H-Labor-Arts The Scope of Early Twentieth-Century German Industrial Art: Works in the Grohmann Museum of Art Discussion published by Patrick Jung on Monday, September 18, 2017 Patrick J. Jung Professor of History Milwaukee School of Engineering Milwaukee, Wisconsin James R. Kieselburg Executive Director Grohmann Museum Milwaukee, Wisconsin Despite the vast social and economic changes the Industrial Revolution unleashed upon Europe, artists in the nineteenth century were initially slow to understand the potential of the industrial image. Klaus Herding, a scholar of German industrial art, rightly asks, “Why did the visual arts not spontaneously turn to large-scale industry as a new subject? Why did the so-called artistic ‘fathers’ of the twentieth century—Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat—hardly deal with industry…? Why did the so-called Materialist or Socialist painters, Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, not depict factory workers but instead focused upon peasants and rural laborers?”1 Eventually, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, European artists responded to the new aesthetic of the Industrial Age, particularly in German painters. Germany industrialized later than Great Britain but at a much faster pace; this made the phenomenon of industrialization a more dramatic event in Germany. France, on the other hand, industrialized more slowly and less thoroughly than either Great Britain or Germany.2 Thus, German artists, to a greater degree than their European counterparts, were drawn to these new subjects: the factory, the steel mill, the blast furnace, the railroad, and the other technological wonders of the time. By the first decade of the twentieth century, a rather significant body of artistic work existed. In 1912, the city of Essen hosted the first exhibition of industrial art in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Krupp Steelworks, the largest industrial firm in the city. Undoubtedly, the most prominent and important of the paintings at the Essen exhibition was Eisenwalzwerk (Iron Rolling Mill), painted by Adolph Menzel between 1872 and 1875.3 This painting, more so than any other, influenced the genesis and development of German industrial art for the next seven decades. Citation: Patrick Jung. The Scope of Early Twentieth-Century German Industrial Art: Works in the Grohmann Museum of Art. H-Labor- Arts. 09-18-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/245120/scope-early-twentieth-century-german-industrial-art-works-grohmann Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Labor-Arts The Grohmann Museum on the campus of the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin has over 1300 works of art that depict human labor and industry through the ages. The Grohmann Museum is also fortunate to have many excellent examples of German industrial art from the age of Menzel to the final, tragic year of World War II in 1945. A growing body of scholarly works on German industrial art places these various works into defined social, economic, political, and cultural contexts.4 Germany’s industrialization was not only rapid and dramatic, but it also largely occurred after the unification of the various German-speaking principalities into a unified German nation state in 1871. The unification of Germany produced a politically centralized and militarily powerful country that had a strong sense of national identity. While the Industrial Revolution began in Germany before 1871, unification resulted in an even more rapid industrial expansion. Germany’s burgeoning industrial economy after 1871 fulfilled Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s prophecy that the nation would become a great power by the marriage of “iron and rye.”5 Menzel’s Eisenwalzwerk (Ill. 1) stands as one of the first and definitely the most influential visual representations of Germany’s industrial age. In fact, many art historians consider it one of his greatest works among a corpus that includes many famous paintings. What makes the painting unique is the dramatic sense of Realism in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. Realism is usually associated with French painter Gustave Courbet, who rejected the often-idealized themes of academic art and focused instead upon rural laborers and other common people. He sought to show them in a manner that was often dirty, gritty, and even disturbing. What made Menzel unique was his desire to depict the industrial worker. Indeed, Menzel was the greatest of German Realist painters, and his decision to depict the hot, dangerous world of the steel workers at the Königshütte iron and steel works in the German province of Silesia was the most revolutionary aspect of Eisenwalzwerk.6 0515.jpg Citation: Patrick Jung. The Scope of Early Twentieth-Century German Industrial Art: Works in the Grohmann Museum of