The Silesian Weavers (painting)

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The Silesian Weavers (Carl Hübner)
The Silesian weavers
Carl Huebner , 1844
Oil on canvas
77.5 × 104.5 cm
Museum Kunstpalast , Düsseldorf

The Silesian Weavers is the title of a genre painting by Carl Huebner from 1844. In the picture, the painter referred to the hardship of workers in the textile industry in Silesia , whose precariousness erupted in a weaving revolt that same year , and shows weaver families , whose Goods are rejected by a publisher , drapery dealer or manufacturer due to allegedly poor quality or are only sold at low prices. In the painting there is a contrasting imperious demeanorProperty citizens with the fear of poor people for their livelihood. The Bergische textile entrepreneur's son and socialist thought leader Friedrich Engels said of the contemporary reception : "This painting ... understandably made some minds receptive to social ideas."

Description and meaning

The picture shows a scene rich in figures in the office of a wealthy cloth merchant or factory owner , in which homework weaver families have gathered . The landlord can the painter as an obese, conspicuously unsympathetic representatives of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie as on a ruler image of absolutism occur in the center of the left half. Behind him there is a glimpse into his elegant private office, where employees book incoming goods. A greyhound on a carpet at his feet and a carved armchair behind him also convey a high social status as status symbols . A younger man, probably the son of the house, leans casually against the wall and points with his hand to a roll of fabric that the weavers have just presented for inspection and payment. A burning cigarillo , which he holds between his fingers, expresses a certain disdain or indifference towards the product and its manufacturer.

With both hands the landlord grabs the white cloth from rolls of fabric, the folds of which are painterly arranged, like that of a drapery . He seems to let the goods on his left fall from his hand to the floor with disapproval and disapproval. The gem-studded gold ring on the outstretched index finger of this hand increases the expression of his gesture into arrogance and decadence. The grim, ice-cold look that the landlord throws arrogantly over his shoulder into the room suggests nothing good about the quality judgment and the purchase offer for the other roll of fabric still on the table. With a "20" on a handkerchief peeking out of the master's palette , the painter alludes to the Zwanziger & Sons company , the notorious Silesian textile company in Peterswaldau , against which a weavers revolted in June 1844.

A horrified weaver in green folk costume, shown with his wife and child in the center of the picture, tries to calm the landlord with a gesture, while his wife has already sunk on the floor and stares at the sky with glassy eyes. The couple's son is clutching his mother's arm, affected. The weaver's aged father, who has sat down on a box on the right edge of the picture, and other family members watch the tragic events in disbelief.

Further figures are distributed in the room, including the type of pedant who examines goods critically and anxious weavers, who sometimes make a worn-out and desperate impression, only pay a low price for their goods. Annoyed arguing with each other, two weavers, shown in the right half of the picture, go home with rejected goods. The painter depicts all of these people in a range of characters and physical forms of expression. The entire scene is spatially composed like a box set on which a drama is performed.

interpretation

The picture show of the Düsseldorf artists in the gallery room , 1844 - This group portrait of the Düsseldorf painting school by Friedrich Boser showsthe painting Hagar and Ismael by Christian Köhler in the middle of the wall of the gallery room . The figure of Hagar resembles Huebner's weaver's wife.

According to Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter , a 19th century doctor and writer who worked in Düsseldorf, Hübner became the “painter of the proletariat ” through this picture and soon afterwards such as the painting Charity in the hut of the poor , while Ute Ricke-Immel , an art historian born in 1938, despite all the artist's “courage to be socially committed” does not consider it justified to “ see in him one-sidedly the revolutionary socialist ”.

After Rolf Andree and Wend von Kalnein , art historians and curators in Düsseldorf, Hübner even distanced himself from his subject. In his weaver picture, the artist consciously resorted to the ironic means of exaggerated pathos. His satire will particularly evident in the figure of the executed sunken Weber wife. They interpret the academic grace of their sagging as a caricature , as does their spiritualized view of the sky, which is reminiscent of baroque depictions of saints and martyrs. They therefore believe that Hübner's picture only pretends to be social criticism, while in the background it is full of cryptic, parodistic allusions, for example to the painting Hagar and Ismael , which was created by Christian Köhler at the same time .

