The balcony room

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The balcony room (Adolph von Menzel)
The balcony room
Adolph von Menzel , 1845
Oil on canvas
58 × 47 cm
Old National Gallery , Berlin

The balcony room is a painting by Adolph von Menzel from 1845. It is the main work of his early work and one of his most famous pictures. It has been part of the collection of the Berlin Old National Gallery since 1903 .

description

The painting has the dimensions 58 × 47 cm and is executed using the painting technique oil on cardboard . Menzel's signature is on the lower right: AM / 45. The art dealer R. Wagner in Berlin bought it from the artist. In January 1903, two years before Menzel's death, Hugo von Tschudi acquired the picture as director of the National Gallery at the time. Since then it has had the inventory number AI 744 .

The picture creates the atmosphere of a bourgeois apartment on a summer afternoon. The cool comfort of the room contrasts with the heat outside. The room is noticeably sparsely furnished or cleared and is flooded with sunlight that penetrates through a white curtain. The curtain is slightly puffed, which suggests a weak gust of wind. In its emptiness, the room looks almost boring. Just a few everyday pieces of furniture: a mirror, two arbitrarily placed chairs facing away from each other, a modest rug and a dimly indicated sofa on the left edge of the picture, which appears more clearly in the mirror, are in the room. The room seems uncomfortable , in complete contrast to the usual room pictures from the Biedermeier period , which were supposed to convey comfort, prosperity and a sense of style. It is deserted, carelessly furnished and unspectacularly everyday. Nothing is staged or told here. In Menzel's representationally empty picture, the restrained colors alone appear independent, atmospherically fresh and lively. In particular, the incidence of light through the open balcony door gives the picture its enigmatic charm. The light illuminates the polished wooden floor and the wall mirror, which half reflects an indefinable gold-framed picture in the invisible area of ​​the room above the sofa. The wall, which takes up the entire left half of the picture, has a surface in lighter colors with a recognizable structure of the paint application. Viewers asked themselves whether the picture was possibly unfinished there, whether it was a reflection of light or whether a new coat of paint on the wall had been interrupted. However, according to art historian Claude Keisch, the composition of the left half of the picture with its shadowy sofa does not allow any “plasticity”. Half of the picture consists of an indefinable surface. It is in contrast to the traditional view of perspective , because it simulates different viewing heights, such as the eye, which adapts differently depending on the distance and sees objects lying on the edge out of focus or blurred. This ability of the human eye to perceive selectively, which Menzel addresses in this picture, also contradicts an iron rule in painting since the Renaissance , namely the “standstill of time”. The balcony room was created at a time when the deceptive idyll of the Biedermeier was slowly moving towards a revolution.

background

Postage stamp with the balcony room

Until 1848, Menzel painted numerous pictures of interior views. This room belonged to the apartment of the Menzel family on Schöneberger Strasse, at that time located on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin, where the artist lived with his mother and siblings. During this time he also made the illustrations for the multi-volume story of Frederick the Great by Franz Theodor Kugler (until 1842), which marked his artistic breakthrough. In Kugler's work, Menzel had already used the motif of a door letting light through in chapter 42. It is a woodcut of the round library in Sanssouci Palace , which shows the windows that reach down to the floor, flooded with light. In addition to the picture from this apartment, Menzel made other pictures of the apartments in Ritterstrasse and Marienstraße.

reception

Hugo von Tschudi , the director of the Nationalgalerie at the time, and Julius Meier-Graefe , found it difficult to describe and interpret this picture. Tschudi saw the picture as an “inconspicuous miracle” that could not be grasped by “clumsy words”. Mostly the interpretations of this picture related to the lighting and its color implementation. But there has been a re-evaluation in later times that includes space. It is the already mentioned contrast of Menzel's composition to the traditional tradition of a uniform perspective representation. The front and side borders are missing, which give the eye clues as to what makes the unusually strange, airy and charming.

Art historian Lucius Grisebach believes the painting is unfinished, even though it is signed, and believes that it is one of his private studies that were not intended for the public. The balcony room is to be understood as a kind of exercise in the use of light in his later official pictures, such as the flute concert of Frederick the Great in Sanssouci . These studies only became known in the last years of Menzel's life. Menzel's private painting aimed to capture an attractive situation with painterly means. In the private sphere, he anticipated what the French Impressionists , but also Max Liebermann, only later publicly represented.

The journalist Gabriela Walde finds the bright spot on the wall that has occupied many art historians "mysterious". In this indeterminacy she sees “the quality and the novelty of the painting”. The topic is "no longer the interior, but the immaterial, the light."

