Kay on Fried, 'Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin'

H-German Kay on Fried, 'Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin'

Review published on Friday, October 1, 2004

Michael Fried. Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. 320 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-09219-6.

Reviewed by Carolyn Kay (Department of History, Trent University, Canada)Published on H- German (October, 2004)

Menzel's Modernism

Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at John Hopkins University, has written a brilliant book on Adolph Menzel, Germany's pre-eminent artist of the nineteenth century. Fried argues persuasively that Menzel possessed a unique and masterful talent and that his works rank him as one of the most significant realist painters of the period, alongside Gustave Courbet and Thomas Eakins (the subjects of earlier writings by Fried).[1] Art historians have tended to assess Menzel's enormous oeuvre of oil paintings, gouaches, and drawings-- diverse in style, technique and subject matter--by holding these up to the standards of French modernism and its emphasis upon a consistent style. As a result, Menzel's art has not been featured in European art histories and is certainly not well known outside of Germany. Fried sets out to change all this. He rejects the assumption that the French model is superior or indeed crucial for an analysis of Menzel's art; he also dismisses the idea that realism in art--heavily criticized by the French modernists--was inferior, particularly in the works of Menzel, Courbet, or Eakins. In one of the opening sections of this dense, exhilarating, and complex book, Fried makes clear his central purpose: "one of my tasks in this book will be to establish the terms of an approach to Menzel that will not be captive to a 'French' model of pictorial accomplishment, in the light of which he can only appear eccentric and, for all his prodigious output, less than the major and exemplary modern painter-draftsman I believe him to be" (pp. 11-12).

To Fried, Menzel's magnificence as a modern European artist arises from two accomplishments: firstly, what Fried calls the process of embodiment in his art; secondly, Menzel's exploration of the everyday in his works, particularly in his drawings. "Embodiment," which might otherwise be described as empathy, is a process whereby Menzel projected himself imaginatively onto the canvas or page, offering figures, objects, and scenes that give a powerful physical sense to the viewer. Within this process, both artist and viewer place themselves bodily within the art, and are able to hear, see, and/or feel objects contained therein. A telling example of this transformation is found in Menzel's drawing Unmade Bed (1845) which shows an unkempt bed, devoid of its owner; we see part of the exposed mattress, covered over by rumpled sheets, and topped by a thick, twisted duvet, and several plump pillows. We look down on this bed from only a short distance away. What is remarkable about this drawing is the physical sense it projects: the pillows and duvet offer a suggestive imprint of a body only recently removed. The scene, too, expresses comfort, softness (in the lush pillows and duvet), and movement (the body that had once thrown aside the duvet). Fried also highlights what he calls the "aliveness" of the scene in the intersections of the bed and the duvet and the sensual nature

Another work by Menzel that expresses a strong corporeality is Frederick the Great's Address to His Generals Before the Battle of Leuthen (1859-61). This history painting refers to Frederick's speech to his generals in December 1757, during the Seven Years' War, in advance of the famous battle in Silesia against the Austrians. Menzel did not finish the work, but Fried still hails this painting as monumental, comparing it to Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. Why? The reason is that in this work Menzel gives an intense physical sense of Frederick's generals--bear-like men, stocky, strong-- standing against the cold, pulling coats and pelisses over their shoulders, listening intently to Frederick (whom Menzel did not finish; he is a blank figure). Fried argues that Menzel had sought to show the hardiness of these generals, who stand about Frederick in a semi-circle, as he wanted to highlight their physical battle against the cold and the enemy. But his efforts went in a direction he did not anticipate. He likely chose not to finish the work because the contrast between these fleshy men and the slender Frederick would not have given the impression of Frederick's centrality in this historical event. But the painting succeeds, nonetheless, argues Fried, because of its "untrammeled corporeality" (p. 45). Yet another example of "embodiment" in Menzel's work is his famous painting of Frederick the Great, in Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci, (1850-52) where the viewer looks upon the German leader playing the flute in a beautiful hall, but also "sees" lights in the candles and chandelier, and "hears" the sound of the flute. Several senses are aroused in this painting, and reveal Menzel's efforts to awaken more than just the visual attention of the viewer.

In presenting this theory of embodiment in Menzel's work, Fried offers some compelling evidence. Next to his own original analysis he places Menzel's art within the context of nineteenth-century German ideas on aesthetics--notably the aesthetics of empathy orEinfuehlung --as elaborated by Robert Vischer, Heinrich Woelfflin, and August Schmarsow. In these authors' theories of aesthetic empathy, both the viewer and the artist are portrayed as having the ability to imaginatively position themselves bodily within art or architecture--an argument that parallels Fried's point about Menzel. Woelfflin (in Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture) notes that "as human beings with a body ... we gather the experience that enables us to identify with the conditions of other forms.... We read our image into all phenomena" (pp. 35-36). Vischer (in On the Optical Sense of Form) argues that "every work of art reveals itself to us as a person harmoniously feeling himself into a kindred object" (p. 39). Fried sees such ideas as giving historical weight to his argument, and, indeed, they are convincing.

