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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 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. 1 H-German of the duvet "nuzzling" the pillows. As Fried notes, "Unmade Bed is as strong an expression of bodily feeling as we could hope to find, and my suggestion is that its special vividness and animation are grounded in the artist's bodily memory of what it felt like to lay himself down in the original of that bed" (p. 42). 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 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. 2 H-German 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.
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