The Swiss writer Christoph Geiser treats the picture in his volume of short stories, Missed Places ( ISBN 978-3-906910-51-2 ) in a story entitled: Little Carl - or the balcony room .

In June 2012 the painting for the special stamp series “German Painting” was issued as a 260 cents postage stamp Adolph Menzel - The Balcony Room . The issue date was June 14, 2012.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • May 1 to October 23, 1904: International art exhibition, Städtischer Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf
  • January to May 1906: Exhibition of the Century: Exhibition of German art from the period 1775–1875 at the Royal National Gallery in Berlin
  • February to March 1935: Adolph Menzel. For the 120th birthday and 30th anniversary of the artist's death. National Gallery in cooperation with the Prussian Academy of the Arts, Berlin.
  • June to August 1952: A Millennium of German Art. Masterpieces from the Berlin museums. New Museum and State Museum in Wiesbaden
  • 1956: A Hundred Years of German Painting Tate Gallery, London
  • February 14 to April 20, 1975: German painting in the 19th century. An exhibition for Moscow and Leningrad. Städelsches Kunstinstitut and Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main
  • April 15 to July 28, 1996: Menzel, 1815–1905, “la névrose du vrai”. Musée d'Orsay in Paris
  • September 24, 1998 to January 10, 1999: Inner life. The art of the interior. Vermeer to Kabakov. Städelsches Kunstinstitut and Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main
  • June 22nd to September 2nd, 2007: Views of Europe. Europe and German painting of the 19th century Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich,

literature

  • Georg Jacob Wolf: German pictures . Gerber, Munich 1900, p. 14–15 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  • GJ Kern: From Menzel's youth. For the hundredth anniversary of his birthday on December 8, 1915 . In: The art. Monthly magazine for fine and applied arts . tape 33 . F. Bruckmann, Munich 1916, p. 84 , illustration, p. 81 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  • Ludwig Justi: Adolph Menzel, the balcony room . In: German painting in the 19th century. A guide through the National Gallery (=  official publication of the National Gallery ). Bard, Berlin 1924 (4 pages).
  • Werner Busch : Adolph Menzel. The balcony room. A work from the Alte Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Mitte, Museuminsel (= Till Meinert (Hrsg.): Der Kunstbrief. ) Gebrüder Mann Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-7861-2429-9 .
  • Reinhard Wegner: Menzel's balcony room: a cabinet piece . In: Lorenz Dittmann, Klaus Güthlein, Dethard von Winterfeld (eds.): Languages ​​of Art. Festschrift for Klaus Güthlein on his 65th birthday . Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 2007, ISBN 978-3-88462-259-9 , p. 241-248 .
  • Gabriela Walde: Adolph Menzel's “balcony room” from 1845 . In: Berliner Morgenpost . August 5, 2018 ( morgenpost.de ).

Web links

Commons : Adolph von Menzel's balcony room  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The balcony room. SMB-digital, accessed on November 20, 2019 (website of the Berlin National Gallery with a detailed description).
  2. ^ Institute for Museum Research - Beatrice Miersch: The Menzel brand. Interdisciplinarity as the key to a public exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin In: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Hrsg.): Messages and reports from the Institute for Museum Research. No. 53, 2014, ISSN  1436-4166 ( smb.museum PDF).
  3. ^ Franz Kugler: History of Frederick the Great. Leipzig 1856, p. 471 Digital edition of the Trier University Library
  4. ↑ Gustav Kirstein : The life of Adolph Menzels . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1919, p. 50–53 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  5. ↑ Werner Busch: The necessary arabesque: appropriation of reality and stylization in German art of the 19th century . Gebrüder Mann Verlag, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-7861-1417-X .
  6. ^ Claude Keisch in: Adolph von Menzel 1815-1905 - The labyrinth of reality. Exhibition catalog, DuMont, Berlin / Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7701-3960-7 , p. 90 f.
  7. ↑ Lucius Grisebach in: Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Ed.): Art of the World in the Berlin Museums, State Museums of Prussian Cultural Heritage. Stuttgart / Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-76302007-1 , p. 36.
  8. ↑ Gabriela Walde: Adolph Menzel's “Balcony Room” from 1845 . In: Berliner Morgenpost . August 5, 2018 ( morgenpost.de ).
  9. ↑ literaturkritik.de
  10. ↑ Program 2012: Series “German Painting” Adolph Menzel - The Balcony Room.