Anselm Feuerbach

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Self-portrait from 1873
Signature of Anselm Feuerbach

Anselm Feuerbach (born September 12, 1829 in Speyer , † January 4, 1880 in Venice ) was a German painter . He is one of the most important German painters of the second half of the 19th century.

Life

Childhood and youth

Anselm Feuerbach's birthplace in Speyer

Anselm Feuerbach was a grandson of Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach and the son of Joseph Anselm Feuerbach and his wife Amalie, nee. Keerl. He lost his mother as early as 1830 and was housed with his grandparents in Ansbach for four years together with his sister Emilie . In 1834 his father married Henriette Heydenreich ; two years later he was appointed to the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and moved there with his family. Anselm Feuerbach attended grammar school in Freiburg. From 1843 he received drawing lessons from the university's anatomy draftsman. In 1844 he painted scenes from the Nibelungenlied and a selection of drawings were sent to Carl Friedrich Lessing and Wilhelm von Schadow in Düsseldorf for appraisal . In 1845 he went to Düsseldorf for two years without leaving school, where he initially joined Schadow and then Alfred Rethel . At the Düsseldorf Art Academy he was a student of Wilhelm von Schadow, Karl Ferdinand Sohn and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer . His first larger painting, the fluting Silenus , was created in 1846. In 1848 he moved to Munich . During this time the influence of Karl Rahl falls .

Years of traveling from 1850

In order to perfect himself in colorism , he went to Antwerp in 1850 , where he studied with Gustave Wappers , and in 1851 to Paris . There he studied the modern masters and worked in Thomas Couture's studio. Two of his first paintings, Hafis in der Schenke and The Death of Pietro Aretino , show the influence of couture, but also point to the example of the Venetians, whom he later became even closer to. Other painters who influenced him in this phase of his life were Eugène Delacroix , Gustave Courbet , Constant Troyon and Théodore Rousseau . It is possible that he had contact with Édouard Manet in 1853 .

Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta , around 1864

In 1854 he returned to Germany and in 1855 he went to Heidelberg , where his now widowed stepmother and sister Emilie lived. There he came into contact with Joseph Victor von Scheffel . He lived in Karlsruhe until April 1855, then he went on a study trip to Italy with Scheffel, which first took him to Venice , where he copied Titian's Ascension . In the summer he stayed at Castel Toblino and made landscape studies . In late autumn he underwent a syphilis cure in Venice . His journey took him to Florence and Rome in 1856 , where he met his future biographer Julius Allgeyer , and where his own special direction gradually developed during the studies of Michelangelo and Raphael . He was based on the historical-monumental style, but also on the richness of colors of Venetian painting , but dampened the luminosity of the local colors with gray nuances. This met with severe criticism from his contemporaries.

It was during this time that Dante and the Noble Women in Ravenna (1858) were created.

From 1857 Feuerbach was a member of the German Artists' Association in Rome. He made closer acquaintance with Arnold Böcklin , Reinhold Begas , Karl Friedrich Fries and Ludwig Passini . He received the order for Dante from the collector Ludwig Landsberg . At that time he rented a studio in the Palazzo Costa . Because he wanted to keep his painting Dante , Feuerbach repaid Scheffels Landsberg's advance payment in 1858 with the help of a loan. The work was on public display in March and April in Piazza del Popolo . The Hanoverian consul in Palermo, Karl Wedekind, ordered a half-finished children's serenade from Feuerbach after visiting his studio .

Creative period from 1860 to 1874

Nanna , 1861
Lesbia with the bird , around 1866

In 1860 Feuerbach met Anna Risi , known as Nanna. The wife of a cabinet maker who immigrated to Rome became his model and lover. This was the beginning of the series of famous Nanna portraits. From May to October he was in Heidelberg for portraits. In 1861 Feuerbach planned his Iphigenia and the feast . During the summer he did marine studies in Anzio . He refused an appointment to the Grand Ducal Art School in Weimar , which had been founded the previous year .

During his stay in Rome from 1862 to 1868 he found a patron in the Count von Schack who bought eleven of his works. The stepmother Henriette increasingly conducted business correspondence with Schack.

The Iphigenie was exhibited in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Berlin in 1862.

