TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/012389/01238900.062

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 97 lines

ART, Page 62

Tracing God's Fingerprint

A fascinating show brings German Romantic drawings to the fore

By Robert Hughes


    There was a time when right-thinking modernists hardly thought
about the first half of the 19th century at all. For them, pretty
well everything painted or sculpted between the French Revolution
of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848 was the art from which
modernism, as the phrase went, "freed itself" -- a dim if permanent
background to the ongoing drama of the new.

    Does anyone share this illusion of a radical break today? Not
likely. Precisely because the 19th century (except for
impressionism and its consequences) was once shunned, for the past
20 years it has been the curator's mother lode. This new curiosity
radiates not only from grand exhibitions like those of Degas and
Courbet, but also from others more modest in size, like "The
Romantic Spirit: German Drawings, 1780-1850," which is on view at
the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City through Jan. 29.

    This fascinating show deals with an area of art about which
most non-Germans know next to nothing.  Beethoven, of course,
everyone knows.  Goethe is more invoked than read. But one would
be hard pressed to find much public recognition of their
contemporaries in painting. There is Caspar David Friedrich,  the
darling of the art historians, with his cloaked and silent
watchers, his chilly crags and moonstruck ships.  But Philipp Otto
Runge? Carl Gustav Carus? Franz Pforr and Julius Schnorr von
Carolsfeld? Johann Overbeck?  Franz Horny or Adrian Zingg?  Not
household names, exactly -- yet interesting and sometimes
remarkable artists, all the same. Hence the Morgan's show fills a
distinct gap. None of the drawings and watercolors in it have been
seen in America before; they are all lent from two great
collections in the German Democratic Republic, the Nationalgalerie
in East Berlin and the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden.

    To browse through this show is to be vividly reminded of the
continuities in the past two centuries of German art. Some are not
altogether welcome. That gentle, scholarly neoclassicist Johann
Tischbein, the friend and portraitist of Goethe, would have been
aghast to see what German state culture in the 1930s got up to --
and yet the first item in this show, his elaborate drawing entitled
The Power of Man, 1786, showing a hunter and his young companion
on horseback dragging home the carcasses of a lion and a huge
eagle, predicts many of the elements of Nazi classicism if not its
overweening vulgarity. The taste for earnest, portentous and
sentimental allegory, which now and then muddies the work of even
the best German artists in the postwar years -- Joseph Beuys,
Anselm Kiefer -- is well and truly installed by the early 1800s in
the elaborate metaphorical drawings and prints of Runge. His paeans
to innocence, with their flying babies and virgins and lilies,
waver close to visionary kitsch. And of course the attitudes to
nature and society that permeate German expressionism were not
invented in the 20th century: they are Romanticism topped up with
more anxiety.

    These earlier German Romantics found an obsessive imagery in
innocence, whether that of childhood or the supposed moral calm of
rural life. Recoiling from industrialization (the first steam pump,
the catalog notes, wheezed into action in the Ruhr in 1789, and by
1849 there were almost 2,000 steam engines in Prussia alone), they
rediscovered the Volk just as Wordsworth and Constable did with
their country idylls. The Germans' pictures were filled with
gnarled trees, old walls, villages unchanged since the Middle Ages.
A favorite spot for Germans studying in Italy was Olevano, a hill
town not far from Rome, where the Nazarenes, a group roughly
equivalent to the English Pre-Raphaelites, liked to convene.

    There was a moral value in being close to the soil, since
nature was the source of all allegory and the direct fingerprint
of God. Nature could stir the broadest emotions so long as it was
rendered with scrupulous fidelity. Hence the special character of
so much German Romantic landscape drawing, as in the work of Joseph
Anton Koch or Friedrich: the impaction of vast amounts of detail
into panoramic scenes.  One sees both close up and for miles, with
the focus equal everywhere. The ideal was a Goethean panorama in
which sublimity and scientific curiosity were inextricably mingled.
Among the Nazarenes, like Schnorr, the desire for precision became
almost hallucinatory, with every stroke of the pen given the
steeliness of a Durer engraving. But the best moments of broad-view
landscape occurred where the elements most nakedly met -- on
mountain peaks, or at the edge of the sea, as in Friedrich's
wonderfully evocative drawing Rocky Shore with Anchor, 1835-37,
with its broad tranquil planes of water, rocks and sky.

    Where does classicism end and Romanticism start? The impulses
interweave, within the life of one artist and sometimes in the same
work. Karl Friedrich Schinkel's buildings, like the Altes Museum
in Berlin (1822-30), were the very essence of neoclassicism, strict
and canonical, their design underwritten by extreme tenacity in the
refinement of detail. Yet as a young man in the mountains, on his
way to Rome in 1803, he used generalization to express his yearning
for the infinite. The twin blue peaks of the Bohemian Mittelgebirge
that he worked up into a watercolor from sketches two years later
-- Mountain Range in Bohemia at Sunset, circa 1805 -- are mere
silhouettes, as is the dark fringe of pines in the foreground. But
that is the source of their visual power. Such drawings warn you
that words like classic and Romantic are, indeed, leaky containers.