Studio wall (1852)
|
| Studio wall |
|---|
| Adolph von Menzel , 1852 |
| Oil on paper, mounted on wood |
| 61 × 44 cm |
| Old National Gallery |
Atelierwand is one of two paintings of this title that Adolph von Menzel created. It dates from 1852, was created in Menzel's studio at the time in Berlin's Ritterstrasse and is located in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin .
The second image Menzel with the same title is 20 years younger. Both pictures, however, are considered examples of a decisive change in art in the 19th century. Wolf Jahn wrote about these representations that their elements worked “like set pieces of a previously unified world order.” They articulate “the experience of the fragmentary, as well as that of the equality of things with one another”.
Menzel is also seen as the first artist who treated the plaster casts , according to which art students should learn to draw and paint, as an independent subject . The appreciation of plaster as a material declined significantly around the middle of the 19th century: nude photography often replaced the cast of the human body, while plaster copies of plastic works of art gradually disappeared from museum collections. Plaster of paris was increasingly perceived as lifeless, inferior and inartificial. Eva Mongi-Vollmer explains that with his representation of the material animated by light and color, Menzel is "beyond the conventional genre boundaries."
description
Menzel's picture from 1852 is an upright oil sketch, signed with “AM” and dated with “20. March 1852 ”, which shows part of a wall that is irregularly illuminated from the bottom right and painted yellowish or brownish. Two plaster casts of muscular human arms hang from this. One, a right arm, is bent roughly at a right angle so that his hand appears to be pointing at the other arm. This - a left - arm is stretched out downwards. His hand grasps a stick-like structure with an extended index finger, which is interpreted as a lowered torch . An anatomical model or a specimen of a left hand can be seen on the central axis of the image below the two arms. This is attached so that the wrist is up and the fingers are pointing down; the thumb is splayed out, so that it looks as if the palette, which can only be seen in a cut at the lower edge of the picture, vertically under this fleshed hand, has been omitted.
At the left edge of the picture, also cut, a cupboard can be seen, on which, below the angled arm cast, lies a human skull. The frame of a window can be seen on the right edge of the picture.
Reception and attempts at interpretation
In view of the numerous references to impermanence, the still life seems to be interpreted as the artist's memento mori .
Sabine Heiser points out the combination of natural and artificial elements and the strongly orthogonally oriented picture elements as well as the axiality of the composition and develops a reference structure from this: All references of the dead hands "finally lead to the painter's palette." Heiser also ventures the theory that this is a paraphrase of a self-portrait Menzel and that the gaps between the dead limbs on the wall form his body.
However, she sees potential in two directions in the subject of “fragments”: on the one hand, it can be part of what was once a whole and thus indicate the transience of all earthly things, but on the other hand it can also be part of a whole that has yet to be created. While the fragment has made it into an independent genre in the context of literary studies and is often used in the art-historical context in the field of architecture and sculpture, its application in painting has been reflected significantly less; art-historical research also focuses on the art of the 20th century.
According to Heiser, science developed around the end of the 18th century in a downright fragmented and at the same time a decipherment mania. She names the beginnings of papyrology as well as Lavater's Physiognomic Fragments as examples . The term fragment, established since the early Romantic period , played an important role in establishing history as a science, because the “collecting and assembling of fragments” represents “one that generates, reconstructs knowledge in every respect and for every discipline”, but precisely also represents an artistic act. Decay and loss are a prerequisite for a mnemonic and abstracting process, which also offers the possibility of creating new constellations. In the artistic sense, this creative process could lead to a pasticcio, a capriccio , an assemblage like here with Menzel, a collage or a montage.
The fact that the human body is also depicted in fragments is of course not Menzel's invention. William Hogarth , for example, chose the Belvedere torso for the title etching of his Analysis of Beauty in the mid-18th century ; In the 19th century at the latest, the torso became an independent genre of sculpture; long before that, skulls and bones were symbols of transience. In the modern age, according to Heiser, the unfinished work and the imperfectly preserved object enter into an alliance that becomes a program: Because the concept of vanitas can already be integrated into the artistic creative process and destruction is depicted before its actual time. Menzel's studio wall could also be placed in this tradition .
Jutta and Peter Griebel take up Heiser's thoughts on Menzel's studio wall as part of a consideration of a picture by Fritz Griebel . They indicate that Menzel left a whole series of pictures with body fragments. Among them is the second picture with the title Atelierwand , created 20 years after the picture from 1852 and with its rapid escape lines and numerous identifiable death masks conceived in a significantly different way than the older picture, but also The Artist's Foot from 1876 or the right hand with a book and the right hand with a paint cup , both from 1864.
The studio wall from 1852, however, shows a certain relationship with Fritz Griebel's still life with votive offerings from 1939. Griebel used votive offerings in the Benedictine monastery Michelsberg in Bamberg as a template for his picture , but withdrew them from their original reference by foregoing any hint of architecture. What remained was depersonalized artifacts, which were treated like objets trouvés , but their arrangement does not appear to be random. Around the point where the prepared or replicated left hand hangs in Menzel's depiction - Menzel was left-handed - there is a heart-shaped red pouch in Griebel's picture.
Hans-Joachim Müller, on the other hand, draws a comparison between Menzel and Julius Grünewald , who in part deal with very related topics. Among them is the theme of the hung wall in his work Ahnen (interior) from 2007, but there are also numerous individual depictions of body parts. Müller probably refers less to the studio wall than to Menzel's hand and foot portrayals when he sees a decisive difference to Grünewald's pictures: “With Menzel, hands and feet look like enlarged sections of their own body. Menzel takes a microscope and brings what is kept at a distance from arms and legs. Julius Grünewald cuts off, amputated. [...] That is actually what is strange: the lack of origin and isolation of the limbs. "
exhibition
In 2008, both of Menzel's pictures, entitled Atelierwand , were shown in an exhibition in Hamburg together with photographs by Lois Renner .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Eva Mongi-Vollmer, The painter's studio , Lukas Verlag 2004, ISBN 978-3-936872-12-5 , p. 71
- ↑ Wolf Jahn, The Experience of the Fragmentary , on: www.abendblatt.de, June 3, 2008
- ^ Lars Stamm: Indexical body sculpture: the natural cast in the art of the 20th century . Ed .: Lars Stamm. 1st edition. Graphentis Verlag e. K., Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-942819-03-9 , pp. 83–85 (496 p., Limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ a b c d Dr. Sabine Heiser: The fragment as a memory medium , on: www.uni-giessen.de ( Memento of the original from December 19, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ The foot of the artist , on: www.freunde-der-nationalgalerie.de
- ↑ Jutta and Peter Griebel, Still Life with Votive Offerings , at: www.fritzgriebel.de
- ^ Hans-Joachim Müller, Julius Grünewald , in: Artists. Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art 89, Issue 4, 1st quarter 2010, p. 2 ( Memento of the original from January 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ www.hamburg-web.de
