Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin 2002001013

Citation preview

Menzel's Realism Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin

Michael Fried

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Yale University Press New Haven & London

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Copyright © 2002 by Michael Fried All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copyright permitted by Sections 107 and ro8 of the U.S. Copying Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Gillian Malpass Printed in Singapore

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fried, Michael. Menzel's realism: art and embodiment in nineteenth-century Berlin I by Michael Fried. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-3 oo-o9219-9 I.

Menzel, Adolph, 1815-1905- Criticism and interpretation.

German- Germany - Berlin- 19th century. I. Menzel, Adolph, 1815-1905 .

2. Art,

3 · Realism in art- Germany.

II. Title.

N6888 .M45 4 F75 2002 759·3 - dc21

2002001013

A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library ILLUSTRATIONS

"B" numbers in parentheses in the captions

refer to the catalogue raisonne of Menzel's prints, Elfried Bock, Adolph Menzel: Verzeichnis seines graphischen Werkes (Berlin, 1923 ) Dimensions are given in centimeters, height before width

Page i

Adolph Menzel, Bricklayer with His Family in front of

the Half-Finished Edifice of Society (B. 919), from The Works of Frederick the Great, 1843-49

Frontispiece

Adolph Menzel, Rear Courtyard and House, detail of fig. 45·

!(•5>-

Lj 15 t( 6 V LI

J

10 l;o ItJ-z_

To T.

]. Clark and Walter Benn Michaels

Contents

Preface

lX

I

Two Bookca es

I

2

" Who is Menzel ? "

5

3

An Art of Embodiment:

4

An Aesthetics of Empathy

35

5

An Art of Embodiment:

4I

6

Menzel and the "Autonomization of Sight"

59

7

The " Private" Pictures and Some Others

75

8

Menzel with Courbet and Eakins

I09

9

The French Response to Menzel: Edmond D uranty

I25

Time and the Everyday; Menzel and Kierkegaard' Either/Or; with a Postscript on Fontane's Effi Briest

I4I

II

Some Self-Portraits

I67

I2

Menzel's " Real Allegory"

I85

I3

The Later Menzel

207

I4

"The Disenchantment of the World"; Walter Benjamin on Traces

23I

Concl usion: Menzel's Realism

247

Coda : Brickwork

259

IO

I5

ores

r

II

I9

266

Chronology

300

Photograph Credits

304

Index

3°5

Facing page Adolph Menzel, Frederick the Great's Address to His Generals before the Battle of Leuthen, detail of fig. 1 8

Preface

A

FEW

REMARKS

ABOUT

THE

GENESIS

OF

MENZEL 'S REALISM

ARE

IN

ORDER.

I CAME T O A D O L P H M E N Z E L AFTER DECADES O F TH INKING AND WRITING A B O UT

French eighteenth- and ni neteenth-century painti ng, though more to the point may be the fact that I had already written at length about two major nineteenth-century real ist painters, Gustave Courbet and Thomas Eakins. I n fact I think of this book as the third in a nineteenth-century realism trilogy, along with Courbet's Realism ( 1 9 90 ) and the Eakins chapter in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane ( 1 9 8 7 ) . But my interest i n Menzel is not a recent development. For a long time I had hoped some day to write about him, though practically speaking that became much more feasible with the fal l of the Berlin Wa ll, which meant that from then on there would be easy access to the immense holdings of Menzel's pai ntings and drawings in the former East Berl i n . (Today, of course, the drawings belong to the Kupferstich­ kabinett in the new centralized museum complex not far from Potsdamer Platz.) I con­ tinued to assume, however, that in order to become fa miliar with the scope of his oeuvre and also to discover what I wanted to say about it I would need to spend an extended period of time in Berlin, and for personal reasons that appeared not to be in the cards for year to come. Then in 1 99 7 the large and marvelously chosen retrospective exhi­ bition of Menzel's art, organized by Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, working with Philip Conisbee in the United States, arrived at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I went to see it as soon a s it opened, and not only was I deeply impressed by the work itself, I also began to glimp e the outline of an argument that would allow me to provide an analogous account of Menzel's enterprise to those I had developed in response to the work of Courbet and Eakins. I returned often, and as I spent many hours giving myself up to his paintings and drawings my thoughts and intuitions became increasingly concrete, and I realized that I had no choice but to embark on a book. I followed the exhibition to Berl in, the third stop on its international tour, and took advantage o f being there to visit other German museums with Menzel . A year later I returned to Berlin ( both visits were enabled by an exchange program between the Johns Hopkins University and the H u m boldt University), looked at draw­ ings in the Kupferstich kabinett, and met Claude Keisch, whose k nowledge of Menzel's art is without equal and whose help and support have been invaluable. (A third visit followed in May 200 1 , but by then the present book was completed.) I still believe that a scholar presuming to write on Menzel ought ideally to have seen all the drawings in Berl in, at the very least. My own fam iliarity with his art stops short of that. But I have looked hard at much of his work , including the best-known paintings and drawing , and without having made myself an expert i n German nineteenth-century art, I have read sufficiently in the secondary literature to be sure that no one before me has said what I wish to say.

I

I.

Facing page

Adolph Menzel, Tron Rolling Mill, detail of fig. 71

IX

Special thanks are due the following persons: Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher in Berlin; Kermit Champa, whose enthusiasm for Menzel when we were both graduate students at Harvard proved contagious; Lynette Roth, who found Menzel notes for me in the archives in Berlin; Neil Hertz for having long ago called my attention to the chapter of Ruskin's Modern Painters with which I begin my book; Brigid Doherty, Catherine Gallagher, Joseph Koerner, Robert Pippin, Edward Snow, and David Wellbery for comments and suggestions that have been put to use in what follows; and Stephen Bann, T. J. Clark, Ruth Leys, Walter Benn Michaels, and Alex Potts for reading the present book in manuscript and offering valuable suggestions. At Yale University Press, Gillian Malpass has been a resourceful and perfectionist editor; it has been a plea­ sure to work with her. Throughout the period I have been writing on Menzel my daughter Anna Lei Ci Fried has brought great joy to her mother and me in countless ways. I would like to think that this book bears the touch of her presence on every page.

X

Be it life or death, we crave only reality. Thoreau, Walden

/".

...-··

.. �-'···

I

..

)

Adolph Menzel, Dr. Puhlmann's Bookcase, 1844, pencil, 26.9

x

21, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

(SZ

Menzel N 1027)

r

I

Two Bookcases

N VOLUME FOUR OF

MODERN PA INTERS,

MYSTERY: - FIRST, AS ESSENTIAL,

"

I N A CHAPTER CALLED

"

oF TURNERIAN

JOHN RUSKIN DEVELOPS THE NOTION THAT ALL

vision, all acts of seeing are incomplete, that they necessarily stop short of perfect clarity. Putting this more strongly, he writes: " WE NEVER SEE ANYTHI N G CLEARLY . . . What we call seeing a thing clearly is only seeing enough of it to make out what it is; this point of intelligibility varying in distance for di fferent magnitudes and k inds of things, while the appointed q uantity of mystery remains nearly the same for a l l . " 1 A few pages later he proposes the following: .

Everything in the field of sight is equally puzzl ing, and can only be drawn rightly on the same difficult conditions. Try it fairly. Take the commonest, closest, most fam iliar thing, and strive to draw it verily as you see it. Be sure of this last fact, for otherwise you will find yourself continually drawing, not what you see, but what you know. The best practice to begin with is, sitting about three yards from a bookcase (not your own, so that you may know none of the titles of the books), to try to draw the books accurately, with the titles on the backs, and patterns on the bindings, as you see them. You are not to stir from your place to look what they are, but to draw them simply as they appear, giving the perfect look of neat lettering; which, never­ theless, must be ( as you find it on most of the books) absolutely i llegible. Next try to draw a piece of patterned m uslin or lace (of which you do not k n ow the pattern), a little way off, and rather in the shade; and be sure you get all the grace and look of the pattern without going a step nearer to see what it is. Then try to draw a bank of grass, with all its blades; or a bush, with a l l its leaves; and you will soon begin to understand under what a universal law of obscurity we l i ve, and perceive that all distinct drawing must be bad drawing, and that nothing can be right, till it is un­ intelligible. (79, emphasis in original ) Now consider the pencil drawing by the n ineteenth-century Berlin draftsman and painter Adolph Menzel known as Dr. Puhlmann's Bookcase ( 1 844; fig. 1 ) ;2 to what extent does it bear out the truth of Ruskin's claims? More broadly, to what extent does it give the impression of having been made in something like the spirit of Ruskin's proposed experiment? On first glance, the drawing conveys the sense o f an attempt by the artist to depict the bookcase simply and strictly as it appeared to him. We instinctively feel - without thinking about i t - that such a bookcase actually existed, that the artist placed himself at a fixed distance ( perhaps about three yards) from it for as long as was needed for the drawing to be made, and that nothing mattered more to the artist, whom we recognize on the strength of this work a lone to have been an unusually gifted draftsman, than transcribing as exactly as possible in line and shade what Ruskin calls the "look" of the

I

I

bookcase and its contents (mainly books and papers but various other objects as well). Moreover, the treatment of the bindings of the books appears to accord with Ruskin's strictures. On the one hand, the artist seems to have made a concerted effort to evoke the various bindings, with their different patterns and titles, that he saw before him. On the other hand, as Ruskin crucially requires, nothing about the bindings is e �tirely clear; certainly not the lettering of titles and authors, or the various patterns that can be dis­ cerned on at least some of the books (see in particular the diagonal crisscross pattern on the group of books at the left of the fourth shelf up), or the precise material texture of the individual bindings - and yet, to come full circle, the drawing strikes us, again without our thinking about it, as unusually replete with information about the book­ case and its contents. For there is nothing in the least sketchlike, as that term is usually understood, about this drawing. The artist has not been willing to settle for a rapid, global "impression," as if the bookcase were glimpsed as a whole and only for an instant by an eye unwilling to engage with it more closely. (It might be contrasted in this regard with Edgar Degas's drawing of books in a bookcase that served as a study for his portrait of the novelist and art critic Edmond Duranty [1879; fig. 2].3) On the contrary, Menzel's drawing evokes a sense of absolute concentration, over a not inconsequential period of time, upon a highly complex, internally differentiated motif- which is to say that it is in accord with Ruskin's insistence in the same chapter that the draftsman or painter not court indistinctness but rather "mean something, and say something, when­ ever you touch canvas [or paper]" {87). For Ruskin, in other words, "all great drawing [is] distinct drawing; referring, nevertheless, to a certain sort of indistinctness, necessary to the highest art" (73). And my suggestion is that, up to a point but only up to a point (it is what lies beyond that point that interests me), Menzel's drawing of Dr. Puhlmann's bookcase may be taken as exemplifying Ruskin's ideas. One way of starting to characterize the point at which Ruskin's chapter and Menzel's drawing part company is to recall the distinction between seeing and knowing invoked in the paragraph quoted above. For Ruskin, the task of the draftsman or painter is to render the truth of vision ("ocular truth" [82]), and it is that truth which, no matter how closely we approach or how finely we examine a particular object, is necessarily partial, incomplete, ending in mystery. Even under a microscope this will be the case: the mystery, far from being resolved, will merely remove itself "into a fifth, sixth, hundredth, or thousandth place, according to the power we use" (77). The ultimate un­ clarity of perceived reality, in other words, is based on what Ruskin calls "the absolute infinity of things" (75), that is, the ultimate irresolvability of reality itself. The drafts­ man or painter must be faithful to that infinity or irresolvability- must resist the ever­ present temptation to replace it with "knowledge"- while doing everything in his power to capture the appearance of the world as meticulously as possible under the prevailing circumstances {at such and such a distance from the object to be represented, under such and such conditions of light and atmosphere, and so on), which of course is the only way in which the infinity or irresolvability in question can be captured as well. (The unclarity Ruskin advocates is thus the supreme test of a certain ocular realism, exem­ plified for him - bizarrely, it may seem to us - by the Pre-Raphaelites.4) There is in Ruskin's vision of reality a mixture of ontological and epistemological considerations that is both unstable and exhilarating, but what I want to stress - what has already emerged - is the exclusively visual or ocular register of Ruskin's remarks. Simply put, Ruskin is interested in what can and cannot be seen, understanding by seeing the visual

2

2 Edgar Degas, Study of Bookshelves for "Edmond Duranty, "

1879, charcoal, heightened with white chalk, o n faced blue paper, 46.9 x 30.5, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund 1 9 1 8 (r9· 5 I · 9b)

perception of a particular range of real-world distinctions and d i fferences: in the case of the representative bookcase w h ich the reader is urged to try to draw, the distinctions and differences pertain to the pattern, texture, and titles of the bindings. In contrast, the youthful, prodigiously gifted artist who drew Dr. Puhlmann's Bookcase was con­ cerned with a range of experience, of aspects o f the real, that far exceeded what Ruskin, in the passages I have quoted, would have understood as the facts of vision alone. Obviously I do not mean by this to suggest that Menzel was other than passionately interested in, and marvelously good at, drawing and painting what he saw. My point i s rather that h e was also passionately concerned with evoking aspects of h i s subject matter that co uld not strictly or directly be seen but could only be intuited, inferred, or otherwise imagined on the basis of the visual evidence, construing the notion of such evidence in the broadest possible way. So for example I find in Dr. Puhlmann's

3

Bookcase- and not at all in Degas's little sketch- an extraordinarily intense feeling for books and journals in themselves, by which I mean not just as patches of color in the artist's visual field, nor e.ven as graspable and manipulable objects of a certain size, shape, and weight, and therefore as depictable by a certain tactile illusionism, but also, more important, as particular kinds of cultural or rather existential objects: full of pages of print, bound between hard or soft covers, to be held in two hands or placed flat on a desk or table or lectern while they are read and reread and perhaps studied and con­ sulted (this would be especially true of medical books), indeed to be preserved in book­ shelves within which they are placed in rows or, more informally, on top of one another in smallish stacks- in other words to be used, handled, and maintained (also neglected) in particular ways over substantial periods of time (years, even decades, rather than weeks or months) . . . though to say all this fails to capture the sense in which Menzel's drawing as I see it portrays these particular books, journals, pamphlets, and so on, which (the title of the drawing �ells us) belonged to Dr. Wilhelm Puhlmann, a medical officer who lived in Potsdam and was a member of the board of the local art society as well as one of Menzel's closest friends. 5 (Menzel and he met in 1836, when the artist was twenty-one, and remained close friends until Puhlmann's death in 1882. Menzel was a frequent visitor at Puhlmann's home and once made a drawing of himself arriving there and being welcomed by the family.6) That is, I suggest that it was far from indifferent to the artist that the original of the bookcase in the drawing stood in the house of his friend, that the books and papers it contained had been and presumably still were being used by that friend, in short that the bindings and pages and indeed the rows and stacks of books and papers on the shelves bore not only the marks of wear and tear over the years but also the invisible though, if I am right, not quite unrepresentable imprint of Puhlmann's touch, his gaze, even of his thought. I stop just short of calling Menzel's drawing a virtual portrait of Puhlmann, though that would be one possible implication of my remarks, just as I stop short of calling it a virtual portrait of Menzel himself via his feelings for Puhlmann, though the fore­ shortening of the shelves implies that the fifth shelf up was on the same level as the artist's eyes, a feature of the sheet that refers the viewer familiar with Menzel's biogra­ phy to the latter's dwarflike stature. A minimal conclusion would be that Dr. Puhlmann's Bookcase, both in its overall aspect and in the details of its execution, gives no purchase to Ruskin's distinction between seeing and knowing- and a further claim, to be fleshed out in the pages that follow, is that this in turn points the way to a new understanding of Menzel's practice as draftsman and painter.

4

2

B

"Who Is Menzel?"

