Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [49]
The heavyweight of German Renaissance art is the Nuremberg-born Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), who was the first to grapple seriously with the Italian masters; the Alte Pinakothek (Munich; ) has several famous works by Dürer, and his house is today a museum in Nuremberg. In Wittenberg, Dürer influenced Franconian-born court painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) whose Apollo und Diana in Waldiger Landschaft (Apollo and Diana in a Forest Landscape; 1530) hangs in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery; ).
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The Complete Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is a beautiful collection of 210 fairy tales, passed orally between generations and collected by German literature’s most magical brothers.
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Two centuries later, sculpture became integrated into Germany’s buildings and gardens, creating the inspiration for the imposing work by Andreas Schlüter (1660–1714), Reiterdenkmal des Grossen Kurfürsten (Equestrian Monument of the Great Elector), in front of Berlin’s Schloss Charlottenburg. The four-horse chariot with Victoria on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate is the work of Germany’s leading neoclassical sculptor, Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850).
During the baroque period (from the 17th to mid-18th century), palace walls were frescoed to create the illusion of generous space. The grand staircase by Balthasar Neumann (1687–1753) in Würzburg Residenz is arguably the finest example.
In the mid-18th century, neoclassicism ushered back in the human figure and an emphasis on Roman and Greek mythology. Hesse-born Johann Heinrich Tischbein (1751–1829) painted Goethe at this time in a classical landscape surrounded by antique objects. View Goethe in der Campagna (1787) in Frankfurt am Main’s Städel Museum.
Religious themes, occasionally mystic, dominated 19th-century Romanticism. Goethe hated the works of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), indelicately suggesting they ought to be ‘smashed against the table’. A room is dedicated to Friedrich’s works in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, and his work is also a highlight of Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie.
Also in the exciting collection of Hamburg’s Kunsthalle are works by the founder of the German Romantic movement, Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810), as well as intensely religious works by the Nazarener (Nazareths). The museum also showcases some later realistic works of Cologne-born Wilhelm Leibl (1844–1900), who specialised in painting Bavarian folk.
German Impressionists are well represented in the Moderne Galerie of Saarbrücken’s Saarland Museum. Key exponents of the late-19th-century movement include Max Liebermann (1847–1935), whose work was often slammed as ‘ugly’ and ‘socialist’; Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911); and Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), whose later work, Die Kindheit des Zeus (Childhood of Zeus; 1905) – a richly coloured frolic in nature with intoxicated, grotesque elements – is housed in Bremen’s Kunsthalle.
The Dresden art scene spawned Die Brücke (The Bridge) in 1905. Its expressionist members Ernst Kirchner (1880–1938), Erich Heckel (1883–1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) employed primitivist and cubist elements, but Germany’s best expressionist painter, the North Frisian Emil Nolde (1867–1956), was an artistic lone wolf who only fleetingly belonged to Die Brücke and was forbidden from working by the Nazis in 1941. His famous Bauernhof (1910) is housed in Museumsberg Flensburg.
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Munich’s Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus showcases a second group of expressionists, Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), centred on Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Gabriele Münter (1877–1962), Paul Klee (1879–1940) and Franz Marc (1880–1916).
BETWEEN THE WARS
After a creative surge in the 1920s, the big