clara with her husband, the painter Albert Hertel , can be seen in the front right . The man in the foreground, who has his back on the action, is wearing a strikingly light-colored hat and seems to be drawing something on a sheet of paper, is interpreted by the historian Susanne Drexler as a self-portrait of Menzel. Menzel's historical paintings often contain a humorous, genre-like component, which Theodor Fontane had also noticed and mentioned in his art reviews. In this picture it is the newsboy who shows the dog his teeth.

History and background

Menzel was on vacation in Saxon Switzerland in the summer of 1870 , which he broke off after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. In Berlin, according to tradition, he was sitting in a restaurant on the first floor of the Linden on July 31, 1870 , witnessing the king's departure for the army. Menzel wrote that he painted the picture with his left hand, as did, for example, pictures from the series about Friedrich II. What is significant is that Menzel, who was originally left-handed, had learned the ability to work equally well with both hands. For reasons of lighting in the composition, he chose the right hand for the preliminary drawing and the left for the painterly part when leaving . Max Jordan suspected the painter's position on the south side of the Linden near the Russian embassy, ​​not far from the Brandenburg Gate . But the neo-baroque facades on the right do not match. This kind of overloaded architecture, which was modern at the time, was under construction on Friedrichstrasse. At that time, a late classicist style prevailed on Unter den Linden . Elsewhere it is said that Menzel reported that “he was on his way to the hairdresser's on July 31, 1870, when he suddenly saw the king's carriage on Unter den Linden. The wave of farewell and various shouts would have made it clear to him that Wilhelm was about to leave the capital to travel to the troops deployed on the Rhine. [...] "

Menzel made several sketches for this picture, which are in different museums. The title of the picture was initially Unter den Linden in Berlin on the afternoon of July 31, 1870 or Die Linden Berlin on the afternoon of July 31, 1870 , under which it was in the first exhibitions, later this title was no longer used.

reception

Menzel's picture was mainly received positively, but old rivalries also made themselves felt in some of the comments. The Hegelian Max Schasler discussed the picture not without swipes in his magazine Die Dioskuren and smelled socialist activities everywhere. He recognized the "astonishing virtuosity", but also "the commonplace of physiognomies". He goes into the "handkerchief" that the queen holds in front of her face and writes that this stems from Menzel's "concern" because, in "his coarse natural growth", he "could not meet" the corresponding expression on the queen's face. On the occasion of Menzel's death in 1905, Anton von Werner , director of the Royal Academy of Arts , said that the painter in that picture “spoke from the heart to the heart of his people”, which the art historian Claude Keisch describes as “trivializing”. In his essay novel The Aesthetics of Resistance , Peter Weiss lets his first-person narrator say about this painting as part of a triptych about modern German history : “... it was said that the heartbeat of the nation was expressed in it [...] enthusiastic welcome to the war , the education to kippers, to lick saliva. "

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1996/1997: Menzel (1815–1905): la névrose du vrai in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (April 15 to July 28, 1996); Adolph Menzel (1815–1905): Between Romanticism and Impressionism in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (September 15, 1996 to January 5, 1997); Adolph von Menzel 1815–1905 - The labyrinth of reality. in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin (February 7th to May 11th 1997)
  • April to July 30, 2017: Exhibition on the war of 1870/71, Musée de l'Armée, Hôtel des Invalides, Paris.Bernhard Schulz: The double trauma of the French . In: Der Tagesspiegel . April 17, 2017 ( tagesspiegel.de ).

literature

Web links

Commons : Departure of King Wilhelm I for the army on July 31, 1870  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christiane Zangs: The artistic development and the work of Menzel in the mirror of contemporary criticism. (Dissertation 1987), Aachen / Mainz 1992, p. 211.
  2. ↑ Kupferstichkabinett: SZ Menzel, N 1650, drawing.
  3. ^ Claude Keisch in: Adolph von Menzel 1815-1905 - The labyrinth of reality. Exhibition catalog, DuMont, Berlin / Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7701-3960-7 , p. 254 ff.
  4. ↑ Susanne Drexler: Artists see the crowd . 2016, 5. Identification with the crowd - self-portraits by artists ., P. 196 , urn : nbn: de: bvb: 19-234518 ( edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de [PDF; 21.0 MB ] Dissertation at the University of Munich).
  5. ↑ Gustav Kirstein: The life of Adolph Menzels. Leipzig 1919, p. 78 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  6. ↑ Menzel in a letter to an unnamed art dealer, September 1876, from: Claude Keisch, Marie Riemann-Reyher (ed.): Briefe Adolph von Menzel. Volume 2: 1856 to 1880. Deutscher Kunstverlag 2009.
  7. ^ Claude Keisch in: Adolph von Menzel 1815-1905 - The labyrinth of reality. Exhibition catalog, DuMont, Berlin / Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7701-3960-7 , p. 256.
  8. ^ Gerhard Paul: Visual History: a study book; Introduction . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36289-7 , pp. 122-125 ( books.google.de ).
  9. ↑ Two viewers for the painting “Departure of King Wilhelm I for the Army on July 31, 1870”. Digital collection Staedelmuseum, accessed on November 16, 2019 .
  10. ^ Adolph Menzel, departure of King Wilhelm I for the army on July 31, 1870 (1871). German history in documents and pictures.
  11. ^ Art criticism - Berlin art show . In: Die Dioskuren: German art newspaper . tape 16 , issue 29, July 16, 1871, p. 230 ( uni-heidelberg.de - here “Exodus of the king to the war against France” as the title of the picture).
  12. ↑ Peter Weiss : The Aesthetics of Resistance . 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-518-04417-6 , pp. 356 (novel).
  13. ^ Menzel (1815-1905) la névrose du vrai. Musée d'Orsay, 1996, accessed November 17, 2019 .
  14. ^ Adolph Menzel (1815–1905). nga.gov, 1997, accessed November 17, 2019 .