Berlin sculpture school

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Berlin Sculpture School is the name introduced by Peter Bloch for a cross-generational art movement of classicistic , naturalistic and neo-baroque portrait and monument art , to which around 400 sculptors of the 19th century are assigned.

The Berlin sculpture school began with Johann Gottfried Schadow around 1785 and ended with the generation of Reinhold Begas' students around 1915. The most important representative next to Schadow was his student Christian Daniel Rauch , who ushered in a new stylistic period within the school. Reinhold Begas contrasted the ethos of the smoking school with the pathos of neo-baroque in the approaching Wilhelminism . Towards the end of the 19th century, part of the modern gas school followed . The classicist attitude of the Berlin sculpture school is echoed in the works of Georg Kolbe and Richard Scheibe .

Johann Gottfried Schadow with the model of his Luther memorial (1821) for Wittenberg

Schadow's realism

Johann Gottfried Schadow built on Andreas Schlueter and contrasted romanticism with an often relentless realism. Typical of the realistic monumental style Schadows the still image is noisy Uta Lehnert of the rider General Hans Joachim von Ziethen of 1799. In dealing with Goethe , which the prosaic Berlin realism and Schadowsche Goethe bust of 1823 did not appeal, emphasized Schadow, "just in playback The real art lies in reality, not in the imitation of foreign ideals. ”In his bust, Schadow did not depict the prince poet, but the ducal minister in his court uniform in a sober and stiff manner.

Smoking school

Reinhold Begas :
bust of Adolph von Menzel , around 1875/76

Schadow's pupil Christian Daniel Rauch had also created a Goethe bust three years before Schadow, "which shows the portrayed, with all realism, as a serene, spiritual and thus timelessly valid Olympian." Rauch's classicism and his school renounced accidental anatomical and costume details. With closed contours, tight surface treatment and formal stringency, he expressed the importance of the sitter. His work was determined by the educational ideal of the German classical period.

The workshop that Rauch had set up after his return to Berlin from Carrara became the nucleus of the Berlin School of Sculpture under the name “ Lagerhaus ”. His students continued his conception of art in Europe and the USA and, in turn, had an educational effect. Albert Wolff , Gustav Blaeser , Friedrich Drake , Fritz Schaper , Rudolf Siemering , Melchior zur Strasse , Elisabet Ney and Albert Manthe represent the smoking school in the Berlin School of Sculpture.

Gassing school (neo-baroque)

Ethos (Rauch) and Pathos (Begas)

With the euphoria of the founding of the empire in 1871 and the upswing of the early days , the sobriety of the Rauch students no longer corresponded to the lifestyle. In art was Reinhold Begas in Neobarock the needs of representation and elevation of the material expression. The emerging monumental art of monuments and the design of representative graves such as the Dorotheenstädtisch-Friedrichswerder cemetery dissolved the strictness of form in favor of a sensual, often blatant naturalism with a strong decorative tendency. In 1990, Peter Bloch showed a large exhibition on the Berlin sculpture school 1786–1914 and contrasted the two currents of the school in a striking way in the exhibition title: Ethos and Pathos - Ethos of the Smoking School and Pathos of the Neo-Baroque Gassing School. In addition to Begas himself, his younger brother Karl Begas as well as Norbert Pfretzschner , Cuno von Uechtritz-Steinkirch and Gustav Eberlein represented Neo-Baroque .

Trial of strength of the Berlin sculpture school: Siegesallee

The main expression of the monumental staging was the national monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I on the Berlin Palace of Begas, 1889–1897. The cult of memorials reached its climax in Berlin's Siegesallee , the boulevard of the client Wilhelm II, ridiculed by parts of the Berlin population as a doll's avenue . 27 sculptors were involved in the 32 statues of Brandenburg and Prussian rulers and the 64 side busts; Reinhold Begas was the artistic director.

According to Uta Lehnert, Siegesallee became a “test of strength for the Berlin sculpture school”, which was involved in the work in all its facets and currents. Among the artists was August Kraus , for example , who with Tuaillon , Heising and Gaul formed against the neo-baroque of the gassing school, later joined the Berlin Secession and is one of the pioneers of modernism . However, the Berlin Secession was "much less important for the sculptors than for the painting colleagues."

Modern tendencies

While Begas had fought against the smoking school as a modernizer, he became a conservative insistence in dealing with the modern tendencies in sculpture. The monumental sculpture of modernism countered the decorative neo-baroque style with a consistent stylization of form under the influence of Adolf von Hildebrand's theoretical work The Problem of Form in Fine Art from 1893.

The summary surface treatment and reduction of the shape of the new direction is even evident in the Siegesalle statue from Reinhold Felderhoff to Margrave Johann II. Felderhoff was the only sculptor of the imperial boulevard to refrain from customizing the statue. He created a typical warrior figure, calmly and seriously looking to the ground, "who anticipates the type of memorial." Client Wilhelm II, who in his so-called gutter speech had branded modern art as having descended into the gutter, did not object to the work. In addition to Felderhoff and Kraus, Breuer , Brütt and Cauer belonged to the modern trend. Towards the end of the 19th century, the artistic spectrum of the Berlin Sculpture School ranged "from cultivating the smoking tradition through the Begasschen neo-baroque to modern times."

