Adolph Menzel - Eisenwalzwerk - Google Art Project

''Studio Wall'' (1872) is an

oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest ...

by the German artist

Adolph Menzel Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (8 December 18159 February 1905) was a German Realist artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings. Along with Caspar David Friedrich, he is considered one of the two most prominent German painters of t ...

, now in the collection of the

Hamburger Kunsthalle The Hamburger Kunsthalle is the art museum of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Germany. It is one of the largest art museums in the country. The museum consists of three connected buildings, dating from 1869 (main building), 1921 (Kuppelsaa ...

. It is considered a masterpiece of his maturity, which he deemed his best painting.Fried, 241 The painting depicts a red colored wall of the artist's studio at night, upon which are hung a series of plaster casts illuminated from below. The casts include portrait busts, death masks and life masks of friends of the artist, children, classical personae such as

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His '' Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ...

and

Schiller Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (, short: ; 10 November 17599 May 1805) was a German playwright, poet, and philosopher. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller developed a productive, if complicated, friends ...

, male and female torsos, a dog and possibly

Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as t ...

Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...

;Fried, 241 art historian Werner Hofmann saw this assemblage as a conscious blurring of "the dividing line between fame and anonymity."Keisch, et al, 97 Numerous commentators have noted that the array of dramatically lit casts "convey an uncanny impression of quasi-animateness."Fried, 245 ''Studio Wall'' was preceded by a work of the same title painted in 1852, an oil on paper now in the

Alte Nationalgalerie The Alte Nationalgalerie ( ''Old National Gallery'') is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin, Germany. The gallery was built from 1862 to 1876 by the order of King Frederick William IV of Prussia according to pl ...

in Berlin. That painting features casts of two arms and a separate hand, the arms arranged so as to suggest a relationship to a body from which they have been removed.Fried, 249 ''Studio Wall'' is also seen as related to Menzel's larger painting ''Iron Rolling Mill'' (1872–1875), for which it may have served as a study in dramatic lighting, yet it has greater import than that of a merely preparatory exercise, and may have functioned as a kind of memorial: the central death mask is that of the artist's friend

Friedrich Eggers Hartwig Karl Friedrich Eggers (27 November 1819, Rostock - 11 August 1872, Berlin) was a German art historian. He was a member of the literary groups Tunnel über der Spree and Rütli. Biography His father, Christian Friedrich Eggers (1788–1 ...

, the first critic sympathetic to Menzel's work.Keisch, et al, 357–358 Eggers died in August 1872, and the painting is dated from October of that year.Keisch, et al, 357 A contemplation on the transience of life, ''Studio Wall'' is also a bravura piece of

alla prima Wet-on-wet, or ''alla prima'' (Italian, meaning ''at first attempt''), direct painting or au premier coup, is a painting technique in which layers of wet paint are applied to previously administered layers of wet paint. Used mostly in oil paint ...

painting.Keisch, et al, 358Fried, 242 Interpretations of the work vary greatly. For art historian

Julius Meier-Graefe , ro, Reșița), Resicabánya Dist., Krassó-Szörény Co, Bánság, Royal Hungary, Imperial and Royal Austria(now Romania) , death_date = , death_place = Vevey, VD, Switzerland , nationality = German, Hungarian German ...

, ''Studio Wall'' was a harmonious example of pictorial unity; to the contrary, Hofmann saw the painting as a "coded manifesto", a rejection by Menzel of academic canons in favor of an aesthetic that celebrated the fragmentary and disjointed, and symbolic of the triumph of painting over sculpture.Fried, 242Keisch, et al, 259 Fried rejects Hofman's view of fragmentariness and anti-academicism, seeing the picture as a structured composition of objects arranged in successive rows.Fried, 242 For Fried the likeliest allegorical meaning would be the sublimation of tangible existence to that of "

phantasmagoria Phantasmagoria (, also fantasmagorie, fantasmagoria) was a form of horror theatre that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images, such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts, onto walls, smoke, or semi-t ...

s", a world inhabited by ghosts in the form of plaster casts.Fried, 246

Notes

References

* Fried, Michael. ''Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin''. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. * Keisch, Claude, et al. ''Adolph Menzel 1815–1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism''. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

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Further reading