The Watzmann (painting)
The Watzmann is the title of an oil painting by Caspar David Friedrich from 1824/25, the time of Romanticism in the visual arts. It shows the Watzmann massiffrom the perspective of Berchtesgaden in the northeast. The picture isexecuted using thepainting technique oil on canvas and, with a size of 136 cm × 170 cm, is one of Friedrich's greatest works. In 1937 it was acquired by the Berlin Alte Nationalgalerie under questionable circumstances and is now part of the exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie.
Image content and interpretation
Caspar David Friedrich was never in the Alps, but showed a great interest in mountains and mountain ranges. His surprisingly realistic depiction of the Watzmann is based on a watercolor study by his pupil Johann August Heinrich from 1821, which was made in Italy a year before Heinrich's death. Friedrich was also familiar with Ludwig Richter's Watzmann picture , exhibited today in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich , whose character of an idyllic, atmospheric conception, which many artist colleagues of the Romantic era considered indispensable, he rejected. The viewpoint of the viewer of his oil painting technique is northeast of the mountain, the sun is in the southwest and shines on the western flank. Friedrich's strict composition consists of triangles that form several mountain peaks that lie in the depths of the landscape and rise higher and higher. The climax are the two peaks and snowfields of the mountain, which are illuminated in the glaring midday sunlight, which rise to the upper edge of the picture and almost burst the format. The lighting, from the deepest black of the rock crevices in the foreground on the left, to the pure white of the highest peak, directs the gaze up to the divine. In the center of the picture is a small island made of layered rock, animated with grass growth, small trees and bushes in the otherwise inanimate sea of rocks of the scenery. For this, Friedrich used his own drawing, which he made in 1811 during a trip to the Harz Mountains , and other sheets that have now disappeared. According to Wieland Schmied , the former chief curator of the Berlin National Gallery, sketches from the Giant Mountains have also been incorporated into the Watzmann picture.
Ludwig Richter compared landscape painting with music, in which the imagination, the whole human spirit, is excited and has space to frolic about in the beautiful climes . Caspar David, however, went beyond this romantic view of a musical aspect by demanding a picture for his high demands on painting that is able to depict the sublimity and inaccessibility of the divine being and writes: So man is not set as an unconditional model for man but the divine, infinite is its goal. It's art, not the artist, what he should strive for! Art is infinite, finally of all artists' knowledge and ability. The art historian and Friedrich connoisseur Helmut Börsch-Supan sees the Watzmann picture as a symbol of God, as was often the case in the early 19th century . The eternal ice of the glaciers is a parable for God's eternity. Friedrich was never in the Alps, he used several drawings and sketches of different mountains for his work, a common practice of other artists. According to Friedrich's conception of art, nature is only a means, the truth content of the picture is not damaged, but clearly proves his symbolic thinking. The inaccessible mountain, shining in white light, becomes a symbol of divine majesty for him .
Review and exhibitions
Caspar David's contemporaries could not follow these lines of thought; Ludwig Richter's image with its binding conception of nature was preferred. The complete loneliness of Friedrich's Watzmann picture was eerie to them. In 1826 the art critic Carl Töpfer criticized the lack of a view of the valley . The art historian and patron Johann Gottlob von Quandt , himself a Friedrich collector, criticized the painter for not studying nature enough , and for not unfolding his imagination freely enough .
The Watzmann was first shown at the Dresden academy exhibition in 1825 under the title A Mountain Region (cat. No. 644). The art association in Hamburg presented the picture in 1826 with the title Great Tyroler Gebirgslandschaft (Cat. No. 47). In the same year it moved on to the Berlin Academy exhibition . Halberstadt followed in May 1832 ( Tyroler Gebirgslandschaft , cat. No. 72) and in the same year the Kunstverein Braunschweig ( mountain area with the Watzmann , cat. No. 66). Since 2001, after the gallery was completely renovated, the picture has been shown in the Friedrichsaal of the Alte Nationalgalerie on Berlin's Museum Island .
Provenance
The picture with the current inventory number A II 895, NG H 4 belonged to Senator Carl Friedrich Pogge from Greifswald after 1832 , later it was inherited by Adolf Gustav Barthold Georg von Pressentin (1814–1879), Rostock. After his death, it went to the Jewish art collector Martin Brunn from Berlin, who, under National Socialist pressure, had to sell it to the National Gallery for 25,000 Reichsmarks in 1937 in order to finance his family's escape to the USA. Adolf Hitler granted 10,000 Reichsmarks, also with regard to his domicile on Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden near the Watzmann massif, but the state retained the proceeds from the sale as a so-called Jewish property tax . Towards the end of the Second World War, Der Watzmann was outsourced to protect against bomb attacks. From 1968 the painting was exhibited first in the New National Gallery and later in Charlottenburg Palace.
In 1999, Martin Brunn's community of heirs in New York was awarded the picture again as part of a so-called restitution of looted art . In 2002 the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation reached an agreement with the heirs, DeKaBank , through the intermediary of the Kulturstiftung der Länder , legally bought the picture at a price below the market value and made it available on permanent loan to the Berlin National Gallery.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich, paintings, prints and pictorial drawings, Munich 1973, No. 264, 317 u. 402
- ^ Wieland Schmied: Caspar David Friedrich , Cologne 1975, p. 104 ff.
- ↑ Ludwig Richter on January 30, 1825 in: Memoirs of a German Painter , Frankfurt am Main 1885, p. 368
- ↑ Sigrid Hinz (ed.): Caspar David Friedrich in Letters and Confessions , Berlin 1968, p. 83
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich, paintings, prints and pictorial drawings, Munich 1973, no. 330
- ↑ Hans Gerhard Hannessen: Paintings of the German Romanticism in the National Gallery Berlin , Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, p. 44
- ↑ Anonymous: Literarisches Conversationsblatt Leipzig 1825, p. 880
- ↑ Carl Töpfer in: Originalien from the realm of truth, art mood and fantasy, No. 10 : First art exhibition in Hamburg , Hamburg 1826, p. 437 fu 443 f.
- ↑ Artistisches Notizenblatt , Dresden 1825, p. 81
- ↑ Internet page picture index
- ↑ Cicero Online website of July 29, 200 (accessed on July 14, 2018)
- ↑ Article in the Berliner Morgenpost from June 10, 2008