The Berlin-Potsdamer Bahn

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The Berlin-Potsdamer Bahn (Adolph von Menzel)
The Berlin-Potsdamer Bahn
Adolph von Menzel , 1847
Oil on canvas
42 × 52 cm
Old National Gallery , Berlin

The Berlin-Potsdamer Bahn is a painting from the early creative phase of Adolph von Menzel from 1847. In a painting style that anticipates Impressionism, it depicts a section of the Berlin-Potsdam Railway, which opened in 1838, southwest of Berlin city center. It is in German painting the first painting to depict a railroad train in the countryside. The work has been part of the collection of the Berlin Old National Gallery since 1899 .

Description and interpretation

Topographically, the picture does not represent exactly the curve to the southwest of the then single-track Berlin-Potsdamer Bahn, the first line in Prussia, near today's Gleisdreieck . The painter's position was roughly the elevation near Schöneberger Großgörschenstrasse south of the Route. At that time, the area was still undeveloped, but it was already planned for the major expansion of Berlin and looked accordingly desolate after it was abandoned for agricultural and horticultural use. The picture in the middle distance is dominated by an extremely large, dark group of trees. The silhouette of Berlin's city center can be seen on the horizon; the two domes are the German and French Domes on Gendarmenmarkt, but only hinted at by Menzel's fleeting brushwork.

Menzel was the first artist in Germany to recognize this wasteland in front of the city gates at the beginning of industrialization with its railroad as a means of transport and travel as a painterly motif. The railway track changed the formerly rural area. Modern technology at the beginning of the industrial revolution is viewed positively. Smoke, steam and the speed of the locomotive with its train create an intended atmospheric interaction in Menzel's picture. In this picture, however, the purely technical takes a back seat in favor of the atmospheric effect. The picture thus stands in complete contrast to a painting created by Menzel's painter friend Karl Eduard Biermann in the same year for the Borsig locomotive factory . Biermann's picture realistically shows not only the smoking factory, but also the transport of a new locomotive by horse and carriage on the factory site, which at that time had no siding ( Die Borsigsche Maschinenbau-Anstalt , 1847, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin ).

Background and story

Pencil drawing from 1845, which is considered a preliminary study for the completed painting. Menzel depicts the route without a train, but with a group of people on the level crossing

In the 1840s, Menzel created several pictures on the subject of railways, including a view of the Anhalter Bahnhof in the moonlight (1846; Museum Oskar Reinhart , Winterthur). In the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett there is a pencil drawing from 1845 , which is to be regarded as a forerunner and study for this picture, but shows no train on the track. Menzel had known the railroad since the 1830s when he had the opportunity to work as a lithographer in his father's workshop to copy English railroad motifs, some of which are based on models by Thomas Talbot Bury (1811 - 1877). As a 17-year-old Menzel had the opportunity to draw a lithograph showing two English railroad cars for the Berliner Kinderwochenblatt dated October 7, 1832.

The painting is Menzel's only representation of a railway in the landscape. Three years earlier, William Turner's painting Rain, Steam and Speed ​​- The Great Western Railway ( National Gallery in London ) was created, the description of which Menzel probably knew because it was discussed, albeit cautiously, in Berlin. In contrast to Turner, whose image, romantically and dreamily, elevates reality into the supernatural and ends in a vision, Menzel remains prosaic and depicts a situation. Later, as far as the railroad was concerned, he dealt with the depiction of travelers in the compartment in a realistic manner, i.e. his later interior painting . Examples are Yawning Gentleman in a Railway Coupé (1859, pastel painting , Kupferstichkabinett Berlin) and a gouache with the title On the journey through beautiful nature from 1892 (private property).

Adolph Menzel had a friend in Potsdam, the military doctor Wilhelm Puhlmann, whom he often visited by train and to whom he gave this picture. After Puhlmann's death in 1882, his heirs sold it to the Bremen printmaker Hermann Henrich Meier junior , who swapped it for prints and lithographs from Menzel's cycle The Army of Frederick the Great . Then it came into the Berlin art trade. Hugo von Tschudi , director of the Berlin National Gallery, was impressed by Menzel's picture and in 1899 bought it from the art dealer R. Wagner as the only one from the artist's early work, because he recognized that it was a special painting that was already characteristic Anticipated elements of later French Impressionism . This is particularly evident in the quick brushstroke that does not allow for realistic details, in the application of paint, predominantly sepia brown , in the use of light and in the slight topographical imprecision of the composition, which makes it difficult to identify the individual buildings. Tschudi described the painting as follows:

“Foreground and the group of trees in resinous brown on a white background, so that the white shines through. Yellow and reddish tones appear on the right. The railroad track purple gray. The plain on the left dirty green, on the right brown. The houses wiped light brown-red. White sky with gray clouds. - Marked below right: AM 1847. "

Julius Meier-Graefe wrote in 1906 about the picture: “In the first joy, the picture was ascribed more charms than the author put into it.” And continues, “... has an extremely beneficial effect compared to the smooth painting of well-known pictures; but the whole thing is too poor. ”Today's art history, however, sees the picture as a masterpiece, albeit in different interpretations. Sigrid Achenbach considers the picture to be a “high point in German art”. Contrary to most of the other views, according to which Adolph Menzel was thoroughly fond of technical progress and thus of the railroad, Hajo Düchting and Karin Sagner-Düchting take the view that the image conveys a "discomfort with technical progress" associated with the emerging industrial age.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • International art exhibition , Düsseldorf, Städtischer Kunstpalast , May 1 to October 23, 1904
  • Exhibition of the century of German art , exhibition of German art from the period 1775–1875, Königliche National-Galerie Berlin, January to May 1906
  • Adolph Menzel. For the 120th birthday and 30th anniversary of the artist's death. Prussian Academy of Arts, National Gallery, Berlin, February to March 1935
  • A millennium of German art. Masterpieces from the Berlin museums. New Museum and State Museum, Wiesbaden, June to August 1952
  • Berlin panorama. Kunsthaus, Zurich, April 1959 and Panorama Berlinois. Vu par les peintres 1750-1950. Galerie Creuze, Paris, April 18 to May 14, 1961
  • Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, between romanticism and impressionism. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, September 15, 1996 to January 5, 1997
  • Menzel and Berlin. A homage. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, March 11 to June 5, 2005
  • Art in the Age of Steam. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, April 18 to August 10, 2008

literature

  • Guido Josef Kern: From Menzel's youth: on the centenary of his birthday on December 8, 1915. In: The art for everyone: painting, sculpture, graphics, architecture. Issue 5/6, December 1, 1915, pp. 81-104 (illustration p. 94 uni-heidelberg.de ) and description p. 98 ( uni-heidelberg.de ).
  • Andreas Conrad: The first railway line between Berlin and Potsdam opened 180 years ago . In: Der Tagesspiegel . October 29, 2018 ( tagesspiegel.de ).
  • Claude Keisch, Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher (eds.): Adolph Menzel: 1815–1905. The labyrinth of reality. DuMont, Berlin / Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7701-3960-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Directory of paintings and sculptures in the Royal National Gallery in Berlin . IT middle u. Sohn, Berlin 1914, p. 87 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ Claude Keisch, Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher (ed.): Adolph Menzel: 1815–1905. The labyrinth of reality . DuMont, Berlin / Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7701-3960-7 , pp. 115 ff . (Paris, Musée d'Orsay, April 15 - July 28, 1996; Washington, National Gallery of Art, September 15, 1996 - January 5, 1997; Berlin, National Gallery in the Altes Museum, February 7 - May 11, 1997) .
  3. ^ Marie Ursula Riemann in: From Caspar David Friedrich to Adolph Menzel. Watercolors and drawings of the Romantic period, from the National Gallery Berlin / GDR (catalog for the exhibition from January 31 to April 21, 1990 in East Berlin and Vienna). Prestel Verlag Munich 1990, ISBN 3-7913-1047-X , p. 240 f.
  4. ↑ Detailed description of the picture in the database of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
  5. ^ Uwe Schaper : Description (PDF) for the Historical Commission in Berlin.
  6. ^ Hugo von Tschudi: Menzel, Adolph von . In: Exhibition of German art from 1775–1875 in the Royal National Gallery, Berlin 1906 . F. Bruckmann, Munich 1906, p. 376 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive - No. 1144: The Berlin-Potsdamer Bahn , with illustration).
  7. ↑ Julius Meier-Graefe: The young Menzel . Insel, Leipzig 1906 digital version of the Heidelberg University Library
  8. ^ Sigrid Achenbach: Adolph Menzel: radically real . Exhibition catalog of the Kunsthalle and the HypoKulturstiftung Munich in cooperation with the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7774-4175-7 , p. 114
  9. ↑ Hajo Düchting and Karin Sagner-Düchting: The painting of German impressionism. Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-7701-2980-6 , p. 50
  10. ↑ Guido Joseph Kern: The German exhibition of the century: a memory sheet . Edmund Meyer, Berlin 1906, p. 26 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).