Development before the First World War

At the beginning, August Gaul and the Art Nouveau artist Hugo Lederer , who together with the architect Johann Emil Schaudt planned the monumental Bismarck memorial in Hamburg and executed it in 1902, were primarily considered to be representatives of Berlin sculpture after 1900 . Gaul and Lederer did not take up the literary currents of neo-romanticism and stylistic art, which saw themselves as a counter-movement to naturalism and modernism and linked to the content of romanticism and which also presented the Berlin sculpture school with new tasks.

Overall, Berlin sculpture before the First World War proved to be “relatively coherent, according to Ursel Berger's portrayal in comparison to developments in other countries. […] The current symbolism in various cities in Europe hardly affected the Berlin sculptors. [...] Rodin seems to have hardly been noticed in Berlin, although he was represented several times at Secession exhibitions ”. The refined art of the Vienna Secession also had no influence in Berlin. Only in the early work of Georg Kolbe and Arthur Lewin-Funcke , Fritz Klimsch and the early deceased Carl Otto are themes of symbolism and new stylistic devices to be found.

Ernst Barlach finally found a new form of expression with his simple, difficult forms, to which he had been inspired in Russia . His unsentimental depictions of beggars and peasants “must have had a shocking effect in Wilhelmine Berlin. [...] He found a new, plastic language of his own that identifies him as an expressionist. ”However, Barlach's influence on the Berlin school of sculpture remained minimal.

Echo after 1945

The classicist attitude of the Berlin School of Sculpture is particularly evident in the figures of Georg Kolbe and, until the 1950s, in the works and portraits of Richard Scheibe and in the sculptures by Renée Sintenis . After the Second World War, Sintenis and Scheibe taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, where there were competing positions in the mid-1950s. Richard Scheibe was increasingly sidelined, while Hans Uhlmann , for example , came to the fore with his abstract metalwork - still defamed by the Nazis as Degenerate Art . The master student Scheibe Katharina Szelinski-Singer did not join the new art trends and remained at least with their first works such as the Trümmerfrau Monument of 1955, the figurative conception Scheibe connected. Art historians therefore still see Szelinski-Singer's work in a line from Wilhelm Lehmbruck in his Berlin time to Georg Kolbe, Käthe Kollwitz , Ernst Barlach, Gerhard Marcks and Renée Sintenis to their teacher Richard Scheibe in the tradition of the Berlin School of Sculpture, which, according to Helmut Börsch-Supan was always united in striving for the image of man across all different directions.

List of persons (selection) and assignment of the individual directions

Schadow

Smoking school

Gassing school (neo-baroque)

Modern

literature

  • Usel Berger: From Begas to Barlach. Sculpture in Wilhelmine Berlin. ed. from the Georg Kolbe Museum , Berlin 1984. (Booklet for the exhibition of the same name from September 12 to November 11, 1984)
  • Peter Bloch , Sibylle Einholz , Jutta von Simson (eds.): Ethos and Pathos. The Berlin School of Sculpture 1786–1914 .
    1. Volume: Catalog. Gebr. Mann, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-7861-1597-4 .
    2. Volume: Contributions with short biographies of Berlin sculptors. Gebr. Mann, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-7861-1598-2 .
  • Peter Bloch, Waldemar Grzimek : The Berlin School of Sculpture in the nineteenth century. Classic Berlin. Gebr. Mann, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-7861-1767-4 .
  • Jörg Kuhn: The Berlin sculpture school of the 19th century . In: Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin (Ed.): Catalog of the sculptures 1780–1920. (= LETTER Schriften , Volume 14.) Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-930633-15-9 , pp. 28-61.
  • Uta Lehnert: The Kaiser and the Siegesallee. Réclame Royale . Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-496-01189-0 .
  • Peter Paret: The Berlin Secession. Modern art and its enemies in Imperial Germany . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-548-36074-2 . (= Ullstein book , volume 36074.)

Web links

Commons : Berliner Bildhauerschule  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Uta Lehnert: The Kaiser and the Siegesallee ... , p. 93
  2. Uta Lehnert: The Kaiser and the Siegesallee ... , p. 94
  3. Uta Lehnert: The Kaiser and the Siegesallee ... , p. 95
  4. Uta Lehnert: The Kaiser and the Siegesallee ... , p. 92
  5. Ursel Berger: From Begas to Barlach. Sculpture in ... , p. 12
  6. adolfvonhildebrand.googlepages.com  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.adolfvonhildebrand.googlepages.com  
  7. Uta Lehnert: The Kaiser and the Siegesallee ... , p. 224
  8. Uta Lehnert: The Kaiser and the Siegesallee ... , p. 97
  9. Ursel Berger: From Begas to Barlach. Sculpture in ... , p. 24
  10. Ursel Berger: From Begas to Barlach. Sculpture in ... , pp. 25, 26
  11. Wolfgang Schulz, Approaching a Life's Work . In: Katharina Szelinski-Singer: Stone and Bronze (exhibition catalog). A publication by the Deutschlandhaus Foundation, Berlin. 1997, catalog for the exhibition Deutschlandhaus, October 19 - December 14, 1997; Meissen, Albrechtsburg February 8 - April 13, 1998. p. 5
  12. Helmut Börsch-Supan , On the artist and her work . In: Katharina Szelinski-Singer: Stone and Bronze (exhibition catalog). A publication by the Deutschlandhaus Foundation, Berlin. 1997, catalog for the exhibition Deutschlandhaus, October 19 - December 14, 1997; Meissen, Albrechtsburg February 8 - April 13, 1998. p. 11