Die Deutsche Kunst

We went on a great field trip last Tuesday to the Museum for German Art. The beautiful building (sort of lost in construction sites right now) was build right after the Franco-Prussian War so that Bismarck could make a huge deal of Germany’s non-French and developing nationalistic identity. My expectations lingered somewhere between ‘what the hell is “German Art”’ and ‘I’ve never even heard of this museum before’. But I was pleasantly surprised on both counts, and really enjoyed what I saw.

Cordula, a professor of Art History at Columbia and our academic director’s wife (confusing? in any case, she has accompanied us on other field trips before) gave us our very own private guided tour of the museum. She has written 500-page books on some of the painters in there, so it clearly pained her to narrow the tour down to highlights. But what we did get to see was astoundingly different, although all under the Art History category of “Romanticism”. The Casper David Friedrich’s were amazing: existential or Protestant, random or completely imbedded with symbolism… you just do not know. 

Adolph Menzel (Friedrich the Great playing the flute at Sans Souci)

We also saw the frescoes from the Casa Bartholdy in Rome, which told Old Testament stories with a secret Christian twist that Cordula enlightened us to only after we went through the stories in depth. One of the paintings had an incredibly silly-looking camel that looked a bit like the one on the cigarette ads. And then came the later pieces by the tiny and asocial Menzel, in particular the scene of Friedrich the Great playing his flute in a room resplendent with candlelight and a warm ambience. The sketch he made of his foot was also incredible; I wish I had a picture of that one. What was special about this museum is that unlike French Impressionists or Mary Casatte, one will never really get a chance to see this art outside of Germany. That is probably why I knew so little about it before, and also why the tour was so fascinating.

Casper David Friedrich (man overwhelmed by nature)