It emerged Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta , Laura and Petrarch , Hafiz at the Fountain , the Pieta (1863) and the children images: Idyll of Tivoli , wiretapped children's concert and motherhood . While there was still a romantic trait to be found in these paintings in addition to the classical design, Feuerbach turned from then on almost exclusively to the depiction of antique objects in the guise of modern colorism, which was subdued and bound by a completely plastic treatment of forms. Examples are Iphigenie (1871, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) and The Banquet of Plato (1873, Berlin Nationalgalerie) as well as The Battle of the Amazons , The Judgment of Paris and several pictures from the saga of Medea . Feuerbach's friendship with Böcklin broke up, and he harbored thoughts of suicide. In 1865 Feuerbach worked again on the composition of the banquet . He made a closer acquaintance with Hans von Marées . His lover Nanna left him and went to southern Italy with an Englishman. Feuerbach spent the summer of 1866 in Anzio again to study the background of the Munich Medea . He met Lucia Brunacci who, like Nanna, became his model and lover. In October he traveled to Berlin. Feuerbach believed that Prussia's victory over Austria in the German War would create Germany's cultural center there. He received an order Schacks for the Medea and Ricordo di Tivoli .

In 1867 Feuerbach finally found a large studio in Rome in Via S. Nicola da Tolentino. At the end of March he traveled to Baden-Baden to relax . He was now in closer contact with Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms . In October he was back in Rome, where Feuerbach and Marées became friends with Conrad Fiedler . The relationship with Fiedler quickly cooled because he supported the destitute Marées. In December 1868 the relationship with Schack was broken off.

Medea , 1870, Neue Pinakothek

In 1869, Feuerbach completed the first version of the banquet , which he exhibited at the Great International Art Exhibition in Munich. There the picture was acquired by the painter Marie Röhrs . The Karlsruher Kunstverein tried to organize an exhibition of the banquet . There was also the possibility of an appointment to Karlsruhe, but Feuerbach reacted negatively. Nevertheless, the Medea was exhibited in Karlsruhe in 1870 . The Karlsruhe court was interested in Feuerbach, but the latter thwarted the Grand Duke's intention to move him to Karlsruhe with excessive demands. In July of this year he was in Berlin. When the Franco-German War broke out, he was only able to return to Rome in September. In autumn he completed The Judgment of Paris with the help of Ferdinand Keller, which was sent to the Berlin Autumn Exhibition.

In 1871 Feuerbach began work on the second version of the Battle of the Amazons and on the second version of the banquet . In 1872 he traveled to Heidelberg and from there to Vienna, where he met Rudolf Eitelberger for the first time and felt for a professorship at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was appointed professor on August 7th. Feuerbach completed his Battle of the Amazons and in June 1873 went to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna . In 1873 sister Emilie also died. Feuerbach was not represented with pictures at the overcrowded Vienna World Exhibition and, in view of Hans Makart's successes, vacillated between admiration and envy. In 1874 he exhibited The Battle of the Amazons and the second version of the banquet in the Vienna Künstlerhaus. The critics reacted negatively.

Last years

Feuerbach's death mask, Museum of Anselm Feuerbach's birthplace, Speyer

Feuerbach commuted between Vienna and Rome in 1875 and was admonished by the ministry for missing vacations. From October he was back in Vienna. He began work on the Titan Fall for the ceiling of the auditorium of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna . He worked intensively on this work from 1878; as a result of differences of opinion with the architect Theophil Hansen, he did not complete it until 1880 in Rome; at the Munich exhibition in 1879, however , the fall of the titans met with heavy criticism.

In March 1876, Feuerbach fell ill with pneumonia. With a high fever he went to see his stepmother in Heidelberg. A large part of his memoirs arose as a pamphlet, as a settlement with his contemporaries, etc. a. also On Macartism - Pathological Phenomenon of Modern Times . In June, Feuerbach submitted his resignation in Vienna. In July Henriette Feuerbach moved to Nuremberg ; Feuerbach commuted between Nuremberg and Venice until 1879.

Grave in Nuremberg

In the last years of his life, Feuerbach, who at times toyed with the idea of ​​going to London as a portrait painter, made a painting for the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, in homage to Ludwig the Bavarian . Feuerbach was buried in Nuremberg in the St. Johannisfriedhof (grave St. Johannis I / 0715).

Commemoration

In April 1880 a large memorial exhibition of his estate took place in the Berlin National Gallery . In Düsseldorf, Feuerbach was honored with a Feuerbachstrasse and a marble statue that was created in 1921 based on a plaster design by the sculptor Reinhold Felderhoff from 1919. The statue erected there in the Alte Kunsthalle was moved to the Volksgarten (entrance Kruppstraße) in 1959 . In Speyer, the artist is commemorated in the Feuerbachhaus and through an Anselm Feuerbach monument commissioned by the sculptor Fritz Claus (1885–1956) in 1935, which was erected in the Feuerbach Park in 1950.

