EXHIBITION REVIEWS and located anything that looks Biedermeier in a bourgeois milieu. The traditional view has recently come under damaging scrutiny. Dr Haidrun Zinnkann in a study of furniture produced in Mainz - an important centre of manu- facture - has looked at cabinet-makers' order books, finding that it was the aris- tocracy who first commissioned pieces in Biedermeier style. Only around 1830 did the local Mainz middle classes, copying their 'social betters', approach manufac- turers for such furniture.2 What of Biedermeier in Munich? Here, the Stadtmuseum collection is important because so many of its 300-odd Biedermeier pieces can be dated, and their history documented. To be more precise, the mu- seum has fallen heir to a good deal of furniture from the residences of the former ruling house ofWittelsbach. Between 1806 and 1815 the Wittelsbachs commissioned large numbers of pieces in a style that can only be described as Biedermeier (Fig.76). This furniture was for everyday use, while grander rooms were decorated in Empire style. Thus in Munich Biedermeier appears a full decade before 'it should'. It was in- troduced by a court that also had a taste for French furnishings, and the work was not executed by craftsmen in the town 76. Biedermeierchair, but by the royal cabinet-maker, Daniel, c. 1806-15. and his sub-contractor. (The evidence Height92/46 cm, breadth46.5/44.5 cm. presented to support this is so overwhelm- as to be (Exh. Stadtmuseum, ing incontestable.) Moreover, Munich). enough is known about Munich in this period to be able to say how Biedermeier over from spilled the ruling house into the travellers reached Munich, but they took 2H. ZINNKANN:Mainzer Miibelschreiner der ersten Hdlfte homes of a surrounding circle of high public time to do so. Of course, styles were adapted des neunzehntenJahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, officials and the upper-middle classes, to to meet local requirements, although less 1985). See also OTTOMEYER:'Von Stilen und Stinden acquire later a still wider following. on aesthetic grounds than for reasons of der Biedermeierzeit', in BiedermeiersGliick und Ende, The Mainz-Munich pattern in the spread cost and the of exotic cited above. The present writer was shown this vol- difficulty importing ume when it was still in and of the Biedermeier style - courts and aris- woods. The extensive use of deal and proof, is, therefore, the trend - would seem as well as the of unable to provide page references. tocracy setting cherrywood, types veneer, 3c. MOLL:'Zwischen Handwerk und Unternehmertum to have been the case. In are best terms of what local generally Vienna, explained in - Das Leben Johann Georg Hiltl (1771-1845) the court had Biedermeier furniture as cabinet-makers had to hand. early Tapazierer, M6belhiindler und M6belfabrikant,'in as 1800. It may also be said that the great Besides showing Biedermeier furniture BiedermeiersGliick und Ende, cited above. centres of Biedermeier were not the free in reconstructed period rooms, the exhi- cities ruled by the Biirgertumbut those with bition seeks to bring two general themes a royal residence, such as Vienna, Berlin before the public. Firstly, 1815-48 was not and Munich. All of which makes admirable an idyllic or even especially contented sense when viewed in a more general con- period in the history of the city. Secondly, New York, Museum of Modern Art text. The Bavarian capital, like the Prussian Biedermeier was far from being the only Roy Lichtenstein's drawings and Austrian, belonged to a conservative style in favour; in these years Munich also kingdom, ruled by a stern bureaucracy that saw Empire, neo-classical, mock-gothic, For the first time in its history, the Mu- gave the middle classes and, even more, neo-baroque and various hybrids thereof, seum of Modern Art has mounted an the craftsmen - including the cabinet- including after c. 1835 baroque-influenced exhibition of drawings by a living artist makers - a very hard time of it.3 That Biedermeier. There was a similar variety (15th March to 2nd June). Only Picasso these layers of society were living in quiet in schools of art. and Matisse have had their works in this confidence and giving free expression to The term Biedermeier has become a medium featured before, and then posthum- their own taste, is a fiction invented by synonym for conventionality. Amongst ously. Therefore, Roy Lichtenstein's draw- those who wished to see in Biedermeier a the portraits on show - some of which do ings must be extraordinary, or so we are German national style. indeed depict early-Victorian domestic led to expect. And yet in her initial para- In truth, Biedermeier can no longer be harmony - there is one by Kaulbach of graph-long analysis of the artist's 1961 regarded as peculiarly German. The Lola Montez that points up the paradoxes drawing of an airplane - a pivotal work Wittelsbach court which brought the style involved. Her name and protestations of created when he was thirty-eight years to Bavaria, for instance, was deeply influ- respectability notwithstanding, Lola was old and had been exhibiting in galleries enced by the 'modesty' of the Enlighten- Irish and won great notoriety as King for a decade - curator Bernice Rose uses ment, and in the throes of anglomania. Its Ludwig I's mistress. Not all the many the adjective 'awkward' four times to de- preference for simple furniture - although strands of the Biedermeier period in the scribe Lichtenstein's lines and the word Bavarian were of by no means an exclusive preference - capital expressions bour- 'dumb' twice about the composition.1 was part and parcel of all this. And, in geois piety. These are certainly not adjectives one European terms, Munich was provincial. MICHAELG. EKSTEIN might apply to the drawings of Picasso Prints showing Hepplewhite and Sheraton or Matisse, masters of the art of making - and French furniture in the English man- 'BiedermeiersGliick und Ende .. . diegestiirte Idylle 1815- beautiful lines, as Ingres, according to ner - as well as reports of diplomats and 1848(Munich, 1987), edited by HansOttomeyer. Degas, defined drawing.