EFORE TRYING TO MAKE G O O D THAT CLAI M, HOWEVER, I M U ST SAY SOMETHING B Y WAY O F BACKGROUND , F I RST ABOUT MENZEL A N D H I S ART A N D SECOND, M O RE

briefly, about my way of proceeding in this book. Adolph Menzel was born in Breslau on 8 December I 8 I 5 , spent most of his life i n Berlin (where t h e family moved in I 8 3 o), and died there in his ninetieth year. 1 H i s father, who died when he was sixteen, ran a lithography workshop, and much of the son's early work comprised illustrations for a wide range of commissions. On his father's death Menzel took over the workshop and successfully supported the family, which by then included not only his mother but a younger sister and brother. Physical ly, Menzel was gnomelike, with a huge head on an undersized body - he was four foot six or seven tall - as numerous contemporary photographs attest (see fig. I 3 2 ) . Although he enjoyed a number of close friendships, both with older men and with literary and artistic con­ temporaries, his personality is repeatedly described as harsh and d i fficult outside that circle. We also know that strangers' spontaneous reactions to his appearance made going out in public something of a trial, but his drawings suggest that he nevertheless became a dedicated flimeur in the rapidly growing metropolis of Berlin, and starting in I 8 5 2 h e also traveled widely in search of subjects for h i s art, t o visit exhibitions a n d artistic con­ gresses, and simply for pleasure. In any case, his grotesque physique set him apart from the general run of humanity and was surely a factor in his never marrying. "Not only have I remained unmarried, throughout my l i fe I have also renounced all relations with the other sex (as such )," he famously wrote in h i s last will and testament. " In short, there is a lack of any kind of self-made bond [ or glue; the German is Klebestoff, l iter­ ally "attachment-stuff"] between me and the outside world."2 This statement has invari­ ably been taken simply as an acknowledgment of a deep sense of estrangement and alienation; eventually I shall argue that its implications for our understanding of his art are considerably more complex. In I 8 3 3 Menzel briefly attended the Berlin Academy of Art, tak ing part in a class that drew from plaster casts of ancient sculptures. He soon gave it up, and from that moment on was entirely self-taught. The decisive event in his early career took place in I 8 3 9, when he accepted the task of providing roughly 400 drawings for wood engravings to i l lustrate Franz Kugler's History of Frederick the Great, which a ppeared in twenty installments until its completion in I 842. Kugler was a p ioneer art historian and a man of letters, and the History marks an epoch i n the h istoriography of Frederick's l i fe and reign, which starting around I83o underwent a process of reevaluation that saw him emerge as a hero of political l i berals in a conspicuously autocratic Prussia. Frederick was born in I 7I2 and died in I 7 8 6. As a youth his interests were artistic and cultural rather than military, but soon after becoming k ing in I 740 he invaded the province o f S ilesia, precipitating a war in the course of which he first emerged as a field

5

commander of genius. The w�r lasted five years, and when it was over Frederick estab­ lished a highly cultivated court at the Rococo palace of Sanssouci at Potsdam, where he gathered around him a circle of men of intellect including the Marquis d'Argens, the Venetian Count Francesco Algarotti, the French doctor and author Julian de la Mettrie, and for three years in the early 17 sos, the great Voltaire. In 1756 new hostilities broke out that became the Seven Years War, during which Prussia was attacked by armies belonging to several European powers; Frederick spent much of those years in the saddle at the head of his forces, and when peace finally came in 1763 Prussia had emerged once and for all as an unignorable factor in European affairs. Among his other cultural pursuits, Frederick was an accomplished flautist and composer; C. P. E. Bach was his concertmaster, and when the latter's father visited Sanssouci, the monarch gave him the melodic theme that became the sublime Musical Offering. According to the liberal mythology of the r 830s and after, Frederick, known familiarly as der alte Fritz, was beloved by his people, whose welfare he took pains to insure - hence his usefulne a an ideal for those in favor of political reform. Menzel's compositionally inventive and psychologically persuasive illustrations, a definitive work in its genre, contributed materially to the success of the History, which was often reprinted in the decades that followed and is still in print today; not the least of Menzel's achievements was the building up of a team of expert wood engravers in Leipzig and Berlin that soon became at least the equal of their initially superior French counterparts. Subsequently Menzel executed another 200 illustrations for the Works of Frederick the Great (completed in r849), and 436 hand-colored l ithographs for The Army of Frederick the Great and Its Uniforms (completed in r857). Not surprisingly, Menzel in the course of working on those projects made himself an expert without peer in the military and other arcana of the Frederician period. During the early and mid-r84os, too, Menzel began seriously to take up oil painting; although the works in question were not exhibited until much later, starting around r844 he painted a number of extraordinarily fresh and spontaneous-seeming canvases of (for example) views from apartment windows, domestic interiors, and members of his immediate family in unselfconscious attitudes, which came eventually to be known as the "private" pictures (see figs. 45, sr, 53). It was primarily these that were ingled out for praise in 1906 by the modernist critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who argued that they seemed in retrospect to hold out the promise of a progressive "French" -style develop­ ment in the direction of pictorial modernity, but that unfortunately, with the exception of a handful of later works, Menzel had been led by the nationalistic and materialistic values of W ilhelmine Germany to betray that promise in favor of a crass and somewhat trivial realism.3 More recent commentators have sought to distance themselves from Meier-Graefe's strictures, but the "private" pictures as a group, in particular the mar­ velous Balcony Room of r845, continue to excite admiration that, while perfectly justified, nevertheless can lead to undervaluing the rest of Menzel's achievement. In March r848, a few days after an insurrection in which hundreds of Berliners were killed by government soldiers, Menzel returned to the city in time to witnes the immen e public funeral held in honor of the fallen in the Gendarmenmarkt. Soon afterward he began work on a modest-sized picture, the Lying in State of the Victims of the March Revolution (see fig. 141), which was never quite completed (the canvas is signed and dated in the unfinished area at the lower_left). And in the late r84os he began in earnest to make a cycle of oil paintings in different formats of scenes taken from the life of

6

3

Adolph Menzel, Lying in State of the Victims of the March Revolution, detail of fig. 141

Frederick the Great, which eventually included the Round Table of Frederick ll at Sanssouci (I85o; in Berlin until I945, since lost), Flu(e Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci (I852; see fig. 32), Night Attack at Hochkirch (I856; destroyed in the Second World War), Bon Soir, Messieurs! (Frederick the Great at Lissa) (begun I856, left unfinished I858; see fig. I3), and Frederick the Great's Address to His Generals before the Battle of Leuthen (begun I8 59, left unfinished; see fig. I8). In addition Menzel painted a variety of smaller works dealing with aspects of Frederick's life, the most important of which, I shall suggest, is the brilliant gouache Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffold at Rheinsberg (I86I; see fig. 128), to which I devote a whole section further on in this book. All this time Menzel was enjoying increasing success as an artist, and not only in Prussia. In September I855 he spent two weeks in Paris visiting the Universal Exhibi­ tion, where the Round Table was on view; on that occasion he is known to have visited Courbet's one-man "Pavilion du Realisme," which included (among numerous other canvases) the monumental Painter's Studio, Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years in My Artistic Life (I854-55; see fig. 65), a work that provides an important precedent for Menzel's own still-to-emerge allegorical tendencies. Some time after his return from Paris he painted the Theatre du Gymnase (I856; see fig. 54), another canvas especially admired by Meier-Graefe. In I857 the Night Attack at Hochkirch was awarded a gold medal when it was shown at the Berlin Academy of Arts; in general Menzel's works became increasingly sought after by collectors; and in I86I he received a royal commission to paint a large-scale representation of the Coronation of King William l at Konigsberg (I86I-65; see fig. 79), a project that required four years of labor for its completion, in the course of which he made more than qo portrait studies in watercolor, pencil, and gouache of participants in the event. (When the painting was done Menzel gathered the studies along with other preliminary sketches, photographs of the finished canvas, and "a long autograph account of the process of creation" in an enormous album, as if to memorialize, to give independent form to, the immense sus­ tained effort that the project had required.4) Among the works Menzel nevertheless exe­ cuted during the first half of the I86os are two astonishing gouaches, Hand Holding a Paint Dish and Hand Holding a Book (I864; see figs. 26, 27), both apparently studies of th� artist's right hand executed with his left (Menzel was famously ambidextrous). And in I863, for his sister Emilie's two children, Menzel began the so-called Children's Album, eventually comprising forty-four gouaches mainly of animals and birds (see figs. 38, 66-8, 98, I6I); the album was completed in I883, at which time he is supposed to have retouched many of the pictures (retouching or for that matter significantly modi­ fying earlier work was not unu$ual for him).5 In I866 Menzel traveled to the battlefields of the Austro-Prussian War in order to see for himself the reality of combat. He failed to witness an actual battle, but he visited field hospitals filled with the wounded and dying, and made several harrowing draw­ ings and watercolors of dead and seriously wounded soldiers (see figs. I33, I34). Also that year Menzel painted a series of gouaches on colored paper known as the Fantasies from the Arms Room (I866; see figs. 28, 29, 30), based on the suits of armor that were kept in the Guard Room in the Berlin Royal Palace where he had painted the Coron­ ation. In I867 Menzel visited Paris again for the Universal Exhibition of that year; on this occasion he was awarded a second-place medal (a high distinction) for the Night Attack at Hochkirch as well as the cross of the Legion of Honor. He solidified his friend-

8

ship with the painter Ernest Meissonier, whom he had met in Berlin i n I 86 2, got to know Alfred Stevens and Jean-Leon Gerome, and visited the Courbet pavilion and perhaps also Maner's one-man exhibition. From that moment his reputation in France was secure; j u st over ten years later the leading critic Edmond Duranty found in Menzel's art the epitome of the pictori a l realism he had always advocated (along with something else, something unique, that he had never previously imagined ), and in I 8 8 5 a l arge exhibition of his art was held at the Pavilion de Ia Ville in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Menzel was awarded the Order of Merit by the Prussian government in I 8 7o; a year ' later he painted the l i fe-size portraits Moltke and Bis marck, following the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War; in I 872 he visited Konigshutte in Upper Silesia in preparation for a major painting of industrial labor, the wholly original Iron Rolling Mill (I872-7 5 ; see figs. 64, ? I ) , immediately p urchased, along with the Flute Concert, by the Berli n Nationalgalerie; and in October I 8 7 2 he painted, it appears rapidly, the Studio Wall today in the Hamburg Kunsthalle ( see fig. I 6o ) , a canvas widely rega rded as the masterpiece of his artistic maturity. In I 8 7 3 he took part in the removal from the vault of the garrison church i n Berlin of numerous sarcophagi containing the remains of officers from the Frederician wars, and made a series of unforgettable drawings of the decayed but in some cases sti ll recogn izable corpses (see figs. I34-40 ) . Also dating from the mid-I 8 7os is the magisterial gouache, Bricklayers on a Building Site (I 8 7 5 ; see fig. I 04), a n exemplary work in more ways than one. I n I 8 76, in response to a com­ mission, he made drawings for more than thirty ela borate woodcut ill ustrations for a centenary edition of Heinrich von Kleist's verse comedy The Broken Jug, pu blished a year later (see figs. I 0 5 , I I5-I7, I 2 I ); the illustrations also comprised four photographs of monochrome gouaches. And in I 878 the Iron Rolling Mill, Round Table, and Flute Concert were all sent to Paris to be shown i n that year's Universal Exhibition, where the first in particular made a powerful impression. Starting around I 8 8o Menzel's career as an oil painter tapered off, with more and more of his pictorial efforts going into gouache, a medi um of which he was absolute master. One last ambitious oil painting, Piazza d'Erbe in Verona (Marketplace in Verona) ( see fig. I43 ), was exhi bited in I 8 8 4, to a lukewarm response, perhaps confirming Menzel's turning away from oils. Honors continued to shower on him - exhi­ bitions, awards, medals, honorary doctorates, official birthday celebrations - and the Nationalgalerie further expressed its support by acquiring paintings, gouaches, and drawings, establishing the basis of an authoritative collection of his art. During these years too he regularly attended court balls and similar occasions, where the young Jules Laforgue, for about five years in the first half of the I8 8os reader to the Empress Augusta, reported seeing him "no taller than a cuirassier-guard's boot, bedecked with pendants and orders, but also wearing the Legion of Honor, coming and going, knowing everyone, not missing a single one of these parties, moving among all these personages like a gnome and like the greatest enfant terrible for the chronicler. "6 (Laforgue also considered Menzel an "extraordinary genius. "7) In I 89 5 a large-scale exhibition of his work was held at the Nationalgalerie to mark his eightieth birthday, and he was made a member of both the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. In I898 he was awarded the Order o f the Black Eagle, the highest Prussian decoration, a llowing him to adopt the noble "von" (the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had been taken as a young boy by his parents to visit Menzel's studio), and in I 903 Hugo von Tschudi, d i rector of the Nationalgalerie, purchased the I 84 5 Balcony Room for the

9

·

museum. Other "private" paintings began to be exhibited, and the opinion started to be heard that the early works were of greater artistic interest than the later ones. On 9 February 1905 Menzel died in Berlin; the arrangements for his funeral several days later were directed by the Kaiser, who walked behind his coffin, a singular honor. And in late March of that year the Nationalgalerie opened a vast memorial exhibition that at once established his preeminence among the artists of his era and set the stage for Meier­ Graefe's iconoclastic monograph, The Young Menzel, of the following year. From fi rst to last Menzel was a prodigious worker. The painter Max Liebermann, more than thirty years his junior, recalls Menzel telling him at the outset of his career, "Your talent you have from God, I value in an artist only the effort," and all his life Menzel lived up to that ideal.8 In the same spirit, his friend the journalist, poet, and novelist Theodor Fontane called him "a lifelong master of the art of concentration. "9 Fontane, who wrote often and admiringly about Menzel's art, was only one of the artist's literary friends.10 As early as r 850 Menzel became a member of the circle "Tunnel over the Spree," and a few years later of the "Ri.itli," a more exclusive offshoot of the first; other members of the latter included Fontane, Kugler, the poet and writer of novellas _ Theodor Storm, the poet Paul Heyse (to whom Menzel gave and dedicated two import­ ant works, a pastel, Lady with Opera Glasses [see fig. 6ol, and a beautiful drawing in black chalk, Portrait Group: jean Paul, Schiller, Goethe, and Herder [see fig. 70]), and the art historian Friedrich Eggers (whose death 1 mask figures prominently in the Hamburg Studio Wall). It was Fontane too who, in 1885 on Menzel's seventieth birth­ day, wrote the well-known poem "On the Steps of Sanssouci," in which the poet, walking one evening through the park at Sanssouci, is stopped by the spirit of Frederick the Great who asks him who this Menzel is whose birthday is being celebrated. The poem goes on to say that Menzel was nothing other than the full range of his "all­ comprehending" subject matter, implicitly recognizing the powerful strain of something like identification that lies at the heart of Menzel's representational procedures (I am getting ahead of mysel£).11 So far I have said nothing about Menzel as a draftsman and yet it might be argued that the heart of his formidable achievement lies precisely there. Simply put, the ambidextrous Menzel drew all the time ("Nulla dies sine linea" was his motto), often on sketchbooks of various sizes that he carried with him in special pockets sewn into his coats.12 "He drew incessantly," Fran66666>bt;;;&��

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1 70

Hanne Da rboven, from Hanne Darboven I 9 75, 1 9 7 5

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Menschen and Landscha(ten,

171

H a n n e Darboven, from

1 98 5

1 72

Hanne Darboven, from Friedrich II, Harhurg 1 9 8 6 , 1 9 86

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.