According to the art historian Lilian Landes, Hübner understood his social criticism in the sense of the "true socialists" who viewed the world from the perspective of German idealism and, while avoiding revolution and violence, strived to achieve pauperism through moral appeals, lived charity and a culture of charity to get rid of the world. In addition, Hübner's pathos corresponds to the common late romantic- academic stylistic devices such as theatricality and sentiment and is presented “in the full seriousness of conviction” and “without satire”. This contradicts the thesis of Andree and Kalnein.

According to Wolfgang Hütt , an art historian in the GDR, in his painting Hübner traced the social hardship of the weavers back to their causes and thus attacked capitalism . However, Hütt noticed that Huebner had taken a position of the liberal bourgeoisie on feudal legislation with his painting Das Jagdrecht, created in 1845 , and thus "swung into the general democratic movement from an almost proletarian point of view".

Emergence

Carl Hübner was a painter from the Düsseldorf School , who from 1841 had his own studio in Düsseldorf- Pempelfort . The city and its surrounding area were embedded in the revolutionary processes of industrialization . The British textile industry has been able to flood the continental European markets with cheap cotton textiles due to its advanced mechanization of the weaving and spinning process . The British model was soon also imitated by German entrepreneurs and opened modern textile factories. This led to the decline of traditional hand and home weaving and the impoverishment of those who worked there. The artists also grappled with the resulting social question , the pauperism of large sections of the population, in the Vormärz . Neither, however, like Heinrich Heine in his poem Die armen Weber , published in 1844, did Huebner place the plight of the weavers in the great macroeconomic context of technological and economic structural change , but rather portray it in his painting in a microeconomic and moralizing way : as a result of exploitation by hard-hearted representatives of the bourgeoisie .

It is possible that the painter suggested a literary model for his work, such as the blacksmith Blood Court , which an unknown author had written by mentioning the “Herr Zwanziger” by name. Around February 1844, Huebner began working on the weaver picture and completed it within a few weeks. Before that, on January 26th, the Düsseldorfer Zeitung was the first Rhenish newspaper to take up the plight of the Silesian weavers and quote from the Breslauer Zeitung : “It is therefore high time that our weavers were given serious and decisive help. Our weavers - I will say it again - die of hunger with their children if they are not helped! "

reception

The work was shown for the first time at the beginning of April 1844 in a charitable exhibition in the gallery room of the Düsseldorf Palace , which had been organized for the "benefit of the poorly poor mountain dwellers in Silesia". In a celebration in which the Düsseldorf Academy Director Wilhelm Schadow appeared as a speaker, the painting was also performed as a tableau vivant for charity purposes . In the spring of 1844 the painting went on tour and was also exhibited in other German cities. It caused a sensation. According to Ernst August Hagen, it was “besieged at the exhibition” in Berlin . Out of pity, visitors are said to have “made important orders for canvas with the poor weavers in Silesia”.

The painting corresponded to a current topic and anticipated the Silesian weavers' uprising in the Owl Mountains , which occurred in early June 1844. When the weavers' revolt broke out, the picture only acquired the political dimension that established the reputation of its creator. Soon he was regarded as "an artist whose works clearly reflect the excitement of the times and social issues".

In the Kölnische Zeitung the picture was discussed as "socialist and consequently contemporary" because - according to the critic - "symbolizes the striving of our epoch to abolish the sharp class difference". Other art critics rejected the picture as unpleasant agitation, alien to true art, and instead coined the pejorative term trend painting . Friedrich Engels in turn praised the painting because he said that it "agitated more effectively for socialism than a hundred pamphlets."

Since Hübner's composition contained central elements of the bourgeois and early socialist criticism of the possessing industrialist, part of the contemporary discussion revolved around the portrayal of the main character as a prototype of a “money bag” and the question of morally correct entrepreneurship. In addition, Hübner's “Geldsack” depiction created a pattern for later designs of this type in art and literature, for example for the figure of the manufacturer in Gerhart Hauptmann's drama Die Weber .

Lithographs after the first version were created by Carl Wildt in 1845 and by Gustav Feckert in 1847 .