Works (selection)

  • Heroic Landscape , 1855

  • Crevice with cows , 1855

  • Iphigenia , 1862

  • The storyteller at the fountain , 1866

  • Ricordo di Tivoli , 1867

  • Orpheus and Eurydice , 1868–1869

  • Resting nymph , 1870

  • The judgment of Paris , 1870

  • Iphigenia II , 1871

  • The Battle of the Amazons , 1873

  • The Banquet , 1874

  • Iphigenia III , 1875

  • The artist's stepmother , 1878

literature

  • Nina Struckmeyer: Feuerbach, Anselm In: Savoy, Bénédicte and Nerlich, France (Ed.): Paris apprenticeship years. A lexicon for training German painters in the French capital. Volume 2: 1844-1870. Berlin / Boston 2015.
  • Oscar Berggruen: The Schack Gallery . Society for Reproductive Art, Vienna 1883.
  • Julius Allgeyer: Anselm Feuerbach . 2 volumes, Spemann, Berlin 1904.
  • Hermann Uhde-Bernays (ed.): Anselm Feuerbach's letters to his mother . 2 volumes, Meyer & Jessen, Berlin 1911.
  • Herbert Eulenberg : The Feuerbach family in portraits . J. Engelhorns Nachf., Stuttgart 1924.
  • Henriette Feuerbach (ed.): A legacy from Anselm Feuerbach . Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 1924 (with autobiographical notes by Anselm Feuerbach).
  • Herbert Eulenberg: Nanna and Feuerbach madness and reality . Verlag der Greif 1946.
  • Leopoldstadt- live: The history of the Feuerbach school . Polytechnic course , G10 with class head Helmuth Furch, January 1986.
  • Jürgen Ecker: Anselm Feuerbach. Life and work, critical catalog of the paintings, oil sketches and oil studies . Hirmer, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7774-5510-5 .
  • Daniel Kupper: Anselm Feuerbach's “Legacy”. The original records . Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-87157-152-0 .
  • Daniel Kupper: Anselm Feuerbach . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-50499-5 .
  • Mira Hofmann (editor): Anselm Feuerbach . Hatje-Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 2002, ISBN 3-7757-9116-7 (exhibition catalog).
  • Achim Kuch: On the Dionysian in Anselm Feuerbach's “The Banquet of Plato” - at the same time an attempt at reinterpretation . In: Stadtverwaltung Speyer (ed.): On the 175th birthday of Anselm Feuerbach (1829–1880) . Publication series of the city of Speyer, 15, Stadtverwaltung Speyer, 2006, ISSN  0175-7954 , pp. 92–114.
  • Hermann Glaser , Rainer Lindenmann, Max Ackermann (eds.): The Feuerbachs - A German family in the 19th century . with CD, Schrenk Verlag, Gunzenhausen 2006, ISBN 3-924270-46-5 .
  • Karl Günther cell: On the iconography of Anselm Feuerbach's “Medea” . In: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 70 (2007), pp. 113–120.
  • Walter Josephi : Adolf Friedrich von Schack and Anselm Feuerbach: Original letters from the artist and his mother in the Mecklenburg Secret and Main Archive in Schwerin . In: Mecklenburgische Jahrbücher, Volume 103 (1939), pp. 85–166 Digitalisat in the state bibliography MV .
  • Ekkehard Mai : Anselm Feuerbach (1829–1880). A century of life, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-412-50580-6 .
Lexicon entries

Web links

Wikiquote: Anselm Feuerbach  - Quotes
Commons : Anselm Feuerbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Family tree of the Feuerbach family
  2. ↑ Feuerbach is listed as a pupil of Schirmer's landscape class from 1845 to 1848. - Cf. Rudolf Theilmann : The student lists of the landscape classes from Schirmer to Dücker . In: Wend von Kalnein : The Düsseldorf School of Painting . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1979, ISBN 3-8053-0409-9 , p. 144.
  3. ^ Felix Czeike , Helga Czeike : Vienna: Art, culture and history of the Danube metropolis . Dumont, Ostfildern 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Feuerbach, Anselm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1829
PLACE OF BIRTH Speyer
DATE OF DEATH January 4, 1880
Place of death Venice