Weimar Prize Tasks

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From 1799 to 1805 , Johann Wolfgang Goethe announced a competition for the promotion of the visual arts under the name Weimar Prize Tasks . The winner of this art prize , which was initiated following Goethe's trip to Italy and under the influence of Winckelmann's enthusiasm for Greece, was supported, apart from a cash prize, by a review of his work by Johann Heinrich Meyer or Friedrich Schiller in the journal Die Propylaea .

The Propylaea

With the founding of the Propylaea, Goethe and Meyer expressly combined the intention of influencing the artists and connoisseurs of their time through art-historical research, through art-theoretical reflection and art-critical analysis in the sense of a classicist art program. Poetry and art should use models from classical antiquity to show how the individual could refine his character. The magazine was directed against Romanticism in its tendency . From 1802, the reviews appeared in a supplement to the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung , as the Propylaea had to cease publication due to a lack of sales.

The competition

conditions

The competition conditions were not changed during the whole time. Only drawings were assessed. Almost all of the topics presented come from the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer , there were few historical topics and only one without a mythological or historical background. What was required were the greatest simplicity and economy in the representation and in the execution a neat outline with the pen . Washes and the use of chalk were allowed.

In 1804 the prize was not awarded. At the same time, the Weimar exhibition showed drawings by Asmus Jakob Carstens , whose outstanding quality clearly declined the submitted works too much, so that an award was not made. The last award ceremony took place in 1805. Half of the prize was awarded to the young Caspar David Friedrich , the protagonist of romantic painting, whose landscape drawings, the procession at sunrise and the fisherman's hut by the lake, had nothing in common with the themes of the past.

Goal of the competition

The award tasks are to be seen as Goethe's attempt to influence the visual arts of his time. The idea arose out of nostalgic memories of his time in Rome, where in the company of artists, connoisseurs and art lovers, after discussing certain topics, the artists spontaneously carried out the work. The interaction of artists, connoisseurs and art lovers was seen by Goethe as a fruitful constellation for the development of art. The situation of a competition was nothing unusual: Philipp Otto Runge told Goethe about similar experiences at the academy in Copenhagen . Such a competition was also attractive to the artists insofar as the role of Goethe as a friend and promoter of the visual arts increased the status of the artist himself, in that Goethe pursued the intention to lead art itself to a higher degree of perfection and to make it more comprehensive Award educational value to society. The professional and career prospects for the graduates of the academies at the time were anything but rosy, as there was no economically and politically powerful center in Germany, which was organized as a small state, that could have attracted and financed the best artists, with the effect of increasing the general level and a role model for young artists.

Goethe's project can be seen as an attempt to establish an intellectual center in Weimar from which standards and guidelines - namely those of consistent classicism - were formulated and practiced, which in turn should become exemplary for the art world in Germany.

The intentions of Goethe and the works shown in the exhibitions were welcomed by the critics, but overall the artistic result was disappointing from today's perspective.

With the emergence of Romanticism, the artists distanced themselves from a classicism perceived as dry, stiff and top-heavy, as they saw it represented in Weimar, in order to turn to new fields - such as landscape painting and private, sensitive portraits .

Known participants

literature

  • The collector and his own. Hand drawings from Goethe's possession. Exhibition of the Goethe National Museum Weimar and the Casa di Goethe Rome in the City of Culture year 1999.
  • Andreas Beyer : Johann Heinrich Meyer censors award tasks. In: Gerhard Schuster u. Caroline Gille (Ed.): Repeated Reflections. Weimar Classic 1759–1832. Hanser Verlag Munich, Munich 1999, Volume 1, pp. 403-412.

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