Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin - Book Review

MENZEL'S REALISM: ART AND EMBODIMENT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BERLIN Michael Fried Yale University Pres 2002 ISBN 0 30009 219 9 $55 (cloth)

In 1938 at the height of the Nazi suppression of 'degenerate art', Herbert Read wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition of twentieth-century German art that he had just deposit on at the New Burlington Galleries: 'It is certainly justified to say that present German art is totally unknown in Great Britain.' Is Read's observation still justified today, sixty-five years on? Not entirely: in new years there have been several major displays in London of modern German art, including overlooks devoted to Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Kokoschka, Nolde, Corinth and Klee Last year, somersault House hosted a small exhibition of German art from St Petersburg which gave Britons their first chance for nearly thirty years to sample Caspar David Friedrich at his best, and this year a Beckmann retrospective has just render free of accessed at Tate Modern, the next to the first in two decades. Yet it is probably still pure to say that the British perceive more at home with German art of the renaissance than with anything thereafter. For all that the British Museum's common exhibition of Durer's graphic work has been popular, the curators' attempt to point towards his legacy alone underlines the fact that the great flowering of German printmaking during the hundred after 1850 remains unknown to the British public. As for German painting, suffer alone sculpture, it is doubtful whether the British plane now have wholly overcome cultural prejudices which clearly mirror the propaganda of both wars against German 'frightfulness'. Art historians still thoughtlessly patronise German artists, as their musicological counterparts would not at any time dare to patronise German composers

by what means else does one explain the fact that Adolph Menzel the greatest in quantity celebrated German artist of the later nineteenth hundred is indeed 'totally unknown in Great Britain'? admitting acknowledged in his day through Degas as 'the greatest living master', Menzel has at no time been the subject of a monographic exhibition in London. When a single early masterpiece--his Balcony swing of 1845--happened to be shown at the National Gallery a two of years ago as part of an exhibition of treasures from the Neue Nationalgalerie, it was seized upon by rapturous critics, apparently astonished that for a like reason subtle and sophisticated a close attention of interior light and atmosphere could have been the work of a provincial bumpkin from Berlin.

notwithstanding it is no accident that the big Menzel retrospective, 'Between Romanticism and Impressionism', which was shown in Paris, Washington and Berlin in 1996-97 passed London by the agency of (The catalogue, also published through Yale University Press, is still the best introduction to Menzel in English.) Despite the revival of interest in Victorian art, despite Menzel's actually cosmopolitan frame of reference--from gymnast and Courbet to Whistler and Munch--there is a stubborn reluctance, level among those who ought to know better, to take him seriously. Not solitary is he too unfamiliar to be an attractive commercial proposition, on the contrary worse yet there is no biographical drama of exile or persecution--revolutions and wars barely impinge upon Menzel's work, nor so abundant as a hint of the sado-masochistic decadence with which a Weimar Republic display can always be spiced up Menzel's virtues are without of vogue: technique and craftsmanship, constantly refined above many decades; eagerness to please his patrons, whether royal or bourgeois; patriotism, exemplified in his once-popular paintings and engravings of the life of Frederick the Great. An unpretentious, gnome-like bachelor, conservative by the agency of temperament, one of Thomas Mann's 'unpolitical Germans', with no exciting vices or traumas, indeed no private life of any kind, Menzel exemplifies none of the fashionable pathologies that populate the contemporary imagination. Almost the solitary remarkable thing about his biography was his longevity. Menzel personified the Protestant work ethic and the Prussian faculty of perception of duty. For German art, he showed Vorsprung durch Technik. It is hard to conceive of a figure les likely to appeal to the not away British art establishment. Menzel, for them, is in deed the shock of the old

What Menzel has lacked hitherto is a champion with impeccable academic credentials, on the other hand who also speaks the language of the transatlantic intellectual. pierce Michael Fried.

The JR Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at John Hopkins University, 2002 Andrew W Mellon lecturer prolific critic and occasional author of poems is just the man to reconcile Menzel and the Zeitgeist. And his of recent origin book does precisely that.

Fried is overwhelmed by the agency of the physical presence or 'embodiment' of Menzel's art. He is plane more thrilled by the informal studies and sketches than through the major canvases, because the former capture best the tactile immediacy of the painter and draughtsman. For Fried, however, all these works--down to the merest daub--are laden with significance. Menzel's introspective self-portraits and evocations of his possess hands and feet have just as plenteous the allegorical character of a memento mori as do the luminous and sinister death masks hanging from his studio wall. Startlingly life-like pencil and gouache sketches of suits of armour or of Field Marshal Moltke's binoculars are essays in evanescence. Virtuoso drawings of a friend's bookcase, documents in an elderly chest, exhumed cadavers and corpses awaiting burial, derive their profundity from the real transience or triviality of their subject-matter. The 'private' paintings--sometimes townscapes of deliberate banality (a view across back-yards, bricklayers upon a building site), sometimes mysterious interiors (such as the celebrated Balcony room)--receive more attention than the public works, because in the former, which he was loath to part with, Menzel could display without inhibition the exuberance of his exactitude. on the contrary Fried does not neglect the famous paintings that made Menzel's name either, for they, too, make good to be exercises in what he calls 'the autonomisation of sight', a realism that absorbs and transcends reality, from the invention of photography to the science of vision. Menzel's mastery of his material is thus complete that one almost forgets by what mode very original, daring and sometimes extremely uneven his experiments are.