German Romantic Painting From Berlin - Critical Essay

Donald Bruce

TWO years have passed since the imaginative and scholarly exhibitions of the portraits of Ingres and the self-portraits of Rembrandt were mounted in the Sainshury Wing of the National Gallery. One has waited in vain for a comparable exhibition there, only to be disappointed by a scattering of shallow displays, rich in contrivance and sparse in substance. Their vagueness of thought and purpose has been excused by casual titles, with frequent craven use of present participles: Seeing Salvation, Painting Quickly in France and, all over the gallery, Telling Time; not to speak of the butterfly-minded Shadows. The latest, patchiest and least enterprising of these is a job-lot from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which is being rebuilt.

There is some precious metal here, and much dross. Most of what has arrived in London, which includes five airless interiors and a picture of a curtain, all by Adolph Menzel, is ponderous Hohenzollern dross. Let us make the most of the exhibition, and look at the gold: Friedrich, Richter and the under-represented Nazarene School.

Caspar David Friedrich rightly asserted that to an artist the imagination, or inner vision, is all-important: 'An artist should portray not only what is before his eyes but what he sees in himself'. In that sense, one would add, all portraits are in part portraits of the artist, and all landscapes revelations of his inner world. Friedrich painted with the shutters closed over his studio windows, so that he could work by plumbing his own creative memory. Before starting a painting he stood gazing at the canvas in the half-light until he envisaged what should be on it. What emerged from his mind into the open was intended to create the opposite effect: in his own words, to 'react on others from the outside inwards'.

He added that if the artist could see nothing inside, he should refrain from painting what he saw outside. What Friedrich himself saw outside was shaped both by his melancholy disposition, and by his familiarity in his youth with the harbour-town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea: across the sound, sombre in winter, of Rugen Island. His inner vision was of lank sailing ships befogged in snow-swept seas; creeping sea-mists surmounted by sails and rocks, represented in this exhibition by his Greifswald Harbour and Moonrise over the Sea; ruined abbeys and shores patrolled by spectral monks; solitary trees listing in a harsh terrain, as in The Single Tree; a countryside heroically gaunt, as epic and cheerless as a polar sunset. Brooding and refining on his sketches, Friedrich often conflated views of disparate regions in one landscape. He travelled from Germany only to Denmark and Bohemia. His picture of the Arctic and the Alps are imaginative extensions of what he had seen on the frozen Baltic and the mountains o f Upper Saxony.

Tier after grim tier of peaks aspires to a dreamlike immensity in his Riesengebirge Mountains, with a sole fell-walker resting on a rock. In The Solitary Tree a shepherd shelters from the rain under an isolated oak, itself weather-beaten, on a swamp in the Harz Mountains, desolate except for drenched sheep. Beyond a hedge and another soaked pasture a steeple-top ascends from an obviously deep valley; and beyond that the crest of the Brocken plunges into the tears of a mournful dawn. Moonrise over the Sea, painted as a nocturnal companion-piece, records a man and two women as they watch the moon emerge from low clouds alongside three broad-sailed boats. The tarnished-silver glow tips the women's cheeks and necks with a faint lustre. Friedrich preferred moonshine to the less cryptic light of day, and the ever-changing skies of the North to the monotonous blaze of the South. Especially, wrote his pupil Carus, he loved twilight. He shunned the very thought of visiting Italy.

No doubt the figure in bonnet and cloak is Friedrich himself. Such old German dress was disliked by the Prussian authorities, since it suggested resistance to the Prussianisation of a previously diverse and regional Germany. In another nightpiece by Friedrich, Contemplation of the Moon, the same man is accompanied by a woman who rests her forearm on his shoulder as they both stand in reverie before the moon and the evening star. They commune with each other and with nature by a half-uprooted but still vigorous oak. Friedrich was always spellbound by the knotty intricacy of oaks, and the droop of pines in a mysterious sublunary penumbra.

His wife Caroline, who probably appears in both moonscapes, is the subject of A Woman at a Window. Seen from the back, her ears pink in the light that also pierces her top-comb, Caroline opens the shutters of her husband's studio in Dresden to watch the sailing boats on the Elbe. The entering daylight streaks her high-waisted silk gown, as if invaded by sunset, with trails of variegated colours.

'Romantic' is now a word so blurred as to have lost a precise meaning. In nineteenth-century Germany there was a distinct Romantic Movement, defined by its advocates, the brothers Schlegel mainly as a revival of the age of the chivalrous romances, as in the tales of Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, and consequently a reversion to the aspirations and religious sentiments of the late Middle Ages. Heinrich Heine sardonically discussed their views in his essay on the German Romantic School. Friedrich von Schlegel, the champion of the Nazarene painters, by chance wrote what could be regarded as their manifesto in his description, published in 1802, of late Gothic painting in Italy and the Netherlands: 'strait forms, contained in sharp and clearly bounded contours, without chiaroscuro or grubby murk and shadow'. The Nazarenes (a title not of their own choosing, but given them by boorish jeering critics) sought in their quasi-monastic comradeship, and in the artistic practices of the fifteenth century, a way of ignori ng both the ravages of Napoleon's European wars and the incipience of Prussian militarism. Their future patrons were to come from the kingdom of Bavaria.

