text stringlengths 0 3.13k |
|---|
Gothic art |
The French invented the Gothic style, and Germany was slow to adopt it, but once it had done so Germans made it their own, and continued to use it long after the rest of Europe had abandoned it. According to Henri Focillon, Gothic allowed German art "to define for the first time certain aspects of its native genius-a v... |
The court of the Holy Roman Emperor, then based in Prague, played an important part in forming the International Gothic style in the late 14th century. The style was spread around the wealthy cities of Northern Germany by artists such Conrad von Soest in Westphalia, Meister Bertram in Hamburg, and later Stefan Lochner ... |
Like that of Pacher, the workshop of Bernt Notke, a painter from the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, both painted altarpieces or carved them in the increasingly elaborate painted and gilded style used as frameworks or alternatives for painted panels. South German wood sculpture was important in developing new subjects that ... |
Martin Schongauer, who worked in Alsace in the last part of the 15th century, was the culmination of late Gothic German painting, with a sophisticated and harmonious style, but he increasingly spent his time producing engravings, for which national and international channels of distribution had developed, so that his p... |
Renaissance painting and prints |
The concept of the Northern Renaissance or German Renaissance is somewhat confused by the continuation of the use of elaborate Gothic ornament until well into the 16th century, even in works that are undoubtedly Renaissance in their treatment of the human figure and other respects. Classical ornament had little histori... |
Printmaking and Dürer |
Printmaking by woodcut, etching, invented by Daniel Hopfer, and engraving (perhaps another German invention) was already more developed in Germany and the Low Countries than anywhere else, and the Germans took the lead in developing book illustrations, typically of a relatively low artistic standard, but seen all over ... |
After completing his apprenticeship in 1490, Dürer travelled in Germany for four years, and Italy for a few months, before establishing his own workshop in Nuremberg. He rapidly became famous all over Europe for his energetic and balanced woodcuts and engravings, while also painting. Though retaining a distinctively Ge... |
Dürer died in 1528, before it was clear that the split of the Reformation had become permanent, but his pupils of the following generation were unable to avoid taking sides. Most leading German artists became Protestants, but this deprived them of painting most religious works, previously the mainstay of artists' reven... |
Lying somewhat outside these developments is Matthias Grünewald, who left very few works, but whose masterpiece, his Isenheim Altarpiece (completed 1515), has been widely regarded as the greatest German Renaissance painting since it was restored to critical attention in the 19th century. It is an intensely emotional wo... |
Danube School and Northern Mannerism |
The Danube School is the name of a circle of artists of the first third of the 16th century in Bavaria and Austria, including Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber and Augustin Hirschvogel. With Altdorfer in the lead, the school produced the first examples of independent landscape art in the West (nearly 1,000 years after Chi... |
Hans Holbein the Elder and his brother Sigismund Holbein painted religious works in the late Gothic style. Hans the Elder was a pioneer and leader in the transformation of German art from the Gothic to the Renaissance style. His son, Hans Holbein the Younger was an important painter of portraits and a few religious wor... |
The outstanding achievements of the first half of the 16th century were followed by several decades with a remarkable absence of noteworthy German art, other than accomplished portraits that never rival the achievement of Holbein or Dürer. The next significant German artists worked in the rather artificial style of Nor... |
Gothic and Renaissance sculpture |
In Catholic parts of South Germany the Gothic tradition of wood carving continued to flourish until the end of the 18th century, adapting to changes in style through the centuries. Veit Stoss (d. 1533), Tilman Riemenschneider (d.1531) and Peter Vischer the Elder (d. 1529) were Dürer's contemporaries, and their long car... |
Two and a half centuries later, Johann Joseph Christian and Ignaz Günther were leading masters in the late Baroque period, both dying in the late 1770s, barely a decade before the French Revolution. A vital element in the effect of German Baroque interiors was the work of the Wessobrunner School, a later term for the s... |
17th to 19th-century painting |
Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism |
Baroque painting was slow to arrive in Germany, with very little before about 1650, but once established seems to have suited German taste well. Baroque and Rococo periods saw German art producing mostly works derivative of developments elsewhere, though numbers of skilled artists in various genres were active. The pe... |
Neoclassicism, which was born largely thanks to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, appears rather earlier in Germany than in France, with Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79), the Danish painter Asmus Jacob Carstens (1754–98), and the sculptor Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850). Mengs was one of the most highly regarded ... |
