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拍品专文
The work is being offered for sale pursuant to a settlement agreement between the current owner and the heirs of Alfred and Gertrude Sommerguth. This settlement agreement resolves the dispute over ownership of the work and title will pass to the successful bidder.
The cloud study forms an important subgenre of its own within the broader context of Romantic landscape painting. Motivated by the desire to capture a fleeting moment in time, which would later come to define the Impressionist movement, as well as an interest in contemporary natural sciences and cosmology, the Romantic painters returned time and time again to the ever-changing sky. While John Constable is perhaps the Romantic artist best remembered for his cloud studies today, the genre held an equally important place in the development of German Romantic painting, and painting clouds, particularly in the light of the moon, became a recurring motif in the work of the movement’s three most important exponents – Caspar David Friedrich, Johan Christian Dahl (who, while Norwegian by birth, was an important figure in the Dresden art scene), and Adolph von Menzel.
From the advent of German Romanticism moonlight became one of the most used motifs in art and literature, symbolizing internal contemplation of the presence of the divine within nature. ‘Why has looking at the moon become so beneficiary, so soothing and so sublime? Because the moon remains purely an object for contemplation, not of the will. […] Furthermore, the moon is sublime, and moves us sublimely because it stays aloof from all our earthly activities, it sees all, yet takes no part in it…”, wrote German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in 1840. While the moon as an object of contemplation was mediated by either a human presence or landscape in the works of both Dahl and Friedrich, by the time Menzel undertook the present work in 1855-1860, the landscape was no longer a necessary element to understand the subject matter of the nocturnal cloud study. Instead, Menzel has reduced the landscape to the mere suggestion of the upper levels of buildings in the lower right-hand corner of this small masterpiece, only visible upon close examination, and devoted the bulk of the sheet to a lyrical, gestural, almost abstract study of the moon and clouds over Berlin.
Much like Schopenhauer’s depiction of the moon as above earthly activities, Menzel himself seeks to similarly elevate his artistic viewpoint, determinedly untethering himself from the landscape to express the transcendent emotional state of his soul while looking at the night sky through his rendering of it. The only concrete element to which the viewer could fix their attention is the bright circle of the moon, and yet this is partially obscured by the black, mauve and lavender clouds passing before it. Instead, our attention is captured by the light reflected on the clouds behind the moon, which in turn helps define what is obscured, an astonishingly modern approach which Menzel’s contemporaries struggled with. The writer and critic Theodor Fontane recalled seeing one of Menzel’s compositions called Berlin by Night, describing it as a ‘sheet of black paper. With enough imagination one could distinguish clearly the cupola of the castle and the towers of the Gendarmenmarkt, but for most mortals, it was merely a large blot of ink, that’s all!’ (Letter from Fontane to W. van Merckel, 21 December 1857).
To modern eyes, however, trained on the later Impressionist and abstract painters, Menzel’s more experimental work is not at all inaccessible. Instead, we can appreciate both the artist’s ability to capture his emotional state in looking at the moon, and his almost contradictory ability to express objective observation of meteorological phenomena. The thin washes of low, scudding clouds along the horizon which dissolve into the suggestion of the buildings are contrasted against the thick, fluid application of undulating passages of gouache to indicate the higher altitude Altocumulus clouds – what are known as Schäfchenwolken, or sheep clouds, in German, and as a ‘mackerel sky’ in English. The reflected light behind the moon is defined by dry brush scumbling of gouache, which emphasizes the broken structure of the clouds, reflecting the light in some places while suggesting that it passes through in others. Finally, the dark clouds passing in front of the viewer are rendered in alternating thick and thin applications of dark gouache, completing the three-dimensional effect of the light by obscuring it in some places while allowing it to almost pass through the thinner portions of the cloud and toward the viewer in others.
Described by Edgar Degas as the ‘greatest living master’ during his lifetime, Menzel is less remembered today outside of Germany than