NOTES TO

PA G E S

I 5 3 -9

writing and drawing while strictly being neither. Obviously there i s nothing like that in Menzel's graphic oeuvre. But Darboven's graphicism as such, as well as her search for practices that fill time extensively, have ana logies in his art. Finally, Doherty draws a highly suggestive connection between Da rboven's mathematical prose and "something like 'the a bsolute immanence of life' that Georg Lukacs recognized in Homeric epic" (Menschen und Landschaften, p. 40), by way of adumbrating an account of Darboven as an epic or rather a historical artist, one who attempts in her " real writing" to " recollect the origins and technolo­ gies of the late capitalist era, from the systems of exchange, administration, and publicity put to use by Hamburg coffee merchants, to the 'scrap-paper economies' of the stock market and the Conceptual artist's own studio", ibid., p. 4 3 · A further question, which Doherty's observations go a long way toward answering, would concern the relation of Lukacs's notion of "the absolute imma nence of life" and, more particula rly, of Da rboven's autograph practices to a layered and idiosyncratic version of the everyday, one that, in her art, overwhelmingly presents itself in a retrospective light that is nevertheless not wholly inaccessible to the present moment. The basic early article on Darboven is Lippard's cited above. The bilingual Menschen und Land­ schaften catalog, edited by Kira van Lil, includes Vivian Bobka's essay " Unfathomable Surfaces," which discusses rhe relation of Da rboven's early work to American Mini­ malist and Conceptual art; while the bilingual Konstruiert

19

Literarisch Musikalisch I Constructed Literary Musical Hanne Darboven I The Sculpting of Time, ed. Ingrid

I

15 16 17

Burgbacher-Krupka, exh. cat. ( London: Goethe Institute, 1 8 ov. 1 994-14 Jan. 1 99 5 ), accompanying the exhibition of Friedrich II, Harburg 1 986, contains several interesting short essays along with a conversation with Darboven on the "concept of time," the value of which is however diminished by her interlocutor Burgbacher-Krupka's desire to cast the artist's projects into a Heideggerian grid. My thanks to Brigid Dohe rty for forcing me to recognize that Hanne Darboven is an artist to be reckoned with. See Keisch's entry on that picture in Menzel 1 9 9 6-97, pp. 39 0-9 1 , cat. 1 64. See the entry by Marie Ursula Riemann i n Menzel 1 9 9 0 , pp. 2 1 2- 1 4, cat. 7 4 · F o r more o n t h e Marienburg itself, see t h e entry o n Friedrich Gil ly's watercolor, The Catholic Church of the Marienburg ( 1 794), in Hinrich Sieveking, Fuseli to Menzel:

20 2r

22

23

Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe from a German Private Collection, exh. cat. (Ca mbridge, Mass:

I8

28 6

Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 4 Apr.-7 June 1 99 8 ; New York: Frick Collection, 23 June-30 Aug. 1 9 98; and Los Angeles: j. Paul Getty Museum, I 5 Sept.-29 Nov. 1 9 9 8 ), pp. I 8 6-87, cat. 7 5 · I n notes a t present i n the central archive of rhe Sraarliche Museen zu Berlin. Other figures, notably the women with umbrellas on the upper ramparts, are described as "tourists resting on the way back from the Baltic seaside." The relevant passage in the notes reads: " Nachtraglich fertig gestellt Studien a us dem Jahr I 8 5 5 - die Staffage theils Touristen - Publikum auf der Rast von den Ostseebadern

24

her - theils heimkehrende Arbeiter in Sonnabendstim­ mung." My thanks to Lynette Roth for obtaining the notes for me. See above, n. 1 2. Significantly, the motif of bricklaying arises at a crucial j u ncture in Walden, when in the chapter called "House-Warming" the writer describes building his chimney, pp. I 94-5· "I lingered most a bout the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house," Thoreau writes. " Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I com­ menced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember; my stiff neck is of older date . . . . I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calcu lated to endure a long time." A few pages later, p. 1 9 8 , he describes plaster­ ing over at least some of the brickwork, remarking in sur­ prise "how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture i n my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to ch risten a new hearth." Cavell in an unpu blished essay, " Night and Day: Heideg­ ger and Thoreau," j u xtaposes the latter passage with Hei­ degger's claim that " Being is the hearth . " Cavell comments: "Since baptizing bricks is not likely to be included in a doxical outline of Christianity, the question whether Thoreau is de-Christianizing the spirituality, or transcen­ dentality, of his fireplace will turn on whether his ecstatic playfulness here is granted, as elsewhere, its due serious­ ness." The image of the hearth stands for home, bur in Menzel brickwork is everywhere, hence the world is his home. Cf. Kie rkegaard in the passage from The Book on Adler cited by Cavell in fn. r , about men always being out, not at home; Menzel is at home when h e is out, so ro speak. See e.g. Seren Kier kegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru ( New York, 1 9 6 2 ) . See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ( 1 927), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston, I l l . , 1 9 6 2 ) , pp. I 6 3-8, 2 1 0-24, 3 8 3-4 2 3 . Franz Kafka, "The Tower o f Babel" (in German a n d Eng . ) , trans. Ernst Kaiser a n d Eithne Wilkins, Parables and Paradoxes ( New York, 1 96 1 ) , p. 3 5 · The theme of aspiring to a higher sphere is developed trag­ ically in Ibsen's complexly imagined The Master Builder ( I 892), in which the idea of "building homes for human beings" is contrasted negatively with building towering "castles in the air" - but the play ends with irs protagonist, Halvard Solness, the ambitious and exhausted master builder, ascending to a great height despite being prone to vertigo and then falling to his death. Obviously the notion of the everyday is implicit in this - marriage and childless­ ness are also thematized in the play - but exactly to what end would have to be determined within the framework of a comprehensive investigation of I bsen's oeuvre. (Such an investigation is at presenr being undertaken by Tori! M oi . ) See Henrik Ibsen, "The Master B u ilder," i n Four Major Plays: Volume 1, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York, 1 9 6 5 ) . On the Kleist project see lngeborg Becker, " 'Frederick iiber alles' - Menzel and Book I l l u stration," in Prints and

NOTES TO PAGES I 5 9-7 5 my blow struck precisely this spot or the vibration through the entire structure of the desk was the occasion, I do not know, but this I do know - a secret door that I had never noticed before sprung [sic] open. This door closed off a compartment that I obviously had not discov­ ered. Here, to my great amazement, I found a mass of papers, the papers that constitute the contents of the present pu blication."

Drawings by Adolph Menzel: A Selection from the Collec­ tions of the Museums of West Berlin, ex h. car. (Cambridge:

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

Fitzwill iam Museum, I6 jan .-4 Mar. I 9 84), pp. 3 4- 5 , and the illustrations and entries in the fuller version of that catalogue, Menzel 1 984, pp. 468-86, cat. 3 3 2-3 5 . 2 r . See Becker, " Menzel and Book Illustration," p . 3 5 {the German noun is " Platten " ) , and Werner Hofmann, " Menzel's Universality," in Menzel 1 996-97, p. 9 6 . The phrase is lngeborg Becker's (German vexiermassiges Selbstportrat) in her entry on the page in question in Menzel r984, p. 477, cat. 3 3 5 - 3 This was first demonstrated by Werner Schmidt, " Das Selbstbildnis von Adolph Menzel im Skizzenbuch aus den jahren I 8 76l77," in Forschungen und Berichte: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 2 ( I 9 5 8 ) : I 04-6. The point is reiterated by both Becker and Hofmann. Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, trans. Douglas Parmee ( Ha rmondsworth, I 9 6 7 ) . All page references will be given between parentheses in the text. The German text I have used is Effi Briest in Werke in Drei Banden, 3 vols., ed. Kurt Schreinert (Munich, I 9 6 8 ) , vol. 2, pp. 5-3 o r . The crucial sentences read in German, p. 2 3 9 : " 'Und wenn ich mich frage, warum nicht? so kann ich zuniichst nichts anderes finden als die Jahre . . . . lch harte nie geglaubt, class die Zeit, rein als Zeit, so wirken konne. ' " That Fontane not only read Kierkegaard but made use of him in his novels is suggested by Erwin Kobel! in two articles, "Theodor Fontane - Ein Kierkegaard-Leser?," jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 3 6 ( I 99 2 ) : 2 5 5-87; a n d " Die Angst d e r Effi Briest," jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts ( 1 994): 2 5 4-8 8 . Kobell notes that Fontane nowhere cites Kierkegaard in his voluminous writings. But I am in agreement with his proposal that reading Fontane through a Kierkegaardian lens is a worth­ while exercise, to say the least. As its title implies, Kobell's second article is exclusively concerned with Effi Briest; its focus is on Effi, though, and despite referring several times to Either/Or the question of the everyday is not raised. On the other hand, Kobell's detailed discussion of Effi's " fear" and " anxiety" in relation to Kierkegaard's Concept of Dread and related works interestingly and perhaps rightly confers on her inner life a greater interest than I have sug­ gested is the case. See Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris, I 999), pp. 4 9 8-9; and Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. I, pp. 4-6. The crucial passage in the latter pages has Victor Eremita a bout to leave on a journey when he discovers he is short of money and opens the desk " to pull out the money drawer and take what happened ro be at hand. But the drawer would not budge. Every expedient was futile. It was a most calamitous situation. To run into such difficulties at the very moment when the coachman's enticing tones were still ringing in my ears! The blood rushed to my head; I was furious. Just as Xerxes had the sea whipped, so I decided to take dreadful revenge. A hatchet was fetched. I gave the desk a terrible blow with it. Whether in my rage I aimed wrong or the drawer was just as stubborn as I, the result was not what was intended. The drawer was shut, and the drawer stayed shut. But something else happened. Whether

I I

2 3

4

5

6 7

Some Self-Portraits See Fried, Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the r86os (Chicago and London, I 996), ch. 5 , "Between Realisms"; and "Caillebotte's Impressionism," Representa­ tions, no. 66 (Spring I 999): I-5 I , esp. 36-4 1 . See " Between Realisms" for more on this. See R. Steven Turner, "Consensus and Controversy: Helmholtz on the Visual Perception of Space," in David Cahan, ed., Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science (Berkeley and London, I 9 9 3 ), pp. I 5 8-9. Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, "The Draughtsman - and Master of the Glance," Menzel 1 996-97, p. I 3 o; the drawing, in a private collection, is reproduced on p. I 3 1 . The German title given ro the painting is Selbstbildnis mit Zahnrose; see Gisold Lamme!, Menzel und seine Kreise ( D resden and Basel, I 9 9 3 ), p. 1 8 3 , fig. 1 3 6; the drawing bears at the bottom, in Menzel's hand, the date " r o Juli 92" and the word "Zahnrose " . In fact the meaning of the latter word has taxed the resources of German friends; my thanks for the present interpretation to Rudiger Campe. See also the numerous photographs of Menzel reproduced in ibid. See Ingeborg Becher, " 'Frederick iiber a lies' - Menzel and Book I l l ustration," i n Prints and Drawings by Adolph

Menzel: A Selection from the Collections of the Museums of West Berlin, exh. cat. (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum,

8 9 IO II

I2 I3 14 I5

I 6 ]an.-4 Mar. I 9 84), p . 3 5 · A number of the illustrations are reproduced and briefly discussed in Menzel r 984, pp. 4 6 8-86, car. 3 3 3-6; the page in question is discussed by Becher on p. 477, cat. 3 3 5 · 3 · Werner Hofmann, "Menzel's Universality," i n Menzel ! 9 9 6-9 7. p. 96. See Becher, " Menzel and Book Illustration," p. 3 5 . All those epithets are used by Hofmann in his essay. The vignette features two infants, one of whom i s shown mostly hidden by a black cloth as he takes a photograph of the other, who holds in h i s hands what appear to be two stamping pads for inking woodblocks. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York, I 9 64), p. 2 . Ibid., p . 2 1 . Ibid., p. 6o. See Heinrich Kleist, The Broken Jug, trans. John T. Krumpelmann (New York, I 9 6 2), p. 6 3 . In the words of Frau Brigitte: " At the right, a fine and sharp and well­ marked I And real· and genuine human foot, I At the left, one lacking form, quite coarse and clumsy, I A monster-like, a clod-like horse's foot." In Ger: " Rechts fein und scharf

N OTES TO PAG E S 1 7 5-202 und nerr gekantet immer, I Ein ordentlicher Menschenfuss, I Und links u n formig grobhin eingetopelt I Ein ungeheurer

klotz'ger Pferdefuss." r6

I7 I8 19

20

r

2 I

2

3

4

Ibid., p. 3· In German: " Ei, was zum Henker, sagt, Gevatter Adam! I Was ist mit Euch geschehn? Wie seht Ihr a us?" I owe this suggestion to Claude Keisch. See the brief entry on this drawing by Keisch i n Menzel 1 990, pp. 2 I o- r r , cat. 7 3 · Incidentally, the two elements on the right-hand page of the sketchbook, a right arm and hand holding up a kind of card, and the head and shoulders of a man wearing what seems almost a plumed hat with a brim, do not belong to the same body or person; they are what remains after various images on that page were erased by the arrisr. This is noted by Lamme!, who also cites the print Prince Eugene von Wiirtemberg, in Menzel: Bildwelt und Bildregie (Dresden and Basel, 1 99 3 ), p. 1 9 2.

6 7 8

Menze l 's " Real A l l egory" On Courbet's Studio, Wheat Sifters, and Quarry, see Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago and London, 1 990), ch. 5 : " Real Allegories, Allegories of Realism: The Wheat Sifters, The Painter's Studio, a n d The Quarry, with a n Excursus on The Death of the Stag." For references r o the large secondary literature on the Studio see rhe notes to that cha pter. On Eakins's William Rush as a real al legory of his enterprise, see Fried, R ealism, Writing, Dis(iguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crmte (Chicago and London, 1 9 8 7), pp. 1 8-2 1 , where for example I suggest rhar the fact that Rush, an early Philadelphia scul ptor, was also, as the painting makes clear, a ship's carver, bears an analogy to Eakins's early tra i n ing as a writing master and beyond that to the continuing importance of writing (or as I also say, writing/drawing) to his arr. On that drawing see Fran�oise Forster-Ha hn, "Aurhenricity into Ambivalence: The Evolution of Menzel's Drawings," Master Drawings I (Autumn 1 9 7 8 ) : 274- 5 . See Marie Ursula Riemann's entry on this work in Menzel 1 990, pp. 7 8-9, car. 1 3 . A related, not quite finished gouache, much later in dare, is In the Ruin (after 1 8 8o), on which see the entry by Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher i n Menzel 1 99 6-97, pp. 404-5, cat. 1 7 2 . Claude Keisch in Menzel 1 9 9 6-9 7 , p. 299, cat. 93 writes: " For a virtua l Menzel gallery i n miniature, commissioned by the commercial advisor Kahlbaum, rhe painter, appro­ aching fifty, seemed to be following a kind of programme. He used gouache, a technique he had begun to favour for increasingly complex and ambitious compositions. Bur above a l l h e brought together an a l most equal number of historical and contemporary subj ects, corresponding to the transition between the two great phases of his work taking place at that time . . . . The systematic choice of scenes for rhe historical paintings of the Kahlbaum cycle (as well as the composition described here, A Trip on the Water at

Rheinsberg, Court Ball at Rheinsberg, Court Lackeys and Hussars in an A ntechamber) seems to indicate a depoliti­ cization of rhe royal personage. "

288

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9 10 rI

12

1

3

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I single o u t Pesne on His Scaffold i n this regard i n full awareness of Werner Hofmann's claim that the Hamburg Studio Wall should be read as a manifesto or "real al legory" of what he understands as Menzel's radically ami-academic realist stance ( I discuss the Studio Wall at length in section 1 4 ) ; see Werner Hofmann, "Uber Menzels 'Atelierwand' in der H a mburger Kusthalle," Aufsatze zur Kunst des 1 9. jahrhunderts (Munich, 1 9 7 9 ) , p p . 20I- T } ; repr. as "Menzels verschliisseltes Manifest" i n Menzel - der Beobachter, exh. car. (Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 22 May-25 July I982), pp. 3 1 -40. Katte had been Frederick's companion in a failed escape from Wi lliam 1's court. See the considered accounts of Frederick's difficult youth in Gerhard Ritter, Frederick the Great ( l 9 3 6), trans. Peter Parer ( Berkeley and London, 1 96 8 ) , pp. 23-3 6 ; and Theodore Sch ieder, Frederick the Great, trans. Sabina Berkeley and H. M. Scott ( London and New York, 2ooo), pp. 1 -3 2. Keisch in Menzel 1 996-97, p. 299. Ibid., p. 30 1 . No doubt this is fanciful, bur the fa l l ing brushes make me think of arrows in mid-flight, which in turn suggests that the manikin might be thought of as a Saint Sebastian. My thanks to T. j. Clark for the thought behind this last sentence as well as for some of its language. See Fried, Courbet's Realism, pp. 1 5 8-64. On Menzel and music see e.g. Gisold Lam mel, Menzel und seine Kreise ( D resden and Basel, 1 99 3 ), pp. 82-8; among rhe musicians Menzel knew personally were Ludwig Spohr, johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, joseph Joachim, and Pauline Yiardot ( 8 3 ) . In 1 8 5 9 Menzel's sister Emilie married the royal music director and composer Hermann Krigar; d u ring the next twenty years Menzel and the Krigar couple kept house together. But Menzel does depict himself holding brushes between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand in Self-Portrait Holding a Palette (see fig. 1 1 2 ). See Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Ch icago and London, 1 990), p. 2 1 : "As Sartre writes lin Being and Nothingness !, the body is 'perpetually the surpassed.' " This is a major theme in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith ( London, 1 9 62). Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods ( ew York, 1 9 9 r ), p. 260. The phrase is Merleau-Ponty's but I cannot locate the source; he refers to " basic" or "operative" intentionality in Phenomenology of Perception, pp. xvii, 1 3 7· My remarks on the role of the Korper or thing-body in Menzel's art are indebted ro a suggestion made by Edward Snow when 111 1 9 98 I lectured on Menzel at Rice University. Leder, The Absent Body, p. 6. See the entry by Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher in Menzel 1 996-97, pp. 3 3 0-32, cat. 1 21 ; the phrase in quotation marks is from a contemporary letter by Menzel. Robert Yischer, "On the Optical Sense of Form: A Con­ tribution to Aesthetics," in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1 873-1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mal lgrave and Eleftherios I k onomou (Santa Monica, Ca l., 1 994), p. 1 0 8 , cited and discussed above, section 4, p. 3 8 and n. 7.