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is diminished more, art or humanism. Throughout the exhibition, one is aware of the hard and the mechanical. Each drawing serves a purpose; it will be mech- anically enlarged into a painting. Then too, a large number of his images are con- cerned with design - interior decoration from curtains to mirrors and dishes, archi- tectural moldings and railings, and Art Deco patterns and posters. In fact, the conjunction of his temperament and tech- nique finds its perfect subject in the Entab- latures, the most mechanical images of all. Here the 'dumb' lifeless lines are appro- priate to the inert, beaux-artscontent. Interestingly, Fernand LU'ger (with whom Lichtenstein obviously feels some kinship since the independent cubist is the most frequent source of his borrowings), manages to evoke the marvels of the mech- anical age and yet maintain, in his draw- ings, the full range of the medium's aesthetic for giving pleasure. LUger's drawn struc- tures are firm to the point of toughness, yet his pencil leaves a silver screen of dust on the paper as though it were blown there. Leager'sfinely-tuned compositions are rife with subtleties, and so are the ways in which he individualises the separate units that comprise his precisely-fitted structures. By comparison Lichtenstein is merely a competent post-cubist composer whose work would seem quite dull if it were not for the jazzy images he has appropriated from a wide range of twentieth-century sources in both high and low art. His fac- 77. Fingerpointing, by Roy Lichtenstein. 1961. Ink on paper, 76.2 by 57.2 cm. ture is non-existent, his colour boringly (Kiki Kogelnik collection; exh. Museum of Modern Art, New York). predictable, the transformation of his means into aesthetically satisfying substances nil. De Kooning's pencil leaves a residue of Rose describes Lichtenstein's drawing old-fashioned ideas about modulation, quicksilver; Johns's the velvety nap of style as crude, amateurish and unsophisti- nuance or grace, thereby providing a per- graphite, but Lichtenstein's pencil simply cated - words that indeed spring to the fect grounding for Lichtenstein's cold, de- deposits lead on the paper. Although the mind again and again as one studies over personalised mature style. Sherman was an catalogue reproductions hype-up the colour 300 images included in this exhibition. A engineering draughtsman and encouraged (as such reproductions are wont to do), number of the smaller, earlier drawings are Lichtenstein to study that technique as one remains aware of its overall sameness. exhibited on canted viewing tables covered well, which the younger man did, making Even in the complicated multiple-source with beige fabric in the way old master his living at mechanical drawing until 1957 pictures of the late seventies and the eighties drawings are displayed in the Fitzwilliam while continuing to paint on the side. where swiss-cheese biomorphism converts Museum. But Lichtenstein's works are com- Originally Lichtenstein's 'fine' art was figure and wall, landscape and door into pletely unconcerned with the properties painted in a loosely representational cubist perforated planes, the pictures don't really and aesthetic satisfactions of drawing as it style, but during the fifties he gradually come to life. They are neither frighteningly has always been. What then is their value? adopted the prevailing expressionist mode surreal nor patently humorous. In fact Why is he being honoured with this major of paint handling. Given the evident diffi- genuine humour is as lacking in his work exhibition? The curator is quick to tell us. culties he has with subjective, personal as passion. Perhaps both are too revealing. It is because of the artist's rejection of the expression - as can be seen in the rare in- As Bernice Rose points out, his style of 'principles of composition and technique' stances of'doodle' drawing in the exhibition drawing is concerned with containment, and, in fact, of 'the whole tradition and and in the flaccid clumsiness of his recent, not gesture, and a mechanical or depicted culture of 'fine' drawing'. Thus she makes loosely-painted Brushstrokepictures - it is gesture is not a genuine gesture but a parody the trite assumption that an artist's rejec- clear that he made the right decision in of one. Parody, of course, is the insincerest tion of tradition automatically guarantees 1961 to 'appropriate' other artists' imagery form of flattery. If you can't speak in your his or her greatness. But in this case, does through which to express himself. His reac- own voice, however, it provides a useful, it? I think not. tions to the violence and horror of war and at least mildly amusing substitute. Lichtenstein learned this anti-traditional were expressed in cartoon stereotypes de- From his imitation comics, through all the manner of drawing after service in the army rived from action comics, and, apparently, years of coyly 'duplicating' his twentieth- during World War II when he studied with his intimate emotions concerning the break century superiors in the fine and applied Hoyt Sherman at Ohio State University. up of his marriage and family were formal- arts, to his recent collaged re-caps of these Sherman's method was to flash various ised into frozen-frame images based on love re-presentations, Lichtenstein consistently images onto a screen which the student comics (Fig.77). That his feelings, and by accomplished one thing - he has kept him- was then trained to draw from memory. extension, all human feeling are trivialised self out of the picture. You can see him Starting with simple shapes and working by such hackneyed, low-art presentation only in the negative. up to complex forms, the student was does not seem to be of much concern to APRIL KINGSLEY trained to convert visual el- him. When he reverses himself in the later manually 7TheDrawings of Roy Lich/tenstein.Text by Bernice ements into visualised concepts. Appar- sixties to debase high art by depicting it Rose. 200 pp. + 86 col. pls. + 79 b. & w. ills. (Harry ently it was a very effective system since it with the techniques of low art, the result is N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), $37.50 HB; $17.95 PB. eliminated associations, emotions, and any the same. One can only try to decide which ISBN 0-8019-0849-2.

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