MENZEL, Adolph von

Menzel’s oils of the 1850s and 1860s presented dazzling tableaux of a vastly wealthy, conspicuously refined Potsdam court under Frederick the Great (1712-1786), depicted as if on the same gargantuan plane as Versailles, in a Prussian palace more French than the one near Paris. Canvases such as A Flute Concert were images the monarch may have wished painted in his own day, yet none of his artists were up to this task.

The Flute Concert depicts the king playing the flute in his music room at Sanssouci. He was a gifted musician who played the transverse flute. He composed 100 sonatas for the flute as well as four symphonies. His court musicians included C. P. E. Bach, Johann Joachim Quantz, and Franz Benda. A meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach in 1747 in Potsdam led to Bach writing The Musical Offering.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):

Johann Sebastian Bach: Musikalisches Offer, BWV 1079 No.1 Ricercare

Menzel caught the Friedrichskanal at moonlight, which he shows with a flickering intensity.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 16 minutes):

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor op. 27 No. 2 (Moonlight)

This painting recalls Karl Blechen’s art.

Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel, German painter, engraver, and illustrator was one of the most prominent German painters in the Realism movement. He became successful in Berlin in the second half of the 19th century. Noted for numerous paintings and illustrations relating to events in Prussia’s recent history, he was a chronicler of the life of Frederick the Great (reigned 1740-1786). He is known for portraits, industrial scenes, intimate studies of interiors, and local religious events.

Menzel’s Storm on Tempelhof Mountain was painted only six years after the death of Caspar David Friedrich. This small-format picture is an example of a completely different conception of the role of landscape painting. Menzel’s art is significant for its break with the German tradition of landscape painting. With Blechen, Menzel was a pioneer of realistic landscape with no symbolic content or didactic purpose, of which the composition and colour adhere strictly to nature.

Stressing the hairsbreadth separating illusion from reality, and the power of metamorphoses, Menzel’s haunting Studio Interior with Casts endows the plasters with a sinister life of their own; the casts seem more real than the nearby skull or dissected hand at the centre.

Menzel was a passionate draughtsman, who always carried his sketchbook about with him in order to capture on paper with rapid strokes everything that interested him. He particularly liked to draw with a soft carpenter’s pencil which allowed him to blur the lines of colour with his thumb.

Menzel’s oils of the 1850s and 1860s presented dazzling tableaux of a vastly wealthy, conspicuously refined Potsdam court under Frederick the Great (1712-1786), depicted as if on the same gargantuan plane as Versailles, in a Prussian palace more French than the one near Paris. The Allegiance of the Silesian Diet before Frederick II in Breslau, signed and dated 1855, is an early example. His habitually powerful re-creative imagination makes these canvases look as if he were working after a lost depiction of the subject by an eyewitness. Knowing his audience required a massively detailed approach, Menzel turned to a Dutch seventeenth-century precedent - the skilled reportage and engaged eye of Gerard Terborch, whose work was still very popular in the nineteenth century.

The Berlin-Potsdam Railway is Menzel’s most unorthodox scene. In this the Prussian capital is visible at the upper right. Such subjects were far better known in England, including Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed.

This painting together with the Palace Garden of Prince Albert, are among the most freely observed of mid-nineteenth-century images. It was painted in Menzel’s apartment on the Sch�neberger Strasse in Berlin.

This painting is among the most freely observed of mid-nineteenth-century images. It was painted in Menzel’s apartment on the Sch�neberger Strasse in Berlin.

As a student in the plaster class at the Berlin Academy, which he attended sporadically in 1833, the young Menzel was delighted by the “many beautiful casts”. In 1848 he also drew plaster casts in the Altes Museum, as well as painted several studies of horses, partly after cadavers. Menzel started collecting plaster casts and hanging them in his successive studios. In 1852 Menzel painted a first, smaller version of The Studio Wall, which passed into the Berlin Nationalgalerie in 1906.

The deathmask visible to the left of the brightly lit torso - not far from an animal skull and above a head of Dante, who is accompanied by further symbols of the artist’s existence, such as dividers and scissors - exhibits the characteristically high forehead and striking nose of Friedrich Eggers, Menzel’s first reviewer and friend. The features of Goethe or Wagner, Schiller, Schopenhauer and Menzel himself have been identified in the other deathmasks. A plaster hand is painted to look as if it is reaching excitedly out of the picture.

Menzel painted this canvas in Berlin, following sketches made on his initial visit to see the Paris World’s Fair.

This painting is a key document in the new German nation’s propaganda, balanced between the gracious culture of the past and the bourgeois monarchy of the post-Industrial Revolution. The combined flags of Prussia and Germany on the Unter den Linden housefronts testify to a great new nation - modern Germany - united by battle against the invading French.

In this painting Menzel displays an approach that points to the most literal aspects of early Impressionism.