Reverse glass painting

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"St. Barbara ”, probably Augsburg, 2nd half of the 18th century.
"Anna teaches Maria", Sandl / Upper Austria, 1st half of the 19th century.
Remembrance of the Dead, 1875

The term reverse glass painting covers glass pictures that are painted from the back of the glass plate and viewed from above. They differ in this from the stained glass known from church windows , which only develop their luminosity when viewed through. The design on the back of the flat glass panes intensifies the colors of the images behind the glass and gives them a lasting shine.

While some early examples of reverse glass painting are of the highest quality in terms of technique and execution, but have survived in negligibly small numbers, the religious-folk reverse glass paintings of the late 18th and 19th centuries found widespread use and are again very popular in the 20th century and have inspired imitation.

history

Techniques of reverse glass painting can be traced back to the high art of antiquity . The use of gold leaf played a special role here; more details are dealt with in the articles Zwischengoldglas and Églomisé . We learn more about the esteem in the Middle Ages and early modern times from the written sources than from the fragile objects themselves, of which only a few have survived to this day. Production increased in the 18th century, and in Holland and above all in Switzerland their own traditions developed, which can now be linked to a whole range of craftsmen's names. The center in Germany was Augsburg, here the profession was even integrated into the guild system. Series production according to external templates, division of labor , publishing system and extensive distribution channels were among the conditions in which these "bulk goods" were created. The export went as far as North and South America. Schematization and artistic decline were the result. But at the same time the pictorial execution of glass etchings ( églomisé ) swung into a temporary fashion in the epoch of classicism . In the color combination gold / black, individual amateurs, glass craftsmen and professional artists created individual murals and portraits.

Apart from that, however, the functions, production methods and image content of ordinary reverse glass painting changed fundamentally during this time. It became a branch of folk art. Glass was no longer a luxury material. For a rural buyer's market, specialized small and family businesses, often operating as a sideline in winter, produced behind-glass pictures, mostly devotional in character . These workshops were often found near glassworks.

New production sites appear around 1800: Murnau , Uffing and Seehausen around the Staffelsee, Rötenbach in the Black Forest, Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Palatinate and Lower Bavaria, Silesia, the places on the Upper Austrian-Bohemian border such as Sandl , Buchers , Schwertberg , Gratzen and Karlstift in the Waldviertel . In Sandl z. For example, families can produce up to 20,000 reverse glass pictures with different motifs within one winter.

The baroque models remained decisive for style and composition until well into the 19th century, albeit simplified into strongly colored, flat, perspective-free pictorial formulas that could be mastered by less experienced hands. The content of the presentation is almost without exception religious topics. Images of grace from places of pilgrimage, other types of devotional images , and depictions of individual saints predominate, biblical scenes are rarer.

As with the pictures made in Augsburg, the later products from the workshops near the hut, but rural workshops, were exported over long distances. The Bohemian and Upper Austrian pictures were sold by peddlers, so-called “Kraner” or “ Bandlkramer ” throughout the entire Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They were offered for sale in places of pilgrimage, at markets and by peddlers to be set up in house and path chapels and in the corner of the house. This private provision, as can also be seen from the picture themes, was more common than that for the church interior ( stations of the cross , ex voto ).

Reverse glass painting outside of the German-speaking area

A tradition of its own can be observed in Romania, where devotional images were created from Transylvania in the late 17th to early 20th centuries for the majority of the Greek Orthodox population. The rear glass technology is also not unknown in other regions. In her standard work on reverse glass painting, Gislind M. Ritz devotes separate, short chapters to the countries of Spain, Southern Italy, Turkey, Syria, Persia, India and China .

Reception in the modern age

In the age of industrialization, cheaper oil pressure displaced the popular reverse glass image, which was sidelined as unfashionable and artless. Between 1905 and 1917 Paul Klee's reverse glass paintings were created, but they did not make use of folk art motifs . In Murnau, however, Gabriele Münter was stylistically inspired by the place's reverse glass painting tradition, her partner Wassily Kandinsky , also from the artist group Der Blaue Reiter , created around 50 works there using this technique. The renunciation of perspective, the contouring, the reduction and abstraction of the forms also stimulated other artists of this generation such as August Macke and Heinrich Campendonk to try their hand at behind-glass paintings. Its popularization can be traced back to Max Picard and his book Expressionist Peasant Painting from 1917. But his idea of ​​rural-naive creativity developed outside of economic constraints is no longer accepted today.

Since then, collectors and museums have increased their interest in this art and contributed to researching its history. The trend towards nostalgia has given reverse glass painting a renewed interest since the 1970s, which was expressed in publications, exhibitions and on another level, in hobby courses on this subject. And again and again, even more recently, professional visual artists have found their adequate means of expression in reverse glass painting: The range extends from the folk, naive scenes by the Croatian painter Ivan Generalić (1914–1992) to the abstract color surfaces of the extensive series "Sindbad" (2008) and "Aladin" by internationally acclaimed Gerhard Richter .

technology

In contrast to a painting, the color is applied to the back of the picture carrier, whereby all motifs and lettering are painted the wrong way round and the sequence of the work steps is reversed: first the contours are drawn, then the hatching and shadows, lettering and details, then the motifs are painted and at the very end the background closes the rest of the picture. An aid in the serial production of popular reverse glass pictures were (also reversed) preliminary drawings, which lay under the processed glass plate and gave the painter the main lines. The painting materials used differ according to the work step, era and region: water, oil, tempera and casein colors, also in various combinations, are mentioned.