Daniel Chodowiecki was born in Danzig, and at least partly identified as Polish, although he only spoke German and French. His paintings and hundreds of prints, book illustrations and political cartoons are an invaluable visual record of the everyday life and the increasingly complex mentality of Enlightenment Germany,... |
The earliest German academy was the Akademie der Künste founded in Berlin in 1696, and through the next two centuries a number of other cities established their own institutions, in parallel with developments in other European nations. In Germany the uncertain market for art in a country divided into a multitude of sma... |
Writing about art |
The Enlightenment period saw German writers becoming leading theorists and critics of art, led by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who exalted Ancient Greek art and, despite never visiting Greece or actually seeing many Ancient Greek statues, set out an analysis distinguishing between the main periods of Ancient Greek art, ... |
The emergence of art as a major subject of philosophical speculation was solidified by the appearance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. In the following century, German universities were the first to teach art history as an academic subject, beginning... |
Romanticism and the Nazarenes |
German Romanticism saw a revival of innovation and distinctiveness in German art. Outside Germany only Caspar David Friedrich is well-known, but there were a number of artists with very individual styles, notably Philipp Otto Runge, who like Friedrich had trained at the Copenhagen Academy and was forgotten after his de... |
The Nazarene movement, the coinage of a mocking critic, denotes a group of early 19th-century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty and spirituality in Christian art. The principal motivation of the Nazarenes was a reaction against Neoclassicism and the routine art education of the academy system. They h... |
Led by the Nazarene Schadow, son of the sculptor, the Düsseldorf school was a group of artists who painted mostly landscapes, and who studied at, or were influenced by the Düsseldorf Academy, founded in 1767. The academy's influence grew in the 1830s and 1840s, and it had many American students, several of whom became ... |
Naturalism and beyond |
Biedermeier refers to a style in literature, music, the visual arts and interior design in the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the revolutions of 1848. Biedermeier art appealed to the prosperous middle classes by detailed but polished realism, often celebrating domestic virtues, and came to d... |
In the second half of the 19th century a number of styles developed, paralleling trends in other European counties, though the lack of a dominant capital city probably contributed to even more diversity of styles than in other countries. |
Adolph Menzel enjoyed enormous popularity both among the German public and officialdom; at his funeral Wilhelm II, German Emperor walked behind his coffin. He dramaticised past and contemporary Prussian military successes both in paintings and brilliant wood engravings illustrating books, yet his domestic subjects are ... |
The Berlin Secession was a group founded in 1898 by painters including Max Liebermann, who broadly shared the artistic approach of Manet and the French Impressionists, and Lovis Corinth then still painting in a naturalistic style. The group survived until the 1930s, despite splits, and its regular exhibitions helped l... |
20th century |
Expressionism and the Bauhaus |
Even more than in other countries, German art in the early 20th century developed through a number of loose groups and movements, many covering other artistic media as well, and often with a specific political element, as with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and November Group, both formed in 1918. In 1922 The November Group,... |
Die Brücke ("The Bridge") was one of two groups of German painters fundamental to expressionism, the other being Der Blaue Reiter group. Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905 by architecture students who wanted to be painters: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel (1883–1970),... |
Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider") formed in Munich, Germany in 1911. Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin and others founded the group in response to the rejection of Kandinsky's painting Last Judgment from an exhibition by Neue Künstlervereinigung—another artists' ... |
Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were both examples of tendency of early 20th-century German art to be "honest, direct, and spiritually engaged" The difference in how the two groups attempted this were telling, however. The artists of Der Blaue Reiter were less oriented towards intense expression of emotion and more tow... |
Weimar period; Dada and beyond |
A major feature of German art in the early 20th century until 1933 was a boom in the production of works of art of a grotesque style. Artists using the Satirical-Grotesque genre included George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, at least in their works of the 1920s. Dada in Germany, the leading practitioners of which w... |
The New Objectivity, or Neue Sachlichkeit (new matter-of-factness), was an art movement which arose in Germany during the 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, expressionism. It is thus post-expressionist and applied to works of visual art as well as literature, music, and architecture. It describes the strip... |