The Nazarenes were a band of religiously devout artists at the Viennese Academy who formed themselves into the Brotherhood of St Luke, a reclusive community matched, although less formally, by the painters who gathered round

William Blake and Samuel Palmer at Shoreham in Kent. Led by Franz Pforr, from Frankfurt-on-Main, and Friedrich Overbeck, from Lubeck, the Nazarenes in 1810 settled into the former monastery of St Isidoro, near Rome. There they practised their choice and curious art, always based on meticulous drawing. The drawings of Overbeck, in particular, are almost as selectively and hintingly discriminating as those of Ingres. For their spare well-calculated outlines, often twisting into involute detail, the Nazarenes were indebted to the engravings of Durer and, in spite of their dislike of Neo-Classicism, Flaxman's engraved illustrations, which circulated widely from 1802 in editions and translations of Homer and Dante. Their paintings, with incisive outlines to demarcate flat local colours, are like tapestries enhanced by areas of intricate calligraphic drawing: here again one notes a resemblance to Ingres. In that respect Nazarene painting differed from the blurred and heavy coloration of Rossetti and his immediate P re-Raphaelite followers, although they were in some respects the Victorian counterparts of the Nazarenes.

Because of the limitations of the Nationalgalerie's collection, the Nazarenes are represented by only two pictures by Overbeck and one by a late recruit to the Brotherhood, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who is the only Nazarene included in the permanent collection of the London National Gallery.

Overbeck's Portrait of Franz Pforr is set in the Gothic North dear to Pforr, as opposed to the southern Quattrocento which Overbeck himself preferred. Behind Pforr, who is being wheedled by his pet cat, sits a young wife industriously knitting as she reads a folio at a window overlooking a late-medieval street. The little street leads to a watergate, a beach and limestone sea-cliffs. The image of Pforr, clad in Memlinc-like costume and happy in the fifteenth-century tranquillity he would have chosen to live in, is as delicately painted as an illumination in a Book of Hours.

Overbeck's Christ with Martha and Mary is a glossily coloured contestation between Grace and Works, topics which greatly occupied Overbeck's mind after his conversion to the Catholic faith. Overbeck cannot help taking Martha's part by depicting Mary in luxurious torpor, staring at her empty hand like an idle housewife painted by the Elder Cranach, as she patiently endures the petulance of her bright-eyed, animated sister Martha. Overbeck advances Martha's argument with a view through the window of the activity of the Good Samaritan, with his endearingly characterised donkey as it waits in long-eyelashed docility for its next task. Such a window with a view is characteristic of the Flemish Primitives.

Schnorr von Carolsfeld had, of all the Nazarenes, most affinity with the childlike purity of Franz Pforr. With his lucent tricoloured wings and the Botticelli-like puff of his robe, the angel of Schnorr's Annunciation is a dandy amongst his kind, but approaches the Virgin without aplomb, shyly carrying a sheaf of lilies which will replace the roses and asters in her slinkily painted vase. A streak of light, tracing the descent of the Holy Ghost, catches the braided hair beneath her veil, her downcast eyes and her hands adrift in a flow of wonder. Unlike Overbeck, Schnorr attempts no approximation to biblical costume. Instead, Mary is dressed in early Renaissance clothes.

Moritz von Schwind came from a circle of Viennese artists more talented than prosperous and more drunken than talented. Schwind was not a member of the Nazarene Brotherhood but a haphazard follower. He exaggerates their love of the past in The Dropped Rose, a piece of phantasmagoric medievalism taking place somewhere at the end of a rainbow. A party of goblin musicians arrives to play at a wedding feast in a spectral castle. Ignoring a rose thrown to them by a buxom bridesmaid, the goblins stride on, straight out of Schwind's beer-laden fancies of elves, trolls, water-sprites and Nibelungs, which may be viewed at hilarious length in the Munich Schackgalerie.

Ludwig Richter, humorous through and through, cocked a ribald eye at transcendental landscapes, and peopled his own scenes with cheerful folk pursuing their everyday occupations. Whilst Friedrich depicts the Riesengebirge as fanged, unpopulated ranges, in Richter's Tarn in the Riesengebirge an old pedlar with a boy and a dog make their companiable way past a small mountain lake, scurrying from the rain of a cloud-flooded peak towards a clearer sky. The boy and the dog relish the scamper, but the pedlar fingers his rosary to ward off the threat of a drenching. The travellers in Richter's Fountain in the Woods refresh themselves in the spreading green repose of the pine-trees. Although working during the Prussian ascendancy, Richter recaptures the Old Germany of Goethe, Heine and the Volkslieder; of Schumann's endearing and evocative piano-suites; of the characters in our own Thackeray as they make their excursions on the Rhine and into the duchies of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel and Kartoffelsberg.

The exhibition is called Spirit of an Age. There was no such cohesive spirit in nineteenth-century German painting, and it would be foolish to seek it in a hundred years of painting in any country. As even the remarkably contentious and dogmatic text of the catalogue half-concedes, the age was only the chronological aggregate of diversely talented and often disparate artists. The misjudgements of this exhibition cannot be blamed on the Berlin Nationalgalerie, a collection of German paintings, mainly from 1812-1914. It serves the particular purpose of allowing a visitor to view his own choice of paintings produced in its native country during a given historical period. That is what the Millbank Tate Gallery should also do.

Spirit of an Age is on show during the National Gallery's liberal opening hours until 13 May, before moving on to the Washington National Gallery. Admission costs [pound]6, with concessions. The telephone number for further information is 020 7747 2885.

Botticelli's Dante, an exhibition of Botticelli's drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy will be at the Royal Academy until 10 June. The telephone number for general information is 020 7300 8000. We advise visitors to take magnifying glasses or, at least, reading spectacles to this event, since the drawings are minute in detail and often in poor condition.

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