Special procedures

Amelation

For particularly valuable reverse glass paintings, which were created using gold etching and translucent colors for mostly feudal clients in the early modern period , the long-forgotten word amelation has been used again in recent years . Its technical structure consists of a layer of gold leaf on the glass side with erasures, which is back-painted with transparent lacquer and then covered with silver or tinfoil , which creates a jewel-like luster effect when viewed from the front , reminiscent of fine enamel and goldsmith work. In the course of the 16th century the use of gold leaf decreased compared to the other colors, so that the term was generally used for reverse glass painting in the 17th century before it disappeared completely from technical usage in the 18th century.

Églomisé

This special variant of reverse glass painting concerns works in which deposited gold leaf or other metal foils as well as etching techniques were used. The late antique examples belong to it and the glass etching is usually also part of amelated works.

Behind glass prints

By 1700 in Augsburg and in the second half of the 18th century in France engraving images were occasionally from paper to glass panels clapped and then, colored as usual. In England at the beginning of the 19th century , copperplate engravings printed on decals were transferred to glass plates, a process that was consistently used for decorated earthenware.

Mirror images

In the 18th century, mirrors were also processed into reverse glass pictures by scraping flat areas from the mercury coating on the back of the mirror and replacing them with pictures or frame decorations. The occasional term nun mirror for such objects is based on the fact that pleasing self-contemplation was frowned upon in nunneries and allegedly these mirrors, legitimized by pious picture additions, were more tolerated.

Museums

In Sandl , Upper Austria, there is a "Behind Glass Museum"; An extensive collection of reverse glass pictures (531 pictures from the period from 1770 to 1930) is in the Mühlviertel Castle Museum in Freistadt , further collections can be found in the Upper Austrian State Museum in Linz , in the Austrian Museum of Folklore in Vienna , in the Murnau Castle Museum , in the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Moscow, in the Folklore Museum in Prague, in the Musée alsacien de Haguenau .

Exhibitions

literature

  • Gislind M. Ritz: reverse glass painting. History appearance technology. Verlag Georg DW Callwey, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-7667-0227-0 .
  • Wolfgang Brückner and Wolfgang Schneider: Behind Glass Pictures , Würzburg 1990 (Collection of the Diocese of Würzburg)
  • Leopold Schmidt: Hinterglas , Salzburg 1972. (Collection of the Austrian Museum of Folklore, Vienna)
  • Simone Bretz: reverse glass painting , 2013 (technology, restoration)

Web links

Commons : reverse glass painting  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ritz: Hinterglasmalerei , p. 49
  2. ^ Ritz: Hinterglasmalerei , pp. 49–53.
  3. ↑ Characterized in detail by Ritz: Hinterglasmalerei pp. 6–36
  4. ^ Ritz: Hinterglasmalerei, pp. 34–36; C. Irimie et al. a .: Romanian behind glass icons , Bucharest and Berlin 1970.
  5. ^ Ritz: Hinterglasmalerei , pp. 36–40.
  6. ↑ Brückner: Hinterglasbilder , p. 13
  7. ↑ Other artists: Regina Reim (* 1965) in Speyer, Sylvia Oeggerli (* 1939) in Switzerland, Karl Manninger (1912–2002) in Pöcking, and many others.
  8. ↑ Nebojša Tomašević (Ed.): Yugoslavian Naive. Artists about themselves. Langewiesche, Königstein (im Taunus) 1974, ISBN 3-7845-8030-0 .
  9. ↑ List of works by Gerhard Richter
  10. ^ Schmidt: Hinterglas, ills. Pp. 9, 14, 19, 24, 29, 37.
  11. ↑ Ritz: Hinterglasmalerei , pp. 48–53.
  12. ↑ Amelierung and Églomisé: Wolfgang Steiner u. a .: Gold shine and silver splendor. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015. - Detailed information on the technology, including the rest of the reverse glass painting: Frieder Ryser and Brigitte Salmen: Amalized stucco on glass / Hinder glass painted histories and paintings, exhib. Cat. Murnau Castle 1997.
  13. ↑ Examples: Double-walled cup around 1560, Grünes Gewölbe , (Ulrike Weinhold and Simone Bretz: Kurfürstliche Trinkgefäß , Dresden 2015, digital only ). - State tankards with reverse glass painting, Wenzel Jamnitzer and Hans Jacob Sprüngli, before 1617, State Museum Schwerin , (digital) . The host bowl, ascribed to Hans Wertinger , acquired in 2008 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accessed: August 3, 2016) A picture of the bowl is also available in the online database of the Metropolitan Museum, with the option to enlarge the details (enter "Wertinger" as the keyword) : [1] .
  14. ↑ Johann Georg Krünitz's encyclopedia no longer knows the word in 1773, nor does Grimm's dictionary in 1852 .
  15. ↑ Brückner, Hinterglasbilder, pp. 22–23
  16. ↑ Lexikon der Kunst , Vol. 2, Leipzig 1971, article behind glass painting .
  17. ^ Brückner: Hinterglasbilder , pp. 23–26.