NOTES TO PAGES 2 0 3 - 1 0 19

O n the Lying in State see Christopher B . With, " Adolph von Menzel: A Study i n the Relationship between Art and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany," Ph.D. diss., University of Ca lifornia, Los Angeles, 1 97 5, pp. 8 5-1 3 5 , and " Adolph von Menzel and the German Revolution of 1 84 8 , " Zeitschrift fiir Kunstgeschichte 42 ( 1 9 79): 1 9 5-2 1 4 ; Fran.;:oise Forster-Hahn, '"Die Aufbahrung der Marzgefa llenen': Menzel's Unfinished Painting as a Parable of the Aborted Revolution of 1 848," in Christian Beutler, Peter-Klaus Schuster, and Martin Wanke, eds., Kunst um c 8oo und die Folgen: Werner Hofmann zu Ehren ( M u nich, 1 9 8 8 ), pp. 2 2 1 -3 2; Peter Parer, Art as History: Episodes in

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the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-Century Germany

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( Princeton, 1 9 8 8 ) , pp. 9 3 - 1 04 ; and Albert Boime, "Social Identity and Political Authority in the Response of Two Prussian Painters to the Revolution of 1 8 48," Art History 1 3 (Sept. 1 990): 3 44-8 5 . In this I am following the suggestion of Fran.;:oise Forster­ Hahn, " 'Die Aufbahrung der Marzgefallenen'," p. 229, who argues that Menzel "chose to painr not rhe actual pro­ cession itself - even though he had observed the cortege from different sires - but the eerie hours of tense e xpecta ­ tion before rhe procession started from the Gendarmen­ markr at two o'clock: the morning hours when the coffins were exhibited on the stairs of the Neue Kirche. The oil study depicts rhe hours of preparation and confusion as the last coffins were being carried to the square and the crowd began ro ga rher." With, " Adolph von Menzel and the German Revolution of 1 848," 209-1 o. Cf. Boime, "Social Identity and Poli­ tical Authority," p. 3 74: "On the left the expressions are dignified and restra ined, and the entire group, including the unfinished figures, maintains a rigorous decorum. Just the opposite occurs on the right, where the crowd breaks up into individuated clu ters of lively and highly agitated proleta rians. While rhe bourgeoisie pays respectful atten­ tion to the procession I i.e., the group of mourners bearing the coffin I , the artisans are engrossed in their own world, gesticulating with their arms and bodies away from the primary compositional cenrre as if rorally oblivious ro the events. Significantly, perhaps, behind this disorderly group a contingent of rhe bourgeois Civic Guard with their rifles and bayonetres l sicl files in to close rhe formal wedge on rhis side of rhe canvas." ( Boime's political reading of the picture sees ir as rife with class tension.) Forsrer-Hahn, however, disputes such ana lyses. Going on from her observation that the painting depicts a moment before the ceremony proper, she adds in a note, " ' Die Aufbahrung der Ma rzgefa llenen,' " p. 2 3 2, n. 3 0: "The theme of the pre­ paration for the ceremony explains why the artist did nor reflect rhe solemn mood of the crowd . . . The painting al o does nor conform ro the artist's own explanation - made much later ro ! Alfred! Lichrwark - that the coffin divides the crowd into rhe bourgeois class on the left and the cra ftsmen and working class on the right . . . The composi­ tion is far more complex than such a simple division would suggest." No doubt she is right abour rhe composition being complex, bur as an approximation rhe two-part class division, if nor the particulars of Boime's characterization of it, seems accurate enough.

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With, " Adolph von Menzel and the German Revolution of 1 84 8 , " p. 209; and Boime, "The Response of Two Prussian Painters to the Revolution of 1 8 48," p. 3 74· Boime identifies that figure as one of the military officers who attended the ceremony in civilian dress (mentioned by Menzel in a letter to his friend Carl Arnold). Parer, Art as History, p. 1 00. I n general Parer is skeptical of political readings of the painting. A few pages earlier, p. :•n , though, after citing With and others, he writes of the same figure: " Although the gentleman makes the conventional response to the coffin being carried past him, his left hand remains in his coat pocket. Is Menzel saying that this rude behavior reveals the well-dressed man's true feelings?" Bur, p . 1 0 1 , he also cites Alfred Lichrwark's testimony in 1 902 that Menzel had recently rold him that " 'the elegant man who salutes the coffin had been a stranger I i.e., a visitor to the city - Parer !, who had attracted hi attention by his immaculate appearance and air of distinction.' " Ibid., p. 96. Except for the last sentence, which Parer does n o r quote, I have followed his translation in Art as History, p. r o r ; the last sentence i s cited b y With, "Adolph von Menzel," p. 1 1 9. Parer, A rt as History, p. 1 0 3 . Compare Boime, "The Response of Two Prussian Painters to the Revolution of 1 8 48," p. 3 7 5 : "There is no sustained movement in the composition that directs the eye to the central event, the catafalque itself, and no sense of a com­ munal, shared experience. This is why the gap between the dense foreground mass and the church assumes its specifi­ cally 'empty' character. Between the crowd and the event there is literally an unbridgeable gap, and this visual gap constitutes Menzel's own detachment, which I believe is further embodied as a persona in the arisrocraric figure at the left [the man doffing his hat ] . "

The Later Menzel See Menzel 1 9 96-97, pp. 4 1 4- 1 5 , cat. 1 79 . Such a reading of the Supper at the Ball is inevitably at odds with Claude Keisch's claim that "the courtesies exchanged !among rhe figures in the pa inting] cannot disguise the fact that everyone is in everyone else's way, and do nor mask the general a l ienation. An early critic [Adolf Rosenberg] perceptively caught the metaphorical level of the work when he wrote that the 'srorming of the buffer' d u ring the long interval between the dances - which is literally what is depicted - was the 'moment when i n the mill of the crowd the right of the individual comes into irs own.' Isolation and dissolution of identity become one and the same thing in the general disorientation, and what Baudelaire would call tragic becomes in Menzel's work grotesque"; Spirit of

an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings from the National­ galerie, Berlin, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery, 8

Mar.-1 3 May 200 1 ; Washington, DC: 10 June-3 Sept. 200 1 ), p. 1 3 7. Rosenberg's statement seems apt, but I feel that in this instance Keisch, one of Menzel's most acute commentators, is reading dissolution of identity and hence

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grotesqueness into a picture that is conspicuously devoid of both. Claude Keisch, " Menzel Junctures Disj unctures," in Menzel I 9 96-97, p. 8 8 . Ibid., p . 4 1 5 . Edmond Duranty, "Adolph Menzel , " Gazette des Beaux­ A rts, 2e per., r. 2 1 ( r March r 8·8 o): 2 1 4 . The full passage reads: " Les deux compositions intitulees Devine qui c'est et le Chevalier a Ia soif sont exrraordina ires. Les lourds mouvements d'ours que prennent les armures, Ia gaiete a manoeuvrer ces machines mysterieuses er bizarres, a ensevelir sous un enorme casque ferme, boite formidable et comique, une tete h u maine invisible, mais dont le soufAe palpite sous l'enveloppe d'acier, Ia profonde justesse q u i exprime rous les organes du personnage a carapace de fer, sont les remarquables remoignages d'une eronnanre puis­ sance d'intuition . " All this seems undeniable on the strength of the painting alone, bur I welcome the support provided by another French critic of the period, Louis Gonse, who wrote of the Marketplace in Verona in r 8 8 5, on the occasion of the large Menzel exhibition at the Pavilion de Ia Ville in Paris, in "Exposition d'Adolphe Menzel a Paris," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2e per., r. 3 1 ( r June r 8 8 5 ): p 8-1 9 : I n a space of two a n d a half square feet there is a l l the crowding of a southern city, the stirring of a crowd, the cries of vendors, the comings and goings of peasants with their carts, the bewildered Aanerie of tourists, the jostling of urchins, a tumult of noise, movement, and light. At any rate that is how M. Menzel, by a prodigious effort of concentration, has strained to present it. To the accomplishment of that task he has employed all his science of drawing, all his resources of observation. Why then does the result nor entirely respond to so laborious an effort? From two causes, it seems to me: the roo limited dimensions of the canvas and the clashing register of the colors. I know that M . Menzel feels an insurmounrable repugnance for large canvases; here, however, is a subject that it was irrational to enclose i n so right a space, or a t least to treat w i t h the d r y preciosity of a miniaturist. In place of a clearly ordered painting, which the gaze easily penetrates, it is a confusion of small whipped figures, chopped up under the blows of a brush, assuredly fu l l of certitude, but of a n unbridled harshness and liberty. This contradiction gives rise ro two irrecon­ cilable sensations in the spectator: the need to approach [the canvas] in order to read the derails of this scene of feverish activity, and a sort of instinctive impulse to move farther away, to complete with the help of distance what the execution of each figure has left too un resolved. As for the color, despite or perhaps because all the faces are the tint of Spanish liquorice, it has nothing Italian about it; the values lack nuance and transition. One would wish more transparency and unity i n the atmosphere, more calm and true brilliance in the light. The painter has sought the open air and even the open sun; his brush has not found them. It rakes a prolonged act of attention, a painful struggle to penetrate into this canvas where one is sriAed. Truly, it is a shame; because the artist has mul­ tiplied in it the features of humanity, the details in which

the feeling of life issues forth in unexpected bursts, the discoveries of gestures and physiognomies. A curious thing, the photograph of the painting is more legible than the painting itself; translated into black and white, Marketplace in Verona takes on a meaning that it was hard to discover in the painting. Dans un espace de deux pieds er demi carres il y a rout l'encombrement d'une ville meridionale, le grouillement d'une foule, les cris des revendeurs, le va-er-vienr des paysans avec leurs charrerres, Ia Aanerie ahurie des rouristes, les bousculades des gamins, un rumulre de bruit, de mouvement er de lumiere. C'est du moins ce que M. Menzel, dans un prodigieux effort de concentra­ tion, s'est efforce d'y merrre. A l'accomplissement de cette tache, il a employe route sa science de dessin, routes ses ressources d'observarion. D'oi:1 vienr que le resulrar n'a pas entieremenr repondu a u n a u ssi laborieux effort? De deux causes selon moi: des dimensions rrop exigues de Ia toile er de Ia gamme heurtee des colorations. Je sais que M . Menzel a une insurmontable repugnance pour les grands tableaux; voici cependanr un sujet qu'il erait irrationnel d'enfermer dans un espace aussi etroir, a moins de le rrairer avec Ia secheresse precieuse d'un miniaru riste. Au lieu d'un tableau cla irement ordonne, ou le regard penerre aisement, c'esr un pele-mele de petites figures fouerrees, hachees sous les coups d'un pinceau, assuremenr plein de certitude, mais d'une aprere er d'une l i berte sans frein. Cerre contradiction fa i t naitre chez le specrateur deux sensations inconciliables: le besoin de s'approcher pour lire les derails de cerre scene enfievree de mouvement et une sorte d'impulsion instinc­ tive a s'eloigner, pour achever par Ia distance ce que !'exe­ cution de chaque figure a de trop grossoye. Quant a Ia couleur, malgre ou peur-erre a cause de rous ces visages uniformemenr passes au jus de reglisse, elle n'a ricn d'italien; les valeur manquent de nua nces er de transi­ tion. On voudrait dans cerre atmosphere plus de rran parence et d'un ite, dans cerre lumiere plus de calme er de veritable eclat. Le peinrre a cherche le plein air er meme le plein solei!: son pinceau ne l'a pas rencontre. II fa ur une longue attention, une contention penible pour penerrer dans cerre toile oi:1 l'on erouffe. C'est dommage, en verite; car !'artiste y a multiplie les traits d'humanire, les derails oi:1 le sentiment de Ia vie s'epanouit en jets impn!vus, les trouvailles de gesres er de physionomies. Chose curieuse, Ia photographic du tableau est plus lisible que le tableau lui-meme; ramene aux effers de blanc et de noir, le Marche de Verone prend une signifi­ cation qu'il erait difficile de decouvrir dans Ia peinture. Another critic writing the same year, Fran�ois-Guillaume Dumas, admired the painting, bur in fact singled our a feature of it that to my mind contributes to its overall effect of impenetrableness. "What we are able to call attention to," Dumas writes, Maitres Modernes: Adolph Menzel (Paris, r 8 8 5 ), p. 2 3 , "is the expression of the mouths, all active, it is that singular and audacious wager that makes us hear through our eyes the thousand noises of this crowd ! " ( " Ce que nous pouvons faire remarquer, c'est !'expression des bouches, routes en acrivite, c'est cerre

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singuliere et audacieuse gageure qui nous fait entendre par les yeux les mille bruits de cette fou le! '' ) And then there is Theodor Fon tane's view. I n a letter to his wife Emilie (23 June 1 8 8 4 ) , cited by Claude Keisch in Fontane und die Bildende Kunst, exh. cat. ( Berlin: Staatliche M useen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, 4 Sept.-29 Nov. 1 9 9 8 ), p. 20 1 , he wrote, "I believe this kind of paint­ ing is misguided, a t best it is a curiosity. You see, no one wants to take the bait of antiquated ways: doubtless this achievement is . . . admirable, but pleasing, let alone charm­ ing, it most certainly is not. One is astonished, but one remains completely cold." ( " Jch glaube doch, diese Art von Malerei ist ein I rrweg, giinstigstenfalls eine Curiositiit. Du siehst, es will doch keiner a u f den alten Zopf anbeissen: unzweifelhaft ist auch diese Leistung wieder . . . bewun­ dernswerth, aber erfreulich oder gar entziickend ist es sicherlich nicht. Man staunt, aber bleibt ganz kalt. " ) Keisch in Menzel 1996-97, p. 4 1 5 , citing Hanns Fechner, whose account of the exchange is given in his " Meine Erinnerungen an Adolph Menzel," in Gisold Lamme!, ed.,

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(Leipzig, 1 9 92), pp. 247-8. In fact Fechner describes himself, p. 248, as having been struck by the inexplicable absence of all effect of sunlight in the painting - but as nev­ ertheless paying the master this insincere compliment, to his subsequent shame. In German: " 'Es ist ganz wundervoll so sonnig!' Sowie ich sie ausgesprochen hatte, schiimte ich mich dieser torichten Liige, die einem Manne wie Menzel, dem Ehrl ichkeitsapostel, gegeniiber herzlich dumm wirken musste. Langsam und jedes Wort betonend, entgegnete er: 'Nein, das ist es nicht! ' " Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Modern Life," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, eel. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff ( Glencoe, Ill., 1 9 so), pp. 409-10. Subsequent page refer­ ences will be given between pa rentheses in the text. A more recent col lection i Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, eel. Donald N. Levine (Ch icago, 1 9 7 1 ) . In a recent article Frederic J ameson insists that Simmel's prescience in making the metropolis a "place of sheer difference and ever more minute differentiation as such . . . should not distract us from the recognition of every­ thing stereotypical about the characterization of its oppo­ site number, rhe countryside, as a place of identitities and identification of everything with everything else"; "The Theoretical Hesitation: Benjamin's Sociological Prede­ cessor," Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1 999): 27 5 . Jameson's article is a brilliant account both of Simmel's originality and of certain basic tensions in his thought. See Peter Parer, "Berlin in Menzel's Time," i n Menzel 1 996-97, p. 6 5 . " [ N Jo major city in Europe underwent quite so dramatic a transformation as Berlin," Peter Fritzsche writes. "The provincial capital of rhe Prussian kingdom reinvented itself as a major metropolis over the course of only a few decades. Between 1 848 and 1 90 5 , rhe population of Berlin leaped from 40o,ooo to 2 million; huge suburbs ringing the city added another r . 5 million. . . . Not surprisingly, the dizzying pace of development in the span of one lifetime fixed the city's identity. Without permanent form or common history, Berlin was widely praised or else dismissively condemned as a 'nowhere city,'

a place that was 'always becoming and never is' [Ernst Bloch] . . . . What sets Berlin apart [ from other major cities like Vienna, Paris, and London that significantly expanded during the same period] is not so much the intensity of industrial development as the city's almost exclusive iden­ tification with it. Any story of Berlin therefore adds an extra measure of turbu lence to an account of the modern city;" Reading Berlin r 9oo (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1 9 9 6 ) , pp. 7-8. Charles Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de Ia vie moderne," in Oeuvres completes, ed. Y. G. Le Danrec and Claude Pichois ( Paris, 1 9 6 1 ), p. 1 1 6 1 ; cited by Jameson, "The Theoretical Hesitation,'' p. 274: " un ka leidoscope doue de conscience." On the other hand, there is an unexplained transition in Simmel' essay from the idea of an "intensification of nervous stimulation" to that of "indiscriminate mutual suggestion," which sugge t that he might nor have been in perfect control of his argument. In any case, the result of the latter phenomenon would have been the binding of the separate individuals into a more or less indiscriminate mass, the crowd; and perhaps that moment of binding is also expressed in Marketplace in Verona in what I have described as the impenetrability of the composition as a whole. (It requires effort to disengage individual figures and motifs from the overall mass. My thanks to Ruth Leys for this point.) On the psychology of crowds before Simmel, see Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology:

Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic ( London and Beverly Hills, 1 9 7 5 ) esp. ch.