Plakatstil, "poster style" in German, was an early style of poster design that began in the early 20th century, using bold, straight fonts with very simple designs, in contrast to Art Nouveau posters. Lucian Bernhard was a leading figure. |
Art in the Third Reich |
The Nazi regime banned modern art, which they condemned as degenerate art (from the German: entartete Kunst). According to Nazi ideology, modern art deviated from the prescribed norm of classical beauty. While the 1920s to 1940s are considered the heyday of modern art movements, there were conflicting nationalistic mov... |
In July, 1937, the Nazis mounted a polemical exhibition entitled Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art), in Munich; it subsequently travelled to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria. The show was intended as an official condemnation of modern art, and included over 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, and books from the ... |
Post-World War II art |
Neo-expressionism, Richter and Socialist realism |
Post-war art trends in Germany can broadly be divided into Socialist realism in the DDR (communist East Germany), and in West Germany a variety of largely international movements including Neo-expressionism and Conceptualism. |
Notable socialist realism include or included Walter Womacka, Willi Sitte, Werner Tübke and Bernhard Heisig. |
Especially notable neo-expressionists include or included Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff, A. R. Penck, Markus Lüpertz, Peter Robert Keil and Rainer Fetting. Other notable artists who work with traditional media or figurative imagery include Martin Kippenberger, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Neo Rau... |
Leading German conceptual artists include or included Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hanne Darboven, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans Haacke, and Charlotte Posenenske. |
Performance art, happenings, video art and Joseph Beuys |
The Performance artist, sculptor, and theorist Joseph Beuys was perhaps the most influential German artist of the late 20th century. His main contribution to theory was the expansion of the Gesamtkunstwerk to include the whole of society, as expressed by his famous expression "Everyone is an artist". This expanded conc... |
Famous for their happenings are HA Schult and Wolf Vostell. Wolf Vostell is also known for his early installations with television. His first installations with television the Cycle Black Room from 1958 was shown in Wuppertal at the Galerie Parnass in 1963 and his installation 6 TV Dé-coll/age was shown at the Smolin G... |
The art group Gruppe SPUR included: Lothar Fischer (1933–2004), Heimrad Prem (1934–1978), Hans-Peter Zimmer (1936–1992) and Helmut Sturm (1932). The SPUR-artists met first at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and, before falling out with them, were associated with the Situationist International. Other groups include the... |
documenta (sic) is a major exhibition of contemporary art held in Kassel every five years (2007, 2012...), Art Cologne is an annual art fair, again mostly for contemporary art, and Transmediale is an annual festival for art and digital culture, held in Berlin. |
Other contemporary German artists include Jonathan Meese, Daniel Richter, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Blinky Palermo, Hans-Jürgen Schlieker, Günther Uecker, Aris Kalaizis, Katharina Fritsch, Fritz Schwegler and Thomas Schütte. |
Notes |
References |
Bartrum, Giulia (1995); German Renaissance Prints, 1490–1550; British Museum Press, 1995, ISBN 0-7141-2604-7 |
Bartrum, Giulia (2002), Albrecht Dürer and his legacy: the graphic work of a Renaissance artist, British Museum Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-7141-2633-3 |
Beckwith, John. Early Medieval Art: Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, Thames & Hudson, 1964 (rev. 1969), ISBN 0-500-20019-X |
Clark, Sir Kenneth, Landscape into Art, 1949, page refs to Penguin edn of 1961 |
Dodwell, C.R.; The Pictorial arts of the West, 800–1200, 1993, Yale UP, ISBN 0-300-06493-4 |
Focillon, Henri, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, Volume II, Gothic Art, Phaidon/Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 1980, ISBN 0-7148-2100-4 |
Gombrich, E.H., The Story of Art, Phaidon, 13th edn. 1982. ISBN 0-7148-1841-0 |
Gossman, Lionel, Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s ‘Italia und Germania.' American Philosophical Society, 2007. ISBN 0-87169-975-3. [1] |
Griffiths, Antony and Carey, Francis; German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe, 1994, British Museum Press, ISBN 0-7141-1659-9 |
Hamilton, George Heard, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880–1940 (Pelican History of Art), Yale University Press, revised 3rd edn. 1983 ISBN 0-14-056129-3 |
Harbison, Craig. The Art of the Northern Renaissance, 1995, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ISBN 0-297-83512-2 |
Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art,1st edn. 1982 & later editions, Macmillan, London, page refs to 1984 Macmillan 1st edn. paperback. ISBN 0-333-37185-2 |
Hunter, Sam; John Jacobus, Daniel Wheeler (2000) Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams |
Kitzinger, Ernst, Early Medieval Art at the British Museum, (1940) 2nd edn, 1955, British Museum |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.