Provenance

Hübner painted the picture in two versions in 1844 and a third in 1846. The first version is now in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn , the second in the Museum Kunstpalast , the third in the German Historical Museum Berlin . The Düsseldorf version probably got through Johann Gottfried Böker to his Düsseldorf Gallery in New York City , where it was on view in 1851 and 1855. From a North American private collection, it came back into the art trade, so that it could be acquired in 1976 with the support of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia .

literature

  • Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter : Düsseldorf artists from the last twenty-five years. Art history letters . Rudolph Weigel, Leipzig 1854, p. 294 ff. ( Digitized version ).
  • Ernst August Hagen : German art in our century. A series of lectures with explanatory notes . Verlag von Heinrich Schindler, Berlin 1857, part 2, p. 16 ff. ( Google Books ).
  • Wend von Kalnein : The Silesian Weavers, 1844 . In: Wend von Kalnein: The Düsseldorf School of Painting . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1979, ISBN 3-8053-0409-9 , p. 344 f. (Cat. No. 110).
  • Wolfgang Hütt : The Düsseldorf School of Painting 1819–1869 . VEB EA Seemann Buch- und Kunstverlag, Leipzig 1984, p. 194 f.
  • Christina von Hodenberg : revolt of the weavers. The 1844 revolt and its rise to myth . Verlag JHW Dietz, Bonn 1997, ISBN 3-8012-3073-2 , p. 155 ff.
  • Lilian Landes: Carl Wilhelm Huebner (1814–1879). Genre and contemporary history in the German pre-March period (= art studies, volume 149). Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-42206-788-2 .
  • Lilian Landes: Aestheticization of the social in the German pre-March. Carl Wilhelm Huebner's socio-thematic genre painting . In: Lutz Hieber , Stephan Moebius (Hrsg.): Aestheticization of the social. Advertising, Art and Politics in the Age of Visual Media . transcript, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8376-1591-3 , p. 153 f. ( Google Books ).
  • Lilian Landes: "... a new subject in the genre". The socially critical genre image of the Düsseldorf School of Painting in an international comparison . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, pp. 201 ff.
  • Kathrin DuBois: The Silesian Weavers, 1844 . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 2, p. 304 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Engels: Rapid progress of communism in Germany. (pdf) In: Marx-Engels-Werke , Volume 2. S. 511 , accessed on September 22, 2020 .
  2. ^ Ute Ricke-Immel: The Düsseldorf genre painting . In: Wend von Kalnein (Ed.), P. 157
  3. ↑ Wend von Kalnein, p. 345
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter, p. 296
  5. ↑ Ute Ricke-Immel, p. 157
  6. ^ Irene Markowitz , Rolf Andree: Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule . Picture booklet of the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, new edition, Düsseldorf 1977, no.13
  7. ^ Wend von Kalnein, pp. 344 f.
  8. ^ Lilian Landes: Aestheticization of the social in the German Vormärz. Carl Wilhelm Huebner's socio-thematic genre painting . In: Lutz Hieber , Stephan Moebius (Hrsg.): Aestheticization of the social. Advertising, Art and Politics in the Age of Visual Media . transcript, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8376-1591-3 , p. 171 ( Google Books )
  9. ↑ Lilian Landes: "... a new subject in the genre". The socially critical genre image of the Düsseldorf School of Painting in an international comparison . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 203
  10. ↑ Wolfgang Hütt, p. 195
  11. ^ There is a court here in town (Das Blutgericht) , website in the portal volksliederarchiv.de , accessed on August 15
  12. ^ Lilian Landes: Carl Wilhelm Huebner (1814–1879). Genre and contemporary history in the German pre-March period . Munich / Berlin 2008, p. 529.
  13. ↑ Düsseldorfer Zeitung , issue No. 26 of January 26, 1844.
  14. ↑ Düsseldorfer Kreisblatt , issue No. 92 of April 2, 1844
  15. ↑ Ernst August Hagen , p. 17
  16. ^ Friedrich Schaarschmidt : On the history of Düsseldorf art, especially in the XIX. Century . Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, Düsseldorf 1902, p. 170 ff. ( Digitized version )
  17. ^ Rudolf Philippi : News about paintings . In: August Hagen (Ed.): New Prussian Provincial Leaves . Königsberg 1847, p. 487 f. ( Google Books )
  18. ^ Friedrich Engels: Rapid progress of communism in Germany. (pdf) In: Marx-Engels-Werke , Volume 2. P. 510 , accessed on September 22, 2020 .
  19. ↑ Christina von Hodenberg : The curse of the money bag. The rise of the industrialist as a challenge to bourgeois values . In: Manfred Hettling , Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (eds.): The bourgeois sky of values. Interior views of the 19th century . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 3-525-01385-X , p. 79 ff. ( Google Books )
  20. ↑ Kathrin DuBois, p. 305