Thursday, August 20, 2026

Adolph Menzel

Adolph Menzel
Man fallen out of Bed
ca. 1843
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Man fallen out of Bed
ca. 1843
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Unmade Bed
ca. 1846
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Cast Collection, Altes Museum, Berlin
1848
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
The 1000-year-old Linden Tree at Lorch Abbey
ca. 1860
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Portrait Studies of Dr van Zander and Graf zu Dohna-Schlodien
1863
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Moritzhof Garden Restaurant
1864
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Seated Officer in Historic Garb
ca. 1870
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
The Barberini Faun (in Munich)
1874
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Model in Renaissance Clothing
ca. 1875
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Models in Renaissance Clothing
ca. 1875
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Judge Walther Enters
(illustration to The Broken Jug by Heinrich von Kleist)
1877
wood-engraving
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Madonna in the Theatine Church in Munich
ca. 1880
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Market Umbrellas in Piazza delle Erbe, Verona
ca. 1881-83
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Figure Study for Neptune
1888
drawing
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Adolph Menzel
Entrance Steps, Maria Magdalenen Kirche, Karlsbad
1894
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

We have seen before that science is always a double-edged weapon to defend or attack any artistic procedure.  It can probe a little into the mysteries of vision; it cannot tell the artist what conclusions to draw from his findings.  And so the observable fact that looking at the elements in our field of vision will result in a picture which will not create an illusion can be adduced to prove that traditional methods are false or, conversely, that they are indispensable. 

We have no right to assume that the upholders of the academic tradition were ignorant of this dilemma.  It is formulated quite explicitly in the charter of academic theory, Idée de la perfection de la peinture by Roland Fréart de Chambray, one of the patrons of Poussin, published in Le Mans in 1662: "Whenever the painter claims that he imitates things as he sees them he is sure to see them wrongly.  He will represent them according to his faulty imagination and produce a bad painting.  Before he takes up his pencil or brush he must therefore adjust his eye to reasoning according to the principles of art which teach how to see things not only as they are in themselves but also how they should be represented.  For it would often be a grave mistake to paint them exactly as the eye sees them, however much this may look like a paradox."  

It is this paradox, I believe, which accounts for the fact that illusionist art grew out of a long tradition and that it collapsed as soon as the value of this tradition was questioned by those who relied on the innocent eye.  . . .  In fact, the achievement of the innocent eye, what modern authorities call "stimulus concentration," turned out to be not only psychologically difficult but logically impossible.  The stimulus, as we know, is of infinite ambiguity, and ambiguity as such, to return to the theme song of this book, cannot be seen – it can only be inferred by trying different readings that fit the same configuration.  I believe, indeed, that the artist's gift is of this order.  He is the man who has learned to look critically, to probe his perceptions by trying alternative interpretations both in play and in earnest.  Long before painting achieved the means of illusion, man was aware of ambiguities in the visual field and had learned to describe them in language.  Similes, metaphors, the stuff of poetry no less than of myth, testify to the powers of the creative mind to create and dissolve new classifications. 

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)