• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm Volume 23 Three Paintings from Dresden and the New Concepts of Art of the Early 19th Century Carl-Johan Olsson, Curator, Paintings and Sculpture Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, © The National Library of Sweden, Stockholm Graphic Design is published with generous support from (Fig. 4, p. 38. Fig. 21, p. 211. Fig. 28, p. 215) BIGG the Friends of the Nationalmuseum. © Alte Nationalgallerie, Berlin (Fig. 2, p. 40) Layout Nationalmuseum collaborates with © Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg Agneta Bervokk Svenska Dagbladet and Grand Hôtel Stockholm. (Fig. 3, p. 41) We would also like to thank FCB Fältman & © Neue Pinakothek, Munich Translation and Language Editing Malmén. (Fig. 5, p. 43) Gabriella Berggren, William Jewson, David Jones © The Morgan Library & Museum, New York and Martin Naylor Cover Illustration (Fig. 4, p. 109. Fig. 32–33, p. 217) Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783–1853), © The Matthiesen Gallery, London Publishing Danish. “Ciociara”– Portrait of a Roman Country Girl, (Fig. 1, p. 108) Ludvig Florén, Magnus Olausson (Editors) and 1816. Oil on canvas, 52 x 46.5 cm. Purchase: Wiros © The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Ingrid Lindell (Publications Manager) Fund. NM 7334. (Fig. 2, p. 122) © Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum is published Publisher (Fig. 3, p. 123) annually and contains articles on the history and Berndt Arell, Director General © Robilant + Voena theory of art relating to the collections of the (Fig. 4, p. 124) Nationalmuseum. Editor © The Swedish National Archives, Stockholm Ludvig Florén and Magnus Olausson (Fig. 3, p. 204) Nationalmuseum © The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Box 16176 Editorial Committee Photo: Joshua Ferdinand SE–103 24 Stockholm, Sweden Janna Herder, Linda Hinners, Merit Laine, (Fig. 4, p. 205) www.nationalmuseum.se Lena Munther, Magnus Olausson, Martin Olin, © Musée du Louvre, Paris. RMN-Grand Palais/Art © Nationalmuseum, the authors and the owners of Maria Perers and Lidia Westerberg Olofsson Resource, NY the reproduced works (Fig. 5, p. 205) Photographs © Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna ISSN 2001-9238 Nationalmuseum Photographic Studio/ (Fig. 8, p. 207) Linn Ahlgren, Bodil Beckman, Erik Cornelius, © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Anna Danielsson, Cecilia Heisser, Sofia Persson, Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Per-Åke Persson and Hans Thorwid Program (Fig. 10, p. 208. Fig. 30, p. 216) Picture Editor © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Rikard Nordström (Fig. 11, p. 208) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Photo Credits (Fig. 18, p. 210. Fig. 23, p. 212. Fig. 31, p. 216) © Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen © Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (Fig. 5, p. 21. Fig. 1, p. 36) (Fig. 24, p. 213. Fig. 26, p. 214) © Amsterdams Historisch Museum, Amsterdam © Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis. (Fig. 2, p. 32) John Herron Fund. © Trustees of the British Museum, London (Fig. 25, p. 213) (Fig. 3, p. 33. Fig. 6, p. 38) © Stockholms auktionsverk © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (Fig. 8, p. 136) (Fig. 2, p. 36) Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 23, 2016 4 acquisitions/three paintings from dresden and the new concepts of art of the early 19th century Three Paintings from Dresden and the New Concepts of Art of the Early 19th Century Carl-Johan Olsson Curator, Paintings and Sculpture Fig. 1 Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), Fantasy of the Alps, 1822. Oil on canvas, 52.5 x 67 cm. Purchase: The Wiros Fund. Nationalmuseum, NM 7308. 39 Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 23, 2016 acquisitions/three paintings from dresden and the new concepts of art of the early 19th century Fig. 2 Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), The Monk by the Sea, 1808–10. Oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm. Alte Nationalgallerie, Berlin, NG 9/85. Fully fledged representatives of Of the newly acquired works, Carus’s New content Dresden Romanticism have long been Fantasy of the Alps is a kind of manifesto, in To explain more fully the significance of high on the Nationalmuseum’s “wish list” which the artist employs several of the key these three pictures, it is important to of possible acquisitions. In recent years, compositional devices of Romanticism. place them in the context of the cultural the Museum has been able to add three There is a grandeur to his subject, with and philosophical melting pot of early- such works to its collection, each of them its broad perspective stretching into the 19th-century Dresden. This was a time representative in its own particular way: distance. Leypold’s image of two trees when not only image making, but also the Fantasy of the Alps by Carl Gustav Carus represents a segment of nature as a way people looked at images was changing. (1789–1869), Oak