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4 , "Collective Psychology in the 'Era of Crowds.' " LeBon's La Psychologie des foules came out in 1 89 5, Gabriel Tarde's Les Lois de /'imitation in 1 8 90. For more on Tarde, the period's leading theori t of imitation and suggestion, see Terry N. Clark's introduction to Gabriel Tarde: On Communication and Social Influence (Ch icago, 1 9 6 9 ) ; and Ruth Leys, " Mead's Voices: Imitation as Foundation, or, The Struggle against Mimesis," Critical Inquiry 1 9 (Winter 1 9 9 3 ) : 277-307. Another late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figure in whose work motifs of hypnosis and suggestion play a crucial albeit insufficiently theorized role is Sigmund Freud. See in this connection the brilliant deconstructive reading of a wide range of Freudian texts by Mikkel Borch­ Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, 1 9 8 8), esp. the long section called "The Primal Band," pp. 1 27-239, and The Emotional Tie: Psycho­ analysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et a/. (Stanford, 1 9 9 2 ) , esp. the first section, "Freudian Politics," pp. 1-3 5 . Edmond Duranty, "Adolphe Menzel, deuxieme e t dernier article," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2e per., t. 22 ( 1 Aug. 1 8 8o): 1 2 3 . Henry James, The American Scene ( 1 907; Bloomington and London, 1 9 6 8 ) , p. 1 3 0 . A page later James writes: "it was the sense, after all, of a great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely, as soon as we had crossed to the East side and long before we had got to Rutgers Street." What heightens the analogy with Menzel, of course, is the pictorial metaphor with which James begins.

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On the other hand, Baudelaire's account of the modern crowd in "The Painter of Modern Life," from which the " kaleidoscope" image cited above is taken, was probably written in r 8 5 9-6o, Oeuvres completes, p. 1 7 1 1 , n. r, and in general by the early r 8 8os the conflicrual nature of metropolitan experience was a ropos of contemporary thought (Zola's novels are a case in point). E. T. A. Hoffmann, "My Cousin's Corner Window," in The Golden Pot and Other Tales, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford and New York, 1 9 9 2), p. 3 8 0. Further page references will be given in parentheses in the text. See also the discussion, further on i n " M y Cousin's Corner Window," pp. 3 9o--9 2, of a strange, gaunr, bizarrely clothed personage who puts various purchases of food in the drawers of a box lined with metal that he carries with him. The cousin offers an elaborate hypothesis about the man's identity, but when the narrator replies, "That's enough about this disgusting person," his cousin offers a wholly dif­ ferent hypothesis apparently in the hope that it will please him better. To which the narrator responds, " I The second] invention does credit to your literary talents, dear cousin . " Here roo Hoffmann seems t o be saying that the truth o f the cousin's interpretations is all bur irrelevant to their satisfy­ ingness. What cannot be stressed too strongly is the field­ glass precision of the descriptions of the individual figures seen in the market; whatever else the cousin's "art of seeing" involves, it requires paying the minutest possible attention to the persons a n d objects under observation. Hoffmann's text is cited and briefly discussed by Walter Benjamin in " Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Charles

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trans. Harry Zohn ( London, 1 9 7 3 ), pp. 1 29-30. For Ben jamin, the cousin's attitude toward the crowd is one of superiority; the use of opera glasses allows him to "pick out individual genre scenes," to which he attaches "edify­ ing sayings " ; indeed the art of seeing which the cousin proposes to teach his visitor consists in nothing more than "an ability to enjoy tableaux vivants - a favourite pursuit of the Biedermeyer period"; p. 1 3 0 . I find this depressingly reductive, bur it is of interest because it s uggests the terms in which Benjamin in the late I 9 JOS would have been likely to construe much of Menzel's art. In contrast, see the appre­ ciative remarks on Hoffmann in " Demonic Berlin" ( 1 9 3 0), where "My Cousin's Corner Window" is described as a "textbook of physiognomic seeing" and where it is said that Hoffmann [ sic] "sits in an armchair, gazing down onto the weekly marker, and proves to his cousin, who is there on a visit, how much you can infer - and, even more, spin out and imagine - simply by looking at the clothes, tempo, and gestures of the marker women and their customers"; Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1 9 27-3 4, trans. Rodney Living­ stone et a/., eel. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1 9 99), p. 3 2 6, emphasis added. For more on Benjamin in relation to Menzel (whom Benjamin never mentions) see section 1 4 below. On Afternoon in the Tui/eries Garden see the entry by Keisch in Menzel 1 9 96-97, pp. 3 3 3-5, car. 1 2 3 . Cf. Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyer, Menzel 1 9 96-97, p. 4 4 3 , car. 203 : " I n compositions after r 8 8 5 , t h e spatial con-

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srrucrion gives way to a surface order ruled by color, with a horizon pushed back to the edge of the picture and almost invisible. It is hard to assess distances between figures and to measure the space . . . . The addition of a large number of different elements is often accompanied by less homo­ geneous colour, benefiting brighter tones, sometimes multi­ coloured and dissonanr. These techniques emphasize the isolation of the individual within the crowd." For Max Liebermann, the late work epitomizes the conflict between painting and drawing in Menzel's art, with the latter winning out in the increasing tendency toward complica­ tion and minute detail, so d i fferenr from the old-age styles of Titian, Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Hals; "Menzel" in Vision der Wirk/ichkeit: Ausgetvi:ih/te Schriften und Reden ( Frankfurt am Main, 1 9 9 3 ), p. 1 20. Riemann-Reyher i n Menzel 1 99 6-97, p . 446, cat. 205. And nor counting the activity of discovering the motifs in the course of walks taken for that pu rpose; see Riemann­ Reyher's reference to his "working excursions" ( in quota­ tion marks bur without further reference) i n ibid., car. 203 . Ibid., p. 4 5 9, car. 2 J 8 . Paul Meyerheim reports that Menzel used ro choose his models from a line of often down-and-out men and women that would assemble at his studio door; "Adolph von Menzel: Erinnerungen," in Exzellenz lassen bitten: Erin­ nenmgen an A dolph Menzel, ed. Gisold Lamme! ( Leipzig, 1 99 2 ) , pp. 1 76-7. On the former, see Annette Schlagen hauff, Adolph Menzel: Works in Harvard Collections (Cambridge, Mass: Busch­ Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 1 99 1 ), p. 3 1 . Schlagenhauf£ suggests that the left hand ";:�ppears to be added as an afterthought, intended to make the unusual angle and tilt of the head more comprehensible." Bur the hand can be seen to hold a small comb, which is much more evident in the Berlin drawing (on which see Riemann­ Reyher in Menzel 1 9 96-97, car. 209 , p. 4 5 1 ) . In this connection see also the drawing of the Comb with Hairs (fig. 9 9 ) , illustrated and discussed in Lucius Grise­ bach, " Moltke's binoculars, Lena the cook's comb and the ink pot on the Academy table: Menzel's eye for the con­ crete," in Prints and Drawings by A dolph Me11zel: A Selec­

tion from the Collections of the Museums of West Berlin,

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ex h. cat. (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Mu eum, I 6 jan.-4 Mar. I 9 84), pp. 8-1 1 . For more o n Menzel and photography see section r 5· Is this right? It occurs to me that the b;:�sic conception of this sheer perhaps recapitu lates, in radically altered form, the centripetal structure as well as something of the feeling of The Coronation of King William 1 at Konigsberg (see fig. 79). A suggestion I owe ro T. J . Clark.

"The Disenchantment of the World" T. J . Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism ( ew Haven and London, 1 9 9 9 ) , p. 7 · Further references t o this book w i l l be given in parentheses in the text. The phrase "the disenchantment of the world" is Schil ler's and is used by Max Weber in his essay "Science

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I

2 3 4 s

6

7 8

as a Vocation" (originally a speech at the University of Munich in 1 9 1 8 ) in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright M i l ls, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1 9 4 6 ), p. I S S · The crucial sentences read: "The fate of our times is cha racterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Pre­ cisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic l i fe or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations." From Max Weber, p. s r . See the entry by Claude Keisch in Menzel 1 9 9 6-97, pp. 1 9 7-8, cat. 24. Ibid., p. 1 9 8 . Ibid. Note too what seems to b e the curtain blowing outward i n the wind from the window a t the top of the sheet, which I see as suggesting that the clouds too may be in motion. Walter Benjamin, " Paris, the Capital of the N i neteenth Century ( Expose of I 9 3 S ) , " in The A rcades Proiect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1 999), pp. !l -9. Benjamin, " Paris, Capital of the Ni neteenth Century, Expose (of 1 9 3 9 )," in The A rcades Proiect, p. 1 4 . See e.g. Adorno's letter to Benjamin of 1 0 November 1 9 3 8 responding to the latter's " Paris o f the Second Empire i n Baudelaire" i n Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1 9 2 8- T 940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. icholas Wa lker (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 9 9 ) , p p . 2 8 1 -2. Adorno's most developed use of the term is i n c h . 6 of I n Search o f Wagner (w ritten 1 93 7-3 8, first pub­ lished in 1 9 5 2 ), trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1 9 8 T ) . According to a translator's note at rhe beginning of that chapter, p . 8 s , fn. 1 , "the term 'pha ntasmagoria' went into German from English, where it was first used in 1 80 2 as the name invented for an exhibition of optical illusions pro­ duced chiefly by means of the magic lantern. In this chapter, irs negative connotations stem from Marx's use of the word to describe commodity fetishism. Marx argues that the form of the commodity di verges from the commodity itself as a result of the concealment of the fact that the com­ modity is the product of human labour. 'The commodity­ form, and the value relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the mater­ ial relations arising out of this. I t is nothing but a definite

day the consumer goods on display turned their phenome­ nal side seductively towards the mass of customers while diverting attention from their merely phenomenal charac­ ter, from the fact that they were beyond reach. Similarly, in their phantasmagoria, Wagner's operas tend to become commodities. Their tableaux assume the cha racter of wares on display." See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,

9 10 I I

12

1. 3

social relation between men thernselves which assumes here, for them, the phantasmagoric fonn of a relation

the citation from Marx, with emphasis added, is to Capital, ch. 1 , part 4, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret". For Adorno, p. 90, phantas­ magoria are "the point ar which aesthetic appearance becomes a function of the character of the commodity. . . . The absolute reality of the unreal is nothing but the reality of a phenomenon that not only strives unceasingly to spirit away its own origins in human labour, but also, insepara­ bly from this process and in thrall to exchange value, assid­ uously emphasizes its use value, stressing that this is its authentic reality, that it is 'no imitation' - and all this in order to further the cause of exchange value. In Wagner's

trans. Peggy Kamuf ( New York and London,

1994).

between things' " ;

I4 1s

r6

Benjamin, A rcades Proiect, p. 1 4 . Ibid., p. 20. Benjamin, "Short Shadows ( I I ), " i n Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1 9 27-34, trans. Rodney Livingstone et a/. ed. Michael W. Jennnings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1 999), pp. 7 0 1 -2. Scheerbart's book is available i n English as Glass A rchitec­ ture, trans. James Palmes (New York and Washington, D . C . , 1 97 2 ) , with an introduction by Dennis Sharp. ( G lass A rchi­ tecture is paired in a single volume with a translation of another progressive architectural text, Bruno Taut's A lpine A rchitecture.) For more on Benjamin and the idea of glass architecture see Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin 's Passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Ca mbridge, Mass. and London, I 9 9 S ), pp. 1 47-72. "What we call glass architec­ ture is in fact a combination of glass and metal," Missac remarks, p. 1 6 8 . " Benjamin often reminds us of this i n the Passagen- Werk, and in 'Experience and Poverty' he dis­ tributed the two components, so to speak, between Scheer­ bart and the Bauhaus. Scheerbart considered this situation temporary and expected . . . that thanks to glass, brick and wood would one day be looked upon with disdain, as 'too fragile to have the right to exist.' Only when it has su ffered the i l l effects of weather does brick acquire its only possible dignity, that of the ruin"; a paraphrase of Scheer­ bart, Glass A rchitecture, p. 4 S · As Scheerbarr also writes, p. 46: "The face of the earth would be much altered if brick architecture were ousted everywhere by glass architecture. " Interestingly, though, Scheerbart sees great promise in the use of "so-called glass bricks," which "should make many iron skeletons superfluous," p. s o. So brickwork of a sort is imagined as extending into the new epoch of glass. See esp. Miriam Bratu Hansen, " Benjamin and Cinema: or a One-Way Street," Critical Inquiry 2 S (Winter 1 99 9 ) : 3 06-4 3 , a superb essay t o which I am indebted. Benjamin, " Ex perience and Pove rty, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 7 3 3 ; " Experience and Poverty" goes on to recycle the paragraph from "Short Shadows ( I I ) " quoted above. See also Gershom Scholem, Walter Beniamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia, 1 9 8 1 ), p. 208, where Scholem quotes Benjamin in 1 9 3 8 praising Scheerbart for " 'writing a totally unmagical language, a language cleansed of all magic.' " Ibid., p. 7 3 4 · For an illustration of that painting see Gisold Lammel, Menzel: Bildwelt und Bildregie ( D resden and Basel, 1 9 9 3 ), p. 1 4 7, fig. 64. The painting is today in the Neues Palais, Potsdam. Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. s 4 2 .

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I8

So for example Victor Farias i n his controversial study of Heidegger's politics, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R . Ricci ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, (Philadelphia, I 9 8 9 ) , p . 3 5 , notes that as early as the first decade of the twentieth century the young Heidegger joined a militant (and antisemitic) Catholic orga­ nization, the Gra l bund, and remarks of the Bund movement generally that "the Bund gathered its young members into a 'community' that opposed civilization and technology by leading a 'simple l i fe' and by trying to realize a unique mission based on the lived experience (Erlebnis) of that community and run by charismatic guides (Fuhrer). The point was to link themselves with the real people ( Volkstum ) and their traditions. " M uc h else in Farias's book is pertinent to the present topic. On Norwegian Oysters see the entry by R i e mann-Reyher in Menzel I 9 9 6-97, pp. 3 6 5-6, cat. I 4 3 · Compare Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 220-2 1 : The difficulty i n reflecting on dwelling: o n the one hand there is something age-old - perhaps eternal - to be recognized here, the image of that abode of the human being in the maternal womb; on the other hand, this motif of primal history notwithstanding, we must under­ stand dwelling in its most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence. The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shell. The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. I t conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling's interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet. What didn't the ni neteenth century invent some sort of casing for ! Pocket watches, sl ippers, egg cups, thermometers, playing cards - and, in lieu of cases, there were jackets, carpets, wrappers, and covers. The twentieth centu ry, with irs porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well-lit and a i ry, has put an end to dwelling i n the old sense.

I9

29 4

(The passage includes the sentences quoted by Clark in his own, slightly different translation in Farewell to an Idea. ) Notice, b y the way, how the figure of dwelling a s that "abode of the huma n being in the maternal womb" cap­ tures something of the feeling of Interior of a Barn, in Shadow (see fig. I 5 1 ) , which I characterized in terms of a place of final repose. Cf. Benjamin, ibid., p. 1 20: "The cha racteristic and, properly speaking, sole decoration of the Biedermeier room 'was afforded by the curtains, which - extremely refined and compounded preferably from several fabrics of different colors - were furnished by the upholsterer. For nearly a whole century afterward, interior decoration amounts, in theory, to providing instructions to uphol­ sterers for the tasteful arrangement of draperies.' Max von Boehn, Die Mode in XIX. jahrhundert, vol. 2 (Munich, I907), p. 1 3 0. This is something l i ke the interior's

20

2I

22 23 24 25

26

perspective on the window." But the Balcony Room's perspective on the window is another story. O n these works see esp. the entries b y Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher respectively in Menzel I 9 9 6-97, pp. 2 5 7-9, cat. 6 5 , and pp. 3 5 7-9, cat. I 3 ?; the essay by Werner Hofmann cited below, n. 2 I ; and Jenns Howoldt and Stephanie Hauschild, Menzels A telierwand, exh. cat. (Hamburg: Kunsthalle, 23 Apr.- I I Jul y I 9 9 9 ) . Hofmann's essay w a s published twice, under two titles: "Uber Menzels 'Atelierwand' in der Hamburger Kunstalle," Bruchlinien: Au(siitze zur Kunst des 19. jahrhunderts (Munich, 1 979): 20I- I } ; and " Menzels verschliisseltes Manifest," in Menzel - der Beobachter, exh. cat. (Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 22 May-25 J u ly 1 9 8 2 ), pp. 3 1 -40. Keisch in Menzel 1 99 6-97, p. 2 5 9 .