The other important aspect of Menzel's art, his exploration of the everyday, also receives high praise from Fried. "It may be," argues Fried, "that Menzel's relation to the everyday represents the deepest stratum of his art; I know of nothing like it in the work of any other nineteenth-century painter, which alone would be a reason for regarding Menzel as a unique figure in the culture of his time" (p. 15). In his drawings Menzel studied ordinary objects in great detail (contemporaries noted that Menzel was always sketching something at hand), whether these were documents in a chest, a pile of furniture tossed into a street, a maid's comb, his own foot or hand, binoculars, bicycles, or musical instruments. Furthermore, Fried is struck by Menzel's recurrent use of brickwork and bricklaying in such works as the gouache Bricklayers on a Building Site (1875) or the pencil sketch Bricklayers at

Work on a Scaffold (1875). Connecting Menzel's approach with ideas of the everyday in Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1944), Fried suggests that the process of bricklaying involves the repetitive act of laying brick after identical brick, in a manner that "in principle has no necessary terminus" (p. 153) and no one moment of intensity. In life, such repetitive tasks--even the smallest--have their significance, what Kierkegaard defines as "a matter of inner history, [where] every single little moment is of utmost importance" (p. 144). Fried wonders whether Menzel, as an artist and especially as a draftsman, imagined himself as a bricklayer of sorts, since he regularly drew images in his sketchbook with a consistent and repetitive effort on a daily basis. This is an intriguing notion. Overall, Menzel's exploration of the everyday, in the ordinary objects captured in his art, seems to Fried to be quintessentially modern, in the sense that Menzel did not attempt to derive meaning from these objects, but simply presented them as aspects of modern human life he found aesthetically interesting and which he invested with "vital feeling" (p. 255).

Along with Fried's innovative interpretations in this book, the work itself is organized in a unique way; and the enormous number of sources used--English and German works in art history, art criticism, biography, philosophy, literature, and history--cross many disciplinary boundaries. The book's structure dispenses with chapters and instead offers fifteen sections that help to build the analysis smoothly. Several of these sections focus upon close and careful scrutiny of individual works, such as Rear Courtyard and House (1844); Balcony Room (1845); Iron Rolling Mill (1872-75); and Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on his Scaffold at Rheinsberg (1861). Fried also analyzes Menzel's fascinating self-portraits. In other sections, Fried contexualizes the art by considering philosophy, literature and art criticism, both from Menzel's day and from the twentieth century. Among the many authors cited by Fried are (alongside those noted above) Fontane, Simmel, Weber, Ruskin, Helmholtz, Duranty, Marx, Kant, Meier-Graefe, Kafka, and Benjamin. Contemporary scholars include Jonathan Crary, T. J. Clark, Werner Hoffmann, and Claude Keisch. In a final coda to the book, Fried offers excerpts from Kafka's Amerika and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which he sees as representative of certain ideas (embodiment, the allegory of bricklaying) within Menzel's art. Admittedly, I found this last section less helpful than the rest of the book, since the connections Fried sought to highlight were not apparent to me in these literary excerpts.

For historians of modern Germany, Fried's book on Menzel will offer engaging analysis of the artist and his unique talents, and will show how and why Menzel must be considered one of the foremost German and indeed European artists of the modern era. Still, it should be noted that Fried says very little about the historical conditions in Berlin, or Germany, during Menzel's era, or about the connections between Menzel's art and politics in nineteenth-century Germany. He also refrains from comparing Menzel's work to other German artists of the period. Since Fried's focus is upon a sustained analysis of Menzel's art, with the aim of showing its uniqueness and significance within modern European art and thought, this gap is not perhaps surprising. Nonetheless, readers will find much more historical context in Peter Paret's superb Art as History: Episodes in Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (1998) and in the 1996-97 exhibition catalogueAdolph Menzel 1815-1945: Between Romanticism and Impressionism.[2]

Despite the absence of historical context, Fried's analysis of Menzel's art held me enthralled throughout this book. Still, in a few places I felt the work faltered or needed correction. Firstly, the argument is at times too dense and overloaded with information. For example, Fried has a tendency to write long sentences, which include lengthy add-ons of information packed into parentheses. He

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kay on Fried, 'Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/43977/kay-fried-menzels-realism-art-and-embodiment-nineteenth-century-berlin Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-German also quotes authors, such as Kierkegaard, at great length--in some cases over several pages. His endnotes, too, are often very detailed discussions of separate points that go on for more than half of a page. And certain sections of the book contain additional points in asterisked sections under the main text. In general, I think some of this information could be edited because so many of Fried's ideas are quite complex and require careful and specific explanation. When he includes other points or diverts the main discussion to additional considerations, the reader is often left confused. Secondly, certain philosophical and theoretical concepts in this book are hard to follow, and need clearer elaboration by the author--especially the idea of the autonomization of sight (in section 6), Kierkegaard's notion of the everyday in Either/Or (in section 7), and T. J. Clark's description of modernity's "disenchantment of the world" (in section 14).

What I love about this book is the sheer joy and deep appreciation Fried expresses in examining Menzel's art, the breadth of Fried's perspective in the work (encompassing art, literature, and philosophy of the nineteenth century) and the many provocative, rich, and illuminating interpretations of Menzel's work that fill this book. Fried breathes new life into scholarship on Menzel, an artist whose acclaim is long overdue.

Notes

[1]. Some of Fried's books include Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Manet's Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

[2]. Peter Paret, Art as History: Episodes in Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and, Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, eds., Adolph Menzel, 1815-1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). This exhibition catalogue accompanied the retrospective exhibition of Menzel's art in Washington's National Gallery, in 1997. See also the fine study by Christopher Becker With, "Adolph von Menzel: A Study in the Relationship between Art and Politics in Nineteenth- Century Germany," (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1975); and C. With, "Adolph von Menzel and the German Revolution of 1848,"Zeitschrift fuer Kunstgeschichte 42 (1979): pp. 195-214.

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Citation: Carolyn Kay. Review of Fried, Michael,Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2004.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9877

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