The History of Modern Painting, Volume 3 (of 4): Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX centuryMuther, Richard
History
The History of Modern Painting, Volume 3 (of 4): Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century
Muther, Richard
Painting -- History
paints busy humanity absorbed in their toil, simple beings who do not
dream of leaving off work for the sake of those who frequent picture
galleries. What differentiates him from the Berlin painter is a more
lyrical impulse, something tender, thoughtful, and contemplative. Menzel
gives dramatic point to everything he touches; he sets masses in
movement, depicts a busy, noisy crowd, pressing together and elbowing
one another, forcing their way at the doors of theatres or the windows
of cafés in a multifarious throng. Pettenkofen lingers with the petty
artisan and the solitary sempstress. In Menzel's "Iron Mill" the sparks
are flying and the machines whirring, but everything is peaceful and
quiet in the cobblers' workshops and the sunny attics visited by
Pettenkofen. Menzel delights in momentary impressions and quivering
life; Pettenkofen in rest and solitude. In the former every one is
thinking and talking and on the alert; in the latter every one is
yawning or asleep. If Menzel paints a waggon, the driver cracks his whip
and one hears the team rattling over the uneven pavement; in Pettenkofen
the waggon stands quietly in a narrow lane, the driver enjoys a midday
rest, and an enervating, sultry heat broods overhead. Menzel has a love
for men and women with excitement written on their faces; Pettenkofen
avoids painting character, contenting himself with the reproduction of
simple actions at picturesque moments. The Berlin artist is
epigrammatically sharp; the Viennese is elegiac and melancholy. Menzel's
pictures have the changing glitter of rockets; those of Pettenkofen are
harmonised in the tone of a refined amateur. They have only one thing in
common: neither has found disciples; they are not culminating peaks in
Berlin or Vienna art so much as boulders wedged into another system.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. A LEVEE.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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