Ibid. But did they? Looked at closely the arm at the left can seem more " feminine" than the other. This i s mentioned i n passing by his friend Paul Meyerheim in "Adolph von Menzel: Erinnerungen," in Excellenz lassen bitten: Erinnerungen an Adolph Menzel, ed. Gisold Lamme! (Leipzig, I 9 9 2 ) , p. I 74 · See Fran\oise Forster-Hahn, " Ethos u n ci Eros: Adolph Menzels Eisenwalzwerk und A telierwand," in Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Claude Keisch, and Peter-Klaus Schuster, Menzel - lm Labyrinth der Wahrnehmung, proceedings of a colloquium held in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum hir Gegenwart, Berlin, 9- I o May I 997, jahrbuch der Berliner

Museen, jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen,

27

28

29

Neue Folge, 40. Bd. ( I 9 9 8 ) Beiheft: I 3 . Forster-Hahn acknowledges that the identification with Praxiteles' Aphrodite remains speculative bur points out, p. 20, that it was associated in antiquity with particularly erotic effects. Ibid., p. I I . The initial identi fication of it as Laocoon goes back to the early I 9 8 os, in Menzel - der Beobachter, p . I 74 , cat. I o 2 ; a n d Jens Christian Jensen, Adolph Menzel (Cologne, I 9 8 2), p. I I O. These identifications are proposed by Riemann-Reyher, who stresses the i mportance of the reference to Eggers, in Menzel 1 9 9 6-97, pp. 3 5 7-8; Hofmann, "Menzels verschliisseltes Manifest," pp. 3 I -4 ; and Stephanie Hauschild, " Menzels Atelierwand," in Menzels Atelier­ wand, pp. 9-I o . Menzel is thought to have visited August Borsig's famous steelworks in Eggers's company twenty years before. As Riema nn-Reyher notes, Eggers writing in r 8 5 2 in the Deutsches Kunstblatt called for pai nters to seek subjects inspired by the new industrial world, and enthu­ siastically described his visit to the Borsig factories in the company of a friend who may well have been Menzel. I n I 9 70 Champa wrote: " In the center of the picture the splayed breasts of a truncated fema le torso hang threat­ eningly [or vulnerably?] above the vicious steel points of two large drawing compasses and a hugely scaled cast of a human hand. The psychoanalytic impl ications of this tripartite central image, which is surrounded by male heads and a male torso in half shadow, are numerous and com­ plicated - especially so, when one considers the fact of Menzel's puritanical bachelorhood and the recurrent image

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30

31

32 33

of his sister i n his work from the 1 8 4os and early 1 8 5os"; "Introduction," in Kermit S. Champa with Kate H. Champa, German Painting of the 1 9th Century, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Art Gallery, 1 5 Oct.2 2 ov. 1 970; Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 9 Dec. 1 970-24 Jan. 1971; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 27 Feb.-28 Mar. 1 9 7 1 ) , p. 1 2 3 . Forster-Hahn, " Ethos und Eros," p. 1 8 ; originally cited by Gustav Ki rstein, Das Leben Adolph Menzel ( Leipzig, 1 9 1 9 ) , p. 97· The original German reads: " Nicht allein class ich ehelos geblieben, habe ich auch lebenslang mich jederlei Beziehung zum anderen Geschlecht (al s solchem) entschlagen . " This is, of course, immediately followed by the even more famous remarks about the absence of self-generated Klebestoff binding him to the outside world; see section 2, n. 2. I n this connection Forster-Hahn alludes briefly to Freud's " Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva' " ( 1 907 I I 9o6 J ), " Ethos und Eros," pp. 2 1 -2, just one of many texts that come to mind. Ibid. , p. 2 4 , fig. 20. An essay on The Broken Jug that stresses the signifi­ cance of the biblical resonances of the names is David E. Wellbery, " K leist's The Broken Jug: The Play of Sexual Difference," 111 R eading after Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of the Self in Germany,

ed. Robert S. Leventhal ( Detroit, Mich ., 1 9 94), pp. r r 7-26.

I 7J O- r 8Jo,

15

2

3

Concl usion: Menzel 's Real ism The standard work is Beaumont Newhall, The History o f Photography from r 83 9 t o t h e Present, 5th rev. ed. ( N ew York, 1 98 2 ) . A recent study of considerable interest is Frant;:ois Brunet, La Naissance de /"idee de photographie ( Paris, 2000). See Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, " Biography," in Menzel 1 9 9 6-97, p. 5 6 . See also rhe brief discussions of Menzel and photography in Claude Keisch, " Menzel Junctures Disju ncrures," and Peter- Klaus Sch uster, " Menzel's Modern ity, " in Menzel 1 9 96-97, pp. 84-6 and pp. 1 4 1 -4 respectively. As Kermit Champa recognized thirty years ago, " M enzel's paintings assert their otherness from the realism of pho­ togra phy in terms as defin ite a those achieved at any rime by any realist painter"; " I ntroduction, " in Kermit S. Champa with Kate H. Champa, German Painting of the r 9th Century, exh. cat. ( New Haven, Conn: Yale Uni ver­ sity Art Gallery, T 5 Ocr.-22 Nov. 1 970; Cleveland: Cleve­ land Museum of Art, 9 Dec. 1 970-24 Jan. 1 97 1 ; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 27 Feb.-28 March 1 97 1 ), p. 5 5 · Schuster, too, "Menzel's Modernity," i n Menzel r 9 96-97, p. 1 4 1 , after noting rhar Menzel owned a collection of photographs of weapons and armor in rhe Historisches Museum in Dresden, goes on to observe: " Bur i t is a strange fact that his drawings, compared with the photographic plates, rendered rhe derail of rhe objects with far greater precision than could be achieved by the camera. Moreover, by varying the angle ! from depiction to depiction within

4

a single drawing] Menzel freed his subjects from the singleness of viewpoint characteristic of photography. He improved o n photography and made his subject live ! " Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography ( Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1 99 7 ) , p . 2 9 9 . Actually, the formulation is a little strange: as far as the marks constituting the photograph itself are concerned, they do not at all demonstrate an intentional directionali ty. Maynard's point emerges via a contrast with a drawing of a country house by John Constable in which, Maynard observes, p. 298, "even the straight outlines appear as d irectional marks. The direction of their production may nor be clear, bur rhey do look drawn, not stamped or pressed . . . . A possible representational signifi­ cance of this is that i t mimics the productive process of that which i t represents: a building, in which materials were cut and then positioned." As he also writes, pp. 298-9: "Drawings usually appear to us nor simply as marks, even as display markings, but as marks made with the intention of indicating shapes and objects." Apropos of the all-ar-onceness of photogra phic marking (even ar an early stage in photographic history, when a ll ­ ar-onceness w a s nor a matter of instantaneousness), a n entry i n Benjamin's The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin ( Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1 9 99), p. 67 1 , under the subhead " Photography," makes intriguing reading in rhe light of the figure of brick­ laying we have been following in Menzel's art: A prophecy from the year 1 8 5 5 : "Only a few years ago, there was born ro us a machine that has since become rhe glory of our age, and that day a fter day amazes the mind and startles the eye. I This machine, a century hence, will be rhe brush, the palette, the colors, the craft, rhe patience, rhe glance, rhe touch, the paste, the glaze, the trick, the relief, the finish, rhe rendering. I A century hence, there will be no more bricklayers of painting; there will be only architects - painters in the full sense of rhc word. I And arc we really to imagine that the daguerreotype has murdered a rt ? No, it kills the work of patience, bur ir does homage to the work of thought. I When rhe daguerreotype, this titan child, will have attained the age of matu rity, when all its power and potential will have been unfolded, then rhe genius of art will suddenly seize it by the collar and exclaim: 'Mine! You are mine now! We are going to work together.' " A . J . Wiertz, Oeuvres litteraires ( Paris, 1 870), p . 309. From an article, " La Photographic," that appeared for the first tirne in J u ne 1 8 5 5 , in La Nation., and ended with a reference ro the new invention of photographic enlargement, which makes i t possible ro produce l i fe-size photos. Brickla yer-painters are, for Wiertz, those "who apply themselves to the material parr only," who are good at " rendering." Benjamin lets this stand without comment. Maynard, Engine of Visualization, pp. 249-5 3 . Subsequent page references will be given in parentheses in the text. Hi ne's photographs of men at work, in particular o f construction workers on the Empire State Building, are discussed by Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American

295

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7 8

9

10

in " Realism, Writing, and Disfigurarion in Thomas Eakins's

Photographs: [mages as History. Mathetv Brady to Walker Evans (New York, 1 9 8 9 } , pp. 223-7. On their work, see e.g. Marra Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-jules Marey ( 1 8] 0- 1 904) (Chicago and London, 1 99 2 ) . Their projects, like instantaneous photo­ graphy itself, had to wait upon the commercial production of high-speed gelatin dry plates, which rook place only then. For an i nterpretation of Ma rcy's work that empha­ sizes the radical discontinuity between "ch ronopho to ­ graphic" images a n d human vision, see Joel Snyder, "Visualization a n d Visibility," in Peter G a l ison and Caroline A. Jones, Picturing Science, Producing Art ( London, 1 99 8 } , pp. 3 79-97. I owe this point ro Walter Benn Michaels. As Rosalind E. Krauss puts i t in " ores on the Index: Parr 1," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Ca mbridge, Mass., 1 9 8 6 }, p. 203, " Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is rhus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relation to its object." The tripartite division of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols was rhe work of Charles Sanders Peirce; see his "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," i n Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York, 1 9 5 5 ), esp. pp. 1 0 2-3 See in this connection Maynard's discussion of the nineteenth-century photographer Peter Henry Emerson's denigration of photography as an art on precisely these grounds in The Engine of Visualization, pp. 266-76, 284-5, 290-92, 3 04 . In "Menzel's Modernity," Menzel 1 996-97, p p . 1 4 1 -4, Schuster cites Max Liebermann's essay on Menzel, in which the former contrasts the mechanical objectivity of photo­ graphy with the intense subjectivity of art. Bur (Schuster continues} Liebermann also believed that "the advent of photography, with irs minute attention to derail, has completely changed our visual habits, and this in turn rein forced Menzel's penchant for min utiae: 'His visual sense, naturally inclined towards the observation and reproduction of the tiniest details, received fresh stimulus from photography.' Given rhe tendency ro disintegration of photographic perception and the very existence of this modern medium, given irs public effectiveness, 'we are touched,' says Liebermann, 'by this tragic aspect of Menzel's development: he set himself ro bridle the free flight of his imagination. One might say that his artistic scruples were employed in dissecting the creations of his genius, threatening to rob his art of life itself' " ; for the Max Lieber­ mann see " Menzel," Vision der Wirklichkeit: Ausgewahlte Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt am Main, 1 9 9 3 }, pp. l i O- I I . This is in l i ne with Liebermann's sense of a fatal split in Menzel's art between painting (in what might be thought of as the modern French sense of the term} and illustration; for a l l the brilliance and interest of Lieber­ mann's essay, his point of view is at odds with the gist of my argument in this book. For Courbet and photography, see Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago and London, 1 9 90), pp. 278-8 3 . A s for Eakins, his activity as a photographer has recently emerged as a topic of interest in irs own right;

The Gross Clinic," Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London,

r r

T2

13

T 9 8 7 }, p. 8 2, however, I cal l attention ro the way in which the actual use of photographs as a model for certain pictures "are oddly remote in feeling . . . l a n d ·l seem almost to image the withdrawal of reality from the viewer." There is much fascinating material relevant to this shift in Jonathan Cra ry, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture ( Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1 9 99}, esp. ch. 3 , " 1 8 8 8 : Illuminations of Disenchantment" (centered on Seurar's Parade de cirque) . In that chapter Crary a lludes to an "epistemological crisis whose effects began to be seen clearly by the early 1 88os as increasingly inadequate positivist, psychophysical, and associationist models of cognition and perception were suppla nted by a wide range of new formulations," p. 1 5 5 · Apropos o f a n i l l ustration that aimed to depict the author's visual field in Ernst Mach's Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations ( r 8 8 5 ) he writes, pp. 220-2 1 : "Classical representation, from Alberti onward, defines itself by the fundamental subtraction of the body from the constitution of a visual field and by the related intellectual distinction between observer and observed. Mach was trying ro high­ light how certain visual habits correspond to particular phi losophical prejud ices, and in his enduring attacks on phi losophical dualism he sought to overcome classical distinctions between 'inner' and 'outer' phenomena , between the physical and the psychic. The data of physio­ logical experience were of crucial importance for him in demonstrating the interpenetration of rhe e spheres. Though he shunned a monistic stance, any given ph enom­ enon for Mach was an irreducible composite of properties belonging ro the observer and features of the object observed, and certa inly much the same could be asserted about Selll·at's work after the mi d - 1 S Sos: for both, the world was 'one coherent mass of sensations' " ; the citation is to Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, trans. C. M. Wi lliams ( La Salle, Ill., 1 8 9 3 }, p. 2 3 . T he con­ trast that interests me, of course, is nor with "classical rep­ resentation" bur with the particular bodily emphases of the immediately preced ing epoch. See in this connection ch. 5, " Between Realisms," in Michael Fried, Manets Modernism, 01; The Face of Paint­ ing in the 1 86os (Ch icago and London, 1 99 6 ) ; and idem, "Cail lebotre's Impressionism," Representations, no. 66 (Spring 1 9 99): 1 -p . The mass destruction of bodies i n the First World Wa r and the cultural aftermath in Weimar Germany a rc major themes in a nearly completed book by Brigid Doherty,

Montage: The Body and the Work of Art in Dada, Brecht, and Beniamin. See Doherty, "See: We Are All Ne�-Iras­ thenics! or, The Trauma of Dada Montage," Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1 9 97}: 8 2- 1. 3 2; idem, " Figures of the Pseudorevolurion," October, no. 84 (Spring 1 9 9 8 } : 6 5-89; and idem, "Test and Cestus in Brecht and Be njamin,'' M LN 14

I I J (Apr. 2000}: 4 4 2-8 1 . This was noted independently by T. J . Clark i n " Reserva­ tions of the Marvelous" (a review of The Arcades Pro;ect), London Revietv of Books, 22 J � ne 2000, p. 9· Clark writes:

NOTES TO PAGES 2 5 3 - 5

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8

19

"Benjamin's Paris . . . is all dream and no spectacle; the apparatus of spectacle is not understood by him to invade the dream l i fe and hold unconscious imagining in its grip. Not to recognise the way the city was becoming a regime of false openness, even in the time of the arcades, seems to me to miss something essential about bourgeois society something dreadful and spellbinding . . . . I f you leave out the line of painting that runs from Delacroix to Matisse (and Benjamin does, essentially) you leave out too much of what made the pain [of modernity] endurable: meaning bourgeois hedonism, bourgeois positivism and lucidity. This is not a matter of pitting high art against photo­ graphy and caricature, by the way (of course we need his­ tories of all three), but of asking what this particular high art has to tell us about the culture that spawned it. 'Why was there no French idealism?' reads one of the notes Benjamin made at the time of his 1 9 3 5 prospectus. There cannot be an image-answer (a dialectical image-answer) to that question without Monet and Cezanne. And the ques­ tion is vital. It connects with why the painting of Paris in the 1 9 th century still matters to the bou rgeoisie so much . " See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York, 1 9 9 1 ), pp. 4 1 - 5 . In this Panofsky accepted the view o f A lois Riegl, who argued that " for the ancients space was that which was 'left as it were between bodies' "; see Michael Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History ( Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1 9 8 4 ) , p. q 6 . As Holly shows, p. 87, Panofsky had studied closely the early twentieth-century writings of Theodore Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer, which he came to feel were concerned "not with the historical work of art or even with the a rtist who created it but only with the impression it makes, in the present, on the mind of the contemporary observer." See ibid., pp. 30-3 1 . Ludwig Wirrgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGu inness ( 1 9 2 1 ; London, 1 9 6 1 ), p. 1 1 7 . Henry David Thoreau, Walden 01; L ife in the Woods ( New York, 1 9 9 1 ) , pp. 247-8. The previous paragraph, ibid., pp. 24 6-7, sets the stage for that lingu istic-somatic tour de force: The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage [ i .e., made out of sand l , or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank, - for the sun acts on one side first, - and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am a ffected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, - had come to where he wa still at work, sporting on the bank, and with excess of energy strew­ ing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vita l s of the globe, for this sandy overflow is some­ thing such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find rhus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses

20

21

22

23

itself outwardly in leaves, it so l a bors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its pro­ totype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of far, (A.eipw, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; A.opoc;, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b . The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass o f the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid I behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are sti l l drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub i n the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. In a recent essay, Richard Prud'homme calls attention to the importance o f references to hands in Walden. "The hand," he writes, "is Thoreau's emblem for the necessity of believ­ ing that we can reach a truth beyond the power of language or theory ( including his own) to obscure it" ( " Walden's Economy of Living," Raritan 20 ) Winter 2oor ] , p. r o 8 ) . A short passage from Thoreau's journal, dared 9 September r 8 5 7 and cited by Thoreau in "The Dispersion of Seeds," is finally irresistible: "To the woods for white-pine cones. Very few trees bear any, and they are on their tops. I can easily manage small trees, fifteen or twenty feet high, climb­ ing till I can reach the dangling green pickle-like fruit with my right hand, while I hold on to the main stem with my left; but I am in a pickle when I get one. The cones are now all flowing with pitch, and my hands are soon so covered with it that I cannot easily cast down my booty when I would, it sticks to my fingers so; and when I get down a t last a n d h a v e picked them u p , I cannot touch my basket with such hands but carry it on m y arm, nor can I pick up my coat which I have taken off unless with my teeth - or else I kick it up and catch it on my arm" ( Henry D. Thoreau, Faith i n a Seed: The Disperson o f Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings, ed. Bradley P. Dean [ Washington, D . C . , and Covelo, Cal., 1 9 9 3 ] , p. 3 9 ) . One can imagine Menzel taking pleasure in i llustrating scenes from this Chaplinesque passage. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, The Marx Library ( New York, 1 9 7 5 ), pp. 3 5 r -2, emphasis in original. Cited by Wa lter Benjamin, The A rcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1 9 9 9 ) , pp. 209, 2 r o, where "one-sided" is given as "inert." Marx, ibid., p. 3 5 4· Benjamin, The A rcades Project, p. 2 0 9 . On the collector generally see "Convolute H [The Collector ) , " in ibid., pp. 203-r r . The great exception to that alienation for Benjamin is the child, who for a rime retains a sensuous,

