TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012389/01238900.062

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.8 KB | 112 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.