Art. H-Labor- Arts. 09-18-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/245120/scope-early-twentieth-century-german-industrial-art-works-grohmann Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Labor-Arts Ill. 1. Hans Dieter Tylle, Eisenwalzwerk (Iron-Rolling Mill), reproduction of the original painting by Adolph Menzel, oil on canvas, 62 ½ x 100 ¼ in., 2004. Collection of the Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While Menzel was not the first German artist to depict workers in an industrial setting, he was the first to depict them authentically. In other words, he sought to illustrate the difficult conditions in which they labored as well as their determination and fortitude despite their grueling circumstances. Earlier artists, if they produced industrial depictions at all, tended to emphasize the great machines in the factory; the workers served only to narrate the work processes of which the machines were a part. The conditions in which they labored were often idealized and somewhat sterile. In Eisenwalzwerk, the workers are not mere props that define the functions of the machines. Instead, they are the central subjects of the piece. The painting itself is large with a height 62.2 inches and width of 100 inches. In the center foreground, a team of men guides a white-hot ingot of steel to a rolling machine where it will be shaped into a locomotive rail. Another team prepares to receive the piece and move it to the next set of rollers for further processing. The workers and the rolling machines recede toward the upper left of the painting where a well-dressed supervisor is barely visible near a glowing puddling furnace that produces the steel ingots. To the left of the rolling machines, half-naked workers washing up indicate a shift change has taken place. In the right foreground, a young woman brings her exhausted husband lunch during a well-earned break. The smoke and steam hover over the workers and obscure the distant reaches of the workplace at the top of the painting.7 However, if Menzel depicted the German industrial worker with a stark authenticity, he also glorified the steel mill and factory as symbols of German national strength inEisenwalzwerk . Indeed, the monumentality of the new industrial establishments during his lifetime presented a formidable visual expression of the national pride Germans possessed toward their newly unified and powerful country. This theme resonated particularly with the German middle class, which constituted the most Citation: Patrick Jung. The Scope of Early Twentieth-Century German Industrial Art: Works in the Grohmann Museum of Art. H-Labor- Arts. 09-18-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/245120/scope-early-twentieth-century-german-industrial-art-works-grohmann Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Labor-Arts important segment of the German art market.8 These two themes—authentic depictions of industrial workers, and industry as a symbol of German national strength—are found in many works in the Grohmann Museum. For example, Arthur Kampf produced a mural in 1900 titled Rolling Mill for the town hall of Aachen, Germany that is indicative of the desire to represent authentically the experience of German industrial workers in the manner of Menzel’s Eisenwalzwerk. In fact, Menzel’s Eisenwalzwerk influenced Kampf to a significant degree. Like Menzel, Kampf made the workers the main subjects of his paintings and depicted the dangerous and uncomfortable conditions in which they labored. In contrast to Menzel, Kampf emphasized the masculine nature of industrial work through the half-clad, muscular, writhing bodies of the workers as they performed their difficult tasks. Unfortunately, Kampf’s mural was destroyed during World War II. Josef Jünger reproduced a detail of this mural titled Workers Dragging a Red-Hot Iron Piece (ca. 1920) (Ill. 2) that is now in the Grohmann Museum collection. In this painting, the workers, bare from the waist up, turn away from a slab of hot metal and its searing, unbearable heat. Willy Nus’s Transporting Large Heated Workpiece (ca. 1910) (Ill. 3) similarly depicts a team of men bathed in the intense heat of a huge, glowing hexagonal steel beam. The workers struggle to move the massive piece on a cart amid the din and smoke of a foundry. Their muscles strain and their bodies contort to move the beam to a steam-powered hammer for further fabrication. Like Menzel’s workers, they endure the difficult conditions in the foundry; nevertheless, they exude sense of strength and dignity.9 0383.jpg Citation: Patrick Jung. The Scope of Early Twentieth-Century German Industrial Art: Works in the Grohmann Museum of Art. H-Labor- Arts. 09-18-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/245120/scope-early-twentieth-century-german-industrial-art-works-grohmann Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.