297

N OT E S TO PA G E S 2 S 5 - 6 empathic, mimetic relation to the material world; see esp. two short sections of " One-Way Street" ( written 1 9 2 3-26}, "Construction Site" and (in the larger section called " Enlargements " ) "Child hiding. " One citation from each of the sections in turn: " [C)hildre n are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpenty. In waste products they recognize the face that the world turns directly and solely to them " ; Wa lter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: I 9 I3-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1 996), p. 449; and, p. 4 6 5 : "Standing behind the doorway curtain, the child h i mself becomes something floating and white, a ghost. The dining table under which he is crouch­ ing turns him into the wooden idol in a temple whose four pillars are the carved legs. And behind a door, he himself is the door - wears it as his heavy mask, and like a shaman will bewitch all those who unsuspecti ngly enter." For grown-ups, though, empathy is to be shunned. "The constructions of history are comparable to instructions that commandeer the true life and confine it to barracks," Benjamin writes in one of the first sketches for The Arcades Project, p. 8 4 6 : " O n the other hand: the street emergence of the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to the sort of history which demands 'empathy,' which makes everything abstract. 'Empathy': this is what newspaper reading terminates in. The true method of making things present is: to represent them i n our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). Only anecdotes can do this for us. Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of 'large contexts' " ; emphasis i n original; see also p. 5 4 5 · T h i s is also the point of the experience of shock, which, like the a necdote, comes to us from elsewhere, and the related theme of tactility, a minimally bodily notion, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, " in Jlluminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1 969), pp. 2 1 7-5 1 · Also pertinent is Benjamin's notion of "empathy for the commodity," by which he means with its fluctuating price: " It is only as commodity that the thing has the effect of alienating human beings from one another. It produces this effect through its price. What is decisive is the empathy with the exchange value of the commodity, with its equalizing substrate. (The absolute qualitative invariance of the time in which labor that generates exchange value runs its course - such absolute equality is the grayish background against which the gaudy colors of sensation stand out)"; The Arcades Project, p. 3 8 6. To say that we are very far from the meaning of empathy for Menzel's art would be an under­ statement. A striking example of the difficulty of bodiliness for Benjamin and the entanglement of that difficulty with sociopolitical factors concerns his memories of the unpleas­ antness of climbing stairs at school: "Climbing the stairs i n this fashion, with nothing before me b u t boots and calves, and the scraping of hundreds of feet in my ears, I was often seized - I seem to remember - by revulsion at being

24

25 26 27

hemmed in by this multitude; and again, as on those walks in the city with my mother, solitude appeared to me as the only fit stare of man. Very understandably - for such a mob of schoolchildren is among the most formless and ignoble of all masses, and betrays its bourgeois origin in repre­ senting, like every assembly of that class in our day, the most rudimentary organizational form that its individual members can give their reciprocal relationships"; "A Berlin Chronicle," in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1 9 27-34, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1 999), p. 6 0 1 . I cite this, of course, because of the altogether different experience of climbing and descending staircases in Menzel's art. See also Benjamin's recollection in the same text, p. 6 2 2, of another stairway that "seemed under the power of a ghost that awaited me as I mounted, though without barring my way, making its presence felt when I had only a few more stairs to climb. On these last stairs it held me spellbound." Compare the remarks on modern man's relation to his body in his essay "Franz Kafka,'' in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 794-8 r 6. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmak­ ing of the World (New York and Oxford, 1 9 8 5 ), p. 244· The larger context of her remark is this: " [ Marx l through­ out his writings assumes that the made world is the human being's body and that, having projected that body into the made world, men and women are themselves disembodied, spiritualized. A made thing remade not to have a body, the person is himself an artifact." I could imagine someone proposing that we read the whole of this as a gloss on rhe Hamburg Studio Wall, or indeed on my reading of the Studio Wall in section 1 4 · But the assertion of the primacy of embodiment throughout Menzel's art (or at least until his late years), including the Hamburg picture, is much too powerful and continuous for me to agree. Another, com­ plementary ground of resemblance between Marx and Menzel is indicated by Scarry, p. 25 1 , as follows: "The pres­ ence of the body in the realm of artifice ! Ma rx's first thesis, in her account] has as its counterpart the presence of arti­ fice in the body, the recogn ition that in making the world, man remakes himself. This second thesis, which has for Marx its philosophic origins in Hegel's doctrine of the self­ creating power of work, is so implicit in the first thesis and is itself, independent of the first thesis, so widely under­ stood to be central to Marx's account of civil ization that it need not be dwelt on at length here." (Another name for the second thesis might be the originariness of prosthesis.) Scarry goes on to discuss Engels's essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," which argues (i n her words, p. 2 5 3 ) "that the hand is itself an arti­ fact, gradually altered by its own activity of altering the external world." In addition to her reading of Marx, Scarry's ch. 5 , "The I nterior Structure of the Artifact," with its painstaking development of the concept of " p rojection," is relevant to the present study. Cited in Lucio Coletti, " In troduction," in Marx, Early Writings, p. 5 r . T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London, 1 9 99), pp. 6-7.

Ibid.

N O T E S TO 28 29 30

See the analysis of the Burial in Courbet's Realism, pp. 1 1 1-4 7 · See ibid., p p . 2 3 8-5 3 . This whole paragraph reflects suggestions b y Alex Potts, i n a n unpublished paper responding to a lecture b y m e on Menzel at the San Francisco Museum of Art in April 1 9 9 9 .

3

4

Coda: Brickwork See in this connection Mark M . Anderson, Kafka's Clothes:

Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siecle

2

(Oxford, 1 99 2 ) , and Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka: The jewish Patient ( New York and London, 1 99 5 ) . In Gilman's view, K afka's illness was "the a xis on which his world turned" ( 5 ), and for Anderson, Gilman writes, " Kafka's imagined body becomes the place where his art is contested and where the images in his art are forged" (ibid. ). Franz Kafka, "The Pit of Babel," trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Williams, in Parables and Paradoxes (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 3 4-5 (German and English ) .

6 7 8

PA G E S 2 5 7 - 6 5

Franz Kafka, "The Great Wall of China," trans. Willa and Edwin M u i r, in The Complete Stories, ed. ahum N . Glatzer ( e w York, 1 97 1 ), pp. 2 3 5-48; the quotations are from p. 24 8 . Trans. Clement Greenberg i n Parables and Paradoxes, pp. 46-7 ( German and English). It may be to the point here that Kafka himself practiced a highly personal kind of drawing, which he once charac­ terized as " 'a perpetually renewed and unsuccessful attempt at primitive magic' "; see Gustav Janouch, Con­ versations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (New York, 1 97 1 ), p. 3 6. Franz Kafka, Amerika, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir ( New York, 1 946, 1 974, 1 996), pp. 1 5 2-7. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse ( 1 99 5 ; London, 1 9 98), p. 3 · Ibid., pp. 1 76-9.

299

Chronology

Ada pted from M a rie Ursula Riemann- Reyher's " Biography" in Menzel 1 9 9 6-9 7 r815

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann Menzel born on 8 December in Breslau, the son of Carl Erdmann Menzel, a school principal, and Charlotte Emilie Okrusch, the d a ughter of a drawing teacher.

r8r8

Menzel's father resigns his teaching post to set u p a lithography workshop.

1 8 23

Birth of Menzel's sister Emilie on 2 5 J uly.

1 8 26

Birth of Menzel's brother Rich a rd on 8 November.

1 8 30

The Menzel family moves t o B e r l i n i n Apri l . Menzel works i n his father's lithographic

1832

Menzel's father dies on 5 Janua ry. The si xteen-year-old Menzel takes over the lithographic

1833

From Easter until the autumn, Menzel sporadically attends the drawing class from plaster

business and postpones attend i ng the Academy. business to provide for the rest o f the family. cast models at the Academy. Disa ppointed, he withdraws and continues his education on his own. 1836

Menzel meets D r. Wilhelm Puhlmann, a regi mental medical officer from Potsdam and director of the local art society, with whom he enjoys

a

close friendship until Puhlmann's

death in 1 8 8 2 . 1 83 9

Until 1 8 4 2, h e works on nearly 400 drawings for wood engravings to ill ustrate Franz Kugler's Geschichte Friedrichs des Crossen (History of Frederick the Great) . Di ssatisfied with the Parisian cra ftsmen h i red to execute the wood engravings, he gra d u a l l y builds up a team of competent engravers in Leipzig and Berlin. Two paintings by John Constable exhi bited at the Hotel de Russie in Berl in a re a llegedly the inspiration for Menzel's " p rivate" paintings of the 1 8 4os. On 3 October, the family moves from 39 Wilhelmstrasse to 4 Zimmerstrasse.

1842

Menzel begins the 4 3 6 pen lithographs for Die A rmee Friedrichs des Crossen in ihrer Uniformierung (The A rmy of Frederick the Great and Its Uniforms, three volumes, com­ pleted in r 8 5 7 ) .

I843

Menzel begins the two hundred wood engravings that will i l l ustrate Werke Friedrichs des

1 84 4

Rear Courtyard a n d House, o i l .

I 84 5

At the end o f M a rch, the Menzel fa mily moves t o I 8 Schoneberger Strasse.

Crossen ( The Works of Frederick the Great, completed in 1 8 4 9 ) .

Menzel paints the Balcony f{ oom, oil, the most famous o f the so-called "private" paintings. I

846

1 8 47

Menzel's mother dies on 8 October. The Menzel fa mily moves to 4 3 R itterstrasse. Berlin Potsdam Railway, oil. Living Room with the A rtist's Sister, oil.

r 84 8

. O n 2 1 M a rch, a few days after the street fighting, Menzel returns to Ber l i n . The next day, he sees the bodies of the citizens k i l led in the insu rrection laid in state in front of the German Ch urch in the Gendarmenmarkt. Menzel begins to paint the Lying in State of

the Victims of the March R evolution, a n oil painting which remains unfin ished. r 84 9

He paints h i s fi rst scenes from t h e l i fe o f Frederick t h e Great. In particu lar he begins the Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci, taking it up aga in i n I 8 S I and com­ pleting it in

3 00

I

8 5 2, and the Round Table of Frederick II at Sanssouci, fin ished in

I

8 so.

I 8 50 I852

O n 2 0 October, Menzel becomes a member of the literary group "Tunnel i.iber der Spree." Menzel also becomes part of a smaller group, called " Ri.i tli." Some of the other members are the writers Theodor Fontane, Paul Heyse, and Theodor Storm and the art historians Franz Kugler and Friedrich Eggers.

I853

Menzel i s elected member of the Royal Academy o f Arts.

I85 5

Trip to the Marien burg i n August. In September, Menzel spends fourteen days visiting the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where his Round Table is exhibited. He visits Courbet's one-man exhibition as well.

I856

Night A ttack at Hochkirch is publicly displayed a t the Academy t o widespread accla i m .

Menzel is appointed professor at the Royal Academy o f Arts, Berlin. He paints Theatre du Gymnase, oil. I8 5 7

Gold medal from the Berlin Academy of Arts for Night Attack a t Hochkirk.

I859

O n I O May, Menzel's sister marries the royal music director and composer, Hermann Krigar. The Menzels continue to live in the same bui lding. Menzel begins the last large painting in the Frederick cycle, Frederick the Great's A ddress to His Generals before the Battle of Leuthen. It proves impossible to finish.

I 8 6o

At the end of the year, Menzel moves to

22

Marienstrasse, next door to his brother and

the Krigar family. I86I

Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffold at Rheinsberg,

gouache. On I 2 October, Menzel is informed that he has received a royal commission to paint a faithful representation of the coronation of William

1

in Konigsberg. The painter Fritz

Werner travels with him to the coronation festivities on I 8 October to assist him in ren­ dering color studies. Over the next four years Menzel sketches portraits of those present. The Guard Room in the Berlin Royal Palace is made available to him as a studio. The picture is completed on I 5 December I 86 5. From the time of this commission, Menzel is invited to court festivities. I 8 63

On

I5

Februa ry, an exhibition of all Menzel's work on the age of Frederick the

Great opens at the Academy on the occasion of the centenary celebration of the Treaty of Hubertusburg. For his sister's two children, Menzel begins the Children's Album: forty-four gouaches, on which he works for twenty years and which he partly revises in I 8 8 3 . I 8 64

Menzel's brother Richard marries Elise Preuss and buys the Gustav Schauer Institute for Photogra phic Art and Publishing in Berlin, probably with financial assistance from the artist. Hand Holding a Paint Dish and Hand Holding a Book, gouaches.

I865

Menzel moves, with the Krigar family, to 2 4 Luisenstrasse. Richard Menzel dies o n I 4 July.

I 8 66

In July, Menzel visits the battlefields of the Austro-Prussian Wa r. At Ki:: i niginhof, where military hospitals have been set up, he draws and paints wounded and dying soldiers and corpses. Fantasies from the Arms Room, watercolors and gouaches.

I 867

From late M a y until early August, Menzel visits Paris t o see the Exposition Universelle, with the painter Paul Meyerheim and his sister-in-law Elise. He receives a second-place medal for his painting Night A ttack at Hochkirch. He is awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor, and pays several visits to the French painter Ernest Meissonier at his home in Poissy. He also visits the exhibition pavilions of Courbet and probably also of Manet.

I868

From 9 July to 4 July, Menzel visits Paris, where his Coronation of William I and two small gouaches are exhibited at the Salon.

I 8 7o

Menzel receives the Order Pour le Merite, which was instituted in I 74 0 by Frederick the Great and to which Frederick William

IV

had added a section for the Arts and Sciences

in I 8 4 2 .

301

In November, the Menzei-Krigar family moves to 7 Potsdamer Strasse. I87I

Departure of King William for the A rmy, J I July r 8 7 o , o i l .

I

Visit t o Konigshiitte i n Upper Silesia t o prepare f o r h is painting the Iron R olling Mill, fin­

872

ished in I 8 7 5 · In October, he paints the Studio Wall, which includes the death mask of Friedrich Eggers, who had died in August. I875

The Iron R o lling Mill, recently completed b y Menzel, is immediately purchased by the Berlin Nationalgalerie, along with the Flute Concert. The Menzel-Krigar fam i l y moves to the Sigismund strasse, near the Tiergarten (Menzel's last residence a n d studio). Brick layers on a Building Site, gouache.

I 876

I n October, visit t o Holland i n preparation for wood engravings ill ustrating a centenary edition of Heinrich von Kleist's Der Zerbrochene Krug ( The Broken Jug). This is pub­ lished i n 1 8 77, with thirty i llustrations and four photographs of monochrome gouaches.

I878

Iron Rolling Mill, Dinner a t Sanssouci, and Flute Concert are sent to Paris for the Expo­ sition Universelle. Supper at the Ball, oil.

r 8 8o

Menzel writes the obituary of h i s brother-in-law, Hermann Krigar.

I882

I n October, the Nationalgalerie acquires many works by Menzel from the estate of his friend, Dr. Wil h e l m Puhlmann.

I 8 84

Piazza d'Erbe in Verona (Marketplace in Verona), h i s last ambitious oil painting, is shown at the Berlin Society of Artists. At Easter, the Nationalgalerie holds an exhibition devoted to Menzel, to mark fifty years' activity as an artist.

I885

From 2 6 April to I 5 J u ne, a large Menzel exhibition i s shown a t the Pavil ion d e Ia Ville in Paris. Menzel receives numerous honors on his seventieth birthday. To mark h i s birthday, the Academy shows al most all the works by Menzel to be found in Berlin, including some from his personal collection. Studio Wall, painted in I 8 7 2 , is shown for the first time. The artist is awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Berl in, made an honorary citizen of his native Breslau, and a n honorary member of the Academy of Arts of St. Petersburg. The Berlin Art Society of Arts holds a banquet and Theodor Fontane composes a poem in his honor.

r 886 I 8 89

Menzel i s appoi nted chancellor o f the arts and sciences section o f the Order Pour l e Merite. Menzel takes p a r t i n t h e Exposition Un iverselle i n Paris, marking the centenary of the French Revolution.

1892

Menzel's last oil paintings.

