Realism, historicism and the Empire
Adolph Menzel’s rolling mill, Düsseldorf’s landscapes and Vienna’s new boulevard – as Germany unified and industrialised, art sought both reality and the past.
Around 1840 German artists began to look at the world with new eyes. Adolph Menzel in Berlin painted an empty room with a fluttering curtain and later an iron rolling mill full of sweating workers. In Düsseldorf an academy grew up that drew students from all over the world, including Sweden and Norway. There they learned to paint dramatic landscapes and narrative scenes of rural life with great technical skill. Painting became a way of depicting the present as much as history.
The German Empire was proclaimed in 1871 after the war against France. The new state wanted monuments, history paintings and grand public buildings. Architects borrowed freely from Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, a style known as historicism. In Vienna the city walls were torn down and replaced by the Ringstraße, a ceremonial avenue with an opera house, town hall, parliament and museums. Hans Makart became Vienna’s most celebrated painter, and his studio became an attraction for the city’s high society. Art became part of the state’s self-image.
At the same time other artists withdrew to Italy, dreams and myths. Arnold Böcklin painted Isle of the Dead, a rocky island with cypresses towards which a boat glides at dusk. King Ludwig II of Bavaria built the fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein. In Munich Wilhelm Leibl and his circle gathered around a sober, almost photographic painting of Bavarian peasants. The tension between reality and dream, between present and history, marked the whole period up to the turn of the century.