and Birch by Carl Julius subtly heightened reality, in line with Put simply, the viewing of art went from von Leypold (1806–1874), and Dresden at the Romantic idea of making the familiar being a rational, intellectually determined Sunset by Knut Baade (1808–1879). The unfamiliar. Baade’s view of Dresden, process to something subjective and intention in acquiring these paintings has meanwhile, is an example of how these emotional. When Caspar David Friedrich’s been to demonstrate the radical changes artists used the sky and the city to create The Monk by the Sea (Fig. 2) was exhibited in both the making and the viewing of an awareness of a spiritual presence at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1810, images that took place in Dresden in the in the viewer’s own immediate it represented a definitive breakthrough early decades of the 19th century. environment. for a new way of depicting nature and, Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 23, 2016 40 acquisitions/three paintings from dresden and the new concepts of art of the early 19th century with it, a new way of looking at the resultant art.1 Carus’s Fantasy of the Alps has several features in common with Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea. The most striking similarity is that, at the concrete level, both artists have reduced their subject matter to a mini- mum of elements: a simple foreground, a vast and desolate middle ground, and a distant horizon and sky. This simplicity, coupled with closeness to nature, goes a long way to explaining how the viewing of art evolved into a more subjective search for the meaning of an image. In 1810, a painting like Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea must have been regarded as astonishingly empty or uneventful, in the sense that no narrative or portion of a narrative unfolded within it.2 The viewer was confronted with what appeared to be a segment of tangible nature, devoid of literary, biblical or mythological referen- ces. What did this entail for the process of viewing and the means by which a viewer could arrive at content and meaning? From tangible content to an intangible dimension Much was written during this period about nature symbolism and the relationship between nature and the divine. In the thinking of philosophers and poets such as Schelling, Schiller and Novalis, one of the fundamental ideas was that of a new relationship between the viewer and the work of art. Virtually all the aesthetic and philosophical texts produced by this circle of writers highlighted the viewer’s powers of imagination as crucial to experiencing Fig. 3 Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, c. 1817. Oil on canvas, and comprehending the meaning of 94.8 x 74.8 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, HK-5161. an artwork. This presupposed that the literary and historical references were not too obvious, as there would be a danger otherwise of their constraining the viewer’s experience. The new way of viewing art required, rather, that an image both stimu- lated and left room for the imagination. Referring to Ludwig Tieck’s texts, Synnöve Clason describes the devices he uses to achieve this in the following terms: 41 Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 23, 2016 acquisitions/three paintings from dresden and the new concepts of art of the early 19th century Fig. 4 Carl Julius von Leypold (1806–1874), Oak and Birch, 1832. Oil on paper mounted on panel, 29.6 x 37.7 cm. Purchase: The Wiros Fund. Nationalmuseum, NM 7327. It is a matter of making magic. Fewer words stratum of the piece, elements of incom- the idea of spirit, perhaps best illustrated than in popular literature, but a stronger pleteness that stimulated the imaginative by Schelling’s notion of a primal force emanating force. Collocations such as moonlit powers of the reader or viewer. Hints of a permeating the whole of existence. night, sighing in the trees and ruby glow are hidden content that was not entirely Schelling regarded nature and spirit, repeated like mantras. The text is filled with accessible could be achieved, for example, not as two separate dimensions, but as acoustic signals that bewilder and confuse the by mist and darkness. These cast a united in a single spiritual reality, a reality figures of the narrative.3 mysterious veil over the content, which with room for the imagination. In his day, In the text of a literary work, as in the was there, but was not directly readable. the word spirit, or the Spirit, did not visual constructions of pictorial art, the Another starting point for a person’s intel- refer exclusively to the Holy Spirit or concern was to create, in the concrete lectual and literary experience was God, but to an intangible dimension that Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 23, 2016 42 acquisitions/three paintings from dresden and the new concepts of art of the early 19th century encompassed the divine, together with elements and conditions that stimulated other areas of intellectual and spiritual life.

Load more

  10

Copy Link