I893

Breakfast Buffet Given by a High- Class Bakery at Kissingen, gouache.

I 89 5

In December, large-scale anniversary exhi bition to mark Menzel's eightieth birthday: the Nationalgalerie exhibits prints, the Academy of Arts paintings by Menzel, including a first public showing of the Lying in State of the Victims of the March Revolution. Menzel is appoi nted "Acting Privy Councillor with the title 'Excellency' " and an honorary citizen of Berlin. He is made a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and of the Royal Academy i n London.

I897

O n the Marienburg, gouache ( a reworking o f h i s watercolor o f I 8 5 5 ) .

1 89 8

Menzel i s named Knight o f the Order o f the Black Eagle, the highest Prussian order, raising

I 900

Several works by Menzel are exhi bited in the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he is

1 90 3

Hugo v o n Tschu d i purchases t h e I 8 4 5 Balcony Room for t h e Nationalgalerie. In April,

him to the aristocracy. awarded the medal of honor for h i s etchings. the Association of Berlin Artists e x h ibits two of Menzel's early oil paintings never seen in public before, together with early drawings, watercolors, and gouaches. The

r

8 56 Theatre

du Gymnase is shown for the first time at the autumn exhibition of the K iinstlerhaus in Berlin.

3 02

1 904

Menzel restricts himself to drawing in pencil.

1905

On 9 Februa ry, Menzel d i e s i n Berlin. On

I

3 February, his funeral is held in the rotunda of the Altes Museum, followed by

burial at the Dreifaltigkeits cemetery. On 28 March, a large memorial exhibition opens at the Nationalgalerie. After long negotations with Menzel's sister, the Nationalgalerie acquires Menzel's artistic estate in 1 9 06.

Photograph Credits

By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University: p. i, 1 9, 84, 9 1 , 92, 1 0 1 , 1 0 5 , I 06, I I I, I I 6, I I ?, 1 2 I © K u p ferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen z u Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz: Foro: Jorg P. Anders r , 6, 8, 9, 14,

I S , r 6, I?, 2I, 22, 24, 29, 3 0, 3 8, 40, 55, 6o, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 73, 74, 8s , 94, 95, 98, I o2, Io9, I I 4, r r 8, I 2o, I 2 2, I 2 } , I 27, 1 }0, I } } , 1 34, 1 3 5, I 3 6, I } ?, I } 8, 1 3 9, I40, I S O, 1 5 1 , I 5 2, I 5 3 , I 54, I 5 6, I 5 7, I 5 8, 1 59, I 6 I , I 62, I 6} , 1 65, 1 67, 1 69; Foro: Reinhard Saczewski 42 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer K u lturbesitz Narionalgalerie: 30, 66, I 2 8; Foro: Jorg P. Anders: 26, 3 5 , 37, 39, 5 1 , 5 2, 54, 1 64; Foro: Bernd K uhnert: 27; Foro: Klaus Goken: 33; Foro: Karin Marz: so; Foro: SMB-PK: 90, I I 3

© Hamburger Kunsthalle: Foro: Elke Walford: 34, 87, 99, 1 4 I © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemaldegalerie Neue Meister: Foro: Ji.irgen Karpinski, Dresden: 3 5, 1 4 3 © R M N : 4 7 , 6 s , 6 9 , u o, I I I Arrothek: 53, 62 Photographic Services © President a n d Fellows o f Harvard College: 70 © Allen Memorial Art Museum: I 66 © The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor: Photo: M i ke Frear:

209

Index

absorption 3 7, 6 5 , Io4-5, I 28, I 29, I 3 I , I 3 7-9, 224

Adolph Menzel Drawing with a Pencil between His Teeth (photograph) I 9 6, 1 9 7 Adorno, Theodor W. 2 3 5 , 246, 2 5 3

Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic 94n aesthetic, the (Ki erkegaard) I4 5-7 aestheticism 2 24 aesthetics of the fragment 240 Alberti, Leon Battista 254, 296n Algarotti, Count Francesco 6 a l ienation 2 7 3 n allegory 1 5 , I 8 5-6, I 9 6, 2 4 2 "real" I 8 5 , 240, 2 4 2 , 246 ambidexterity r 69, 2 7 r see also left- a n d righthandedness anamorphosis r 2 3-4 Anderson, Mark M . 299n Andre, Carl, Lever 2 8 3 11 animals I I }- I 4 Annales school I 4 8 Aphrodite of Knidos 2 4 1 arabesque forms 2 7 3 n architecture 3 5-7, 2 3 6 , 2 5 3 , 2 9 3 n Argens, Marquis d ' 6 armor and weapons 5 5 -7, I 29, 2 4 5 , 2 9 5 n Arnold, Carl 2 8 9 n "art o f seeing" see Hoffmann, E . T. A . Astruc, Zacharie I 2 6 asymmetry 8 4 , 1 67, I 7 I Augusta, Empress 9 A u mont, Jacques 68, 69-70, 2 5 3 Austin, J . L. I 5 , I 4 8-9 Austro-Prussian War 8, I 9 8 authenticity 2 7 9 n automata, mechanical 6 4 automatism 6 4 autonomization of sight 6o-62 aversion/antipathy 2 I 3-I 5 The Awful Truth (film) 28 3n Bach, C. P. E. 6, 63 Bach, J. S., Musical Offering 6 Balla, Giacomo I 6 8 Bataille, Georges I 0 5 Baudelaire, Charles 2 I } , 2 5 3 , 289n "The Painter of Modern Life" I 6, 2 9 2n Baudrillard, Jean 6 r Bazille, Frederic r 67

Becher, lngeborg 1 7 1 Beckmann, Max I 68 Bell, Charles 6 o Benda, Franz r 8 7 Benjamin, Wa lter r 6, 2 3 4-9, 246, 247, 2 5 2, 2 5 3 on traces I 6, 2 3 4-9, 2 5 2, 2 5 3

The Arcades Pro;ect (Das Passagen- Werk ) 94n, 234, 2 5 3 , 2 5 5 , 294n, 29 5 n, 297-8n

"Experience and Poverty" 2 3 6 , 2 3 7

Origins of the German Play of Lamentation 94n " Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 94n, 2 3 4-6 "Short Shadows" 2 3 6 "Some Motifs i n Baudelaire" 2 9 2 n Bergson, Henri 2 5 3 Berlin ix, 5 , 9 , 2o-2 I , 64, 9 3 , I I 2, 1 2 5 , 1 27, 1 3 6-7, 1 4 6 , 213, 247, 2 5 3

Academy o f Art 5 , 8 Gendarmenmarkt 9 3 , 203, 2 1 4 Kupferstichkabinett i x Menzel exhibition ( I 996-97) I I Nationalgalerie 9, I o, 4 3 , 7 5 , 8 2 , 1 2 1 Neue Kirche 204-5 Royal Palace Guard Room 8 Schauspielhaus 204 Wal l ix Biedermeier style 294n binocular vision I 6, 62, I 69-7 1 binoculars, opera glasses, field-glasses 1 4 , 20, 46-7, 70, 96, 98-I O I , 1 0 5-6, I I4 , 2 1 5 , 234, 2 3 7-8, 2 5 6 , 292

birds I I 3-14 Bismarck, Otto Prince von 273n, 279n "blase attitude" 2 1 3 Blechen, Karl 2 7 4 n blinding, a n d castration I 24n Bloch, Ernst 2 9 1 n bodily experience 3 6 body depiction of 4 I , 1 0 2-4 symbolism of 3 7 see also embodiment Bohemia I 9 8 Boime, Albert 204, 289n Baldini, Giovanni, Adolph Menzel 1 69-7 1, 1 7 0 books, bookcases r-4, 6 2 , 1 4 1 , 1 4 7 Borch-Jacobsen, M i k kel 28o-8 r n Borsig steel factories, Moabit 1 2 1 , 279n, 29411 Brahms, Johannes 288n Brecht, Bertolt 2 3 7-8

Lesebuch fur Stddtebewohner (Reader for City-Dwellers) 2}6 bricklaying, brickwork r s , 3 4 , 1 29, 1 5 2-9, 1 54n, 1 7 3 , 1 74, 260, 263, 286n, 2 9 5 n Burgbacher-Krupka, Ingrid 286n Busch, Werner 84 Caillebotte, Gustave 1 29, 1 67 "calendrical counting" (Darboven) 284n Callot, Jacques 2 1 5 Camas, Countess 64-5, I } I , 1 9 5 camera obscura 5 9 capitalism 232, 2 3 5 , 246 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 278n, 279n Carracci, Annibale 8 2 cases and holders (etuis) 2 3 4 , 2 3 6 , 237-8 castration 1 20, 1 2 1 , 1 23 , 1 24, 1 9 5 Cavell, Stanley 1 5 , 1 5 4n, 1 59n, 164, 2 5 3 "Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher o f Culture" 1 5 211, 1 54n " Night a n d Day: Heidegger a n d Thoreau " 2 8 6n "The Ordinary as the Uneventful " 1 4 8-so, 1 5 2

The Senses of Walden 1 4 8 "The Uncanniness o f the Ordinary" r 54n ceilings, painted 19 s-6 centeredness 88 Certeau, Michel de 273n Cezanne, Paul 22, So, 82, r 67, 2 3 2, 253, 274-5n, 297n

Mill on the Couleuvre at Pontoise 8r, 82 Champa, Kermit S. 242, 295n Charcot, Jean-Martin 228 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon 82, I 3 7, 267n Chasseriau, Theodore 274n Chodowiecki, Daniel Niklaus I 3 7-8, 2 I 5 , 224 church interiors 70-73 , I 9 s-6 cinema 68 Clark, T. ] . 247, 2 5 3 , 274n, 296-7n Faretuell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism r 6 , 23 1-4, 237-8, 2 5 6 classical mode of pictorial structure So-82 classicism 82, 84, 274n Claude Lorrain 8 2 clothing 42-6, 1 02, 1 92, 245 cold, suggestion of 67, 1 4 7 commodities 2 5 6 commodity fetishism 2 9 3 n Conisbee, Philip i x Constable, John 75, 96, 274n, 295n

Child's Hill 2 7 5 n contemplation 90 contingency 2 3 2 contradiction, principle of 1 74n Copenhagen 92 Corinth, Lovis r68 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille 7 5 , 82, 232, 274n

Orleans: View from a Window Overlooking the Saint­ Paterne Tower So-8 1 , 8 o Tivoli: The Gardens of the Villa d'Este 8o, 8 I-2, 83 corporeal integration 4 5 The Corsair 92

Courbet, Gustave ix, 1 2, I4-I 5 , 75> r o s , I09-I I 7, I } } , r 8 s ,

240, 242, 2 5 3 > 274n and photography 296n and Realism I ro "Pavilion d u Realisme" 8, 9, 94

After Dinner at Omans I I O, 1 95 , 257 A Burial at Ornans 4 5 The Meeting I09 The Painter's Studio: Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years in My Artistic Life 8, 1 5, r 6, I09, uo, r r o, 1 1 7, 1 2411, 1 8 5 , 1 94-5 , 2 5 7 The Quarry I09, uo, I 8 5 The Stonebreakers u o The Wheat Sifters u o, r 8 5 Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: O n Vision and M odernity in the Nineteenth Century I 4 , 5 9-62, 68, I05, 253, 296n Crouzet, Marcel I27 crowds 2 I 3 , 214 Cubism 274n curtains 84-7, 89, 239 D a d a 274n daguerreotype process 24 7 "daily writing" (Darboven) 28411 Dante Alighieri 24 I , 24 5 , 246 Darboven, Hanne 2 5 3 , 284, 284-6n, 285

Friedrich IT, Harburg 284n, 285, 286n Hanne Darboven 1 9 75 284 Menschen und Landschaften 284n, 285 Daumier, Honore 274n The Drama 96, 97, I 0 5 David, Jacques-Louis So, 8 2 Coronation of Napoleon I 3 5 death 54, I 9 � I 98-205 Debord, Guy 6o-6 r Debussy, Claude 2 5 3 Dega� Edgar I 2, I 6, 96, I O S , 1 29, I} O, I67, 27411 Study of Bookshelves for "Edmond Duranty " 2, 3, 4 Delacroix, Eugene 1 2, 96, 1 2411, 2 5 3 , 29711 Delaroche, Paui-Hippolyte I 2 Denis, Maurice 272n, 27411 Dickens, Charles, Hard Times 1 74-5, 2 5 3 Diderot, Denis I 5 , I04-7, I 28, 1 3 3 , 282n " Co nversations on 'The Natural Son ' " I04 "On Dramatic Poetry" I 04 Dilthey, Wilhelm 2 5 3 , 2 7 I n D ingelstadt, Franz I 7 I "disenchantment of the world" (and reenchantment) r6, 2 } I-}, 246, 2 5 3 disorder I42-3 disturbance of seeing 1 1 9-20, 244 Doherty, Brigid 284n, 2 8 611 Domenichino 82 drama 1 2 8-9 Droz, the elder 64 Dumas, Franr;:ois-Guillaume 1 3 8-9, 29o-9 I 11 Duranty, Edmond 2 , 9, T 2- T } , r s, T 25-3 I , T 3 3 , T } 9 , T 4 T , 1 5 7, 2 IO, 2 I I , 2 I 4, 249, 2 5 3 , 2 57, 282n The New Painting 1 2 8

"Those Who W i l l Be the Painters" I 27-8 Diirer, Albrecht, The Fall of Man 244, 244 Dusseldorf Academy 84 Eakins, Thomas ix, 1 1, I 4- I 5 , I09-I 24, I 94-5, 2 50, 2 5 3 ,

257. 296n embodiment in work of I I O-I I 2 "graphic" vs. "pictorial" systems I I I writing and drawing I I-1 2

The Cello Player I 9 5 The Concert Singer I 9 5 The Gross Clinic I 5 , 1 1 0, I I I , 1 1 7, 1 1 8-24, 1 1 9, 244 The Pathetic Song I9 5 The Swimming Hole I IO William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River I6, I I ?, I 8 5 , I 94-5 Eggers, Friedrich I o, I 2 I , 24 I , 24 3, 24 5 , 27911 embodiment, embodiedness and aesthetic impulse 3 5 and binocular vision I 69 Crary on 5 9-62 German texts on 5 2 Kafka and 2 5 9 and lived perspective I 9 Marx and I ? Menzel's concern with I 3 , 22, 3 4 , 3 9, 4 5 , 47, 63-4, 68,

I4I in Menzel's late work 2I7, 226-9 and path or road 24, 26 and Pesne on His Scaffold I 97-8 and photography 247-8 and Rear Courtyard and House 79 and staircase 26 and traces 2 3 8-9 and Wirtgenstein 254 see also empathy; projection, empathic Emerson, Peter Henry 29611 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1 5, 148-so, I 5 2, I 5 4n, 2 5 3

Nature I 49 empathy (Einfiihlung) 246 for the commodity 298n empathic seeing 202, 2 1 0, 249, 2 5 5, 2 5 7 Menzel and I ?, 1 1 3, I 24, 2 I 9 refusal o f 2 I 3-I 5 theory of I 3-I4, 3 7-9, I 96, 254 Vischer o n 3 7-9, 202 withdrawal of, in Menzel's late work I 6, 2 I 3-I5, 226-9 see also embodiment, embodiedness; projection, empathic energy, conservation of 272-3n Engels, Friedrich, "The Parr Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" 29811 Ensor, James I 6 8 eroticism see sexu a l motifs estrangement ( a l ienation) 2 5 5 etuis see cases and holders everyday, the I 5 , 78, I 46-8, I 5 2n, I 5 4n, I 5 9n, I64-5,

I?3-4. 234. 2 5 3 · 278n "bad" I 59, I 65 , 1 74 exchange and transfer (of animareness, bodily feeling, etc.) I 6,

42, 47, 24 5-6, 2 5 2

factura 270-7 I n Fanrin-Larour, Henri I 6, I 26, I 67, I 69

Homage to Delacroix I 6 8 , 1 6 8 Self-Portrait I 68 , 1 6 8 Farias, Victor 29411 Fechner, Gustav I4, 3 5 Fechner, Hanns 99, 2 9 I n feet so-52, I ?6-9, 2 3 9 . 2 5 8 "feminine", " masculine" 87, 89-9 I fetishism 293n Fichre, Johann Gottlieb 87, 276n fire 67 First Wo rld War 2 5 3 Flaubcrr, Gustave 2 5 3 Madame Bovary I 6 I , I 62, I 6 5 Fleming, Paul 27811 Fontane, Emilie 29 I n Fontane, Theodor I o, I Oo-o i , 278n, 29 I n Ef(i Briest I S, 3 2, 7911, I 6 I-5, 2 5 3 " O n the Steps o f Sanssouci" (Auf der Treppe von Sanssouci) IO, 26711 foreshortening 34, 69, I 24, 143, I69, I 76, r 8 8 forges I 2 I-2, I 9 5 , 244 Forster-Hahn, Fran