Menzel, Adolph von

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MENZEL, ADOLPH VON

MENZEL, ADOLPH VON (1815–1905), German realist painter.

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel began his artistic work in the Biedermeier period during the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly 1820–1850; by the time he died, the expressionist painters of Die Brücke had joined forces in Dresden. Both the democratic progress of the 1830s and the 1848 Revolution formed the young painter. In his countless representations of scenes from German history, connections to the contemporary time are also discernible. Menzel's paintings were created on the foundation of an enormous graphic corpus. Both his paintings and drawings testify to his interest in the inconspicuous, in surprising details, and in lighting effects.

Menzel was taught in his father's lithographic workshop, which he carried on after his father's death, producing functional merchandise such as greeting cards and advertisements. For a short time, he attended the Berlin Kunstakademie (Academy of Arts) on the side, but was largely an auto-didact. In 1833 he had his first public exhibition as an independent artist with lithographs for Künstlers Erdenwallen (The artist's life on Earth) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). From 1839 to 1842 he created, on the basis of meticulous studies of the historical situation, 400 drawings for woodcut illustrations to the comprehensive Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen (History of Frederick the Great) by Franz Kugler (1808–1858), an assignment affecting him deeply. It was above all his illustrations that popularized the work. Not only do they show Frederick II (r. 1740–1786) as the successful military strategist but also as an art aficionado seasoned with wit, a friend of the philosopher Voltaire (1696–1778), and a reformer. The eighteenth-century king had become an ideal.

Between 1850 and 1860 paintings dealing with the times of Frederick II took shape, starting with Flute Concert with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci (1850–1852) and Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci (1852), a work that is courtly and intimate at the same time. The king is performing a solo on the transverse flute; at the harpsichord is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), the great church musician's son; and Frederick's favorite sister, Wilhelmine von Bayreuth (1709–1758), is sitting on the sofa listening. Above and beyond the theme, the Flute Concert, like Menzel's other paintings, attained fame because of its coloristic and artistic appeal. Yet initially the paintings on the life of Frederick II were also controversial. Though distinguished by historical accuracy and unconditional realism, they avoid any dramatic overstatement. Menzel depicts the protagonists without any significant characteristics. Menzel's art was only officially recognized with the commission in 1861 to paint the coronation of William I (r. 1861–1888) in Königsberg. Subsequently, he received numerous tributes and was named to the nobility in 1898.

Even before Menzel created the paintings dealing with Frederick II's life, he started his series of rather private paintings especially fascinating to twenty-first-century viewers. In 1839, Menzel admired works by the English landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837), exhibited in Berlin at the time. Constable's novel, natural way of observation still reverberated in Menzel's studies of everyday life in the 1840s. These works, featuring casual brushstrokes in which airiness and atmosphere dominated, helped him develop his fondness of lighting effects. The group of works only became widely known through the commemorative exhibit featuring unpublished works in 1905 at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, securing Menzel posthumous fame. To many viewers he suddenly appeared as a bold precursor of the impressionists. Balcony Room (1845) reveals the kind of artistic ability Menzel was developing at the time. Balcony Room represents neither a genre painting nor an interior but instead an artistic and atmospheric appearance. Without preconceptions, Menzel also included entirely new motifs in his studies: the consequences of urbanization and industrialization. In 1847 he painted the Berlin-Potsdam Railway, the first railroad line in Prussia.

In the years 1872 to 1875, Menzel once again turned, on his own commission, to a subject rarely represented until then: on a grand format, he executed the Iron Rolling Mill. Menzel familiarized himself with the new world of modern industry by means of numerous studies in Upper Silesian ironworks and Berlin factories. Once again, the outcome was an atmospheric work and complex event-centered painting connecting the exact description of the production process with the social interaction of the people working there.

Highly influential, too, were Menzel's sojourns in Paris in 1855, 1867, and 1868. There he visited Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) and befriended the historical painter Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891). Works by Menzel making reference to the city, such as the Théâtre du Gymnase (1856), appear astonishingly modern with their bold angle toward auditorium and stage. The Ball Souper, painted in 1878, was in turn copied by Edgar Degas (1834–1917).

Menzel was one of the few German painters also famous abroad in his own lifetime. However, Menzel had no immediate effect on contemporary artistic production, lacking any actual successors. His forward-looking achievements were overtaken by impressionism. Yet his rich and multifaceted oeuvre continues to preoccupy and fascinate scholars and art lovers to this day. In the last decades of the twentieth century, it was the subject of countless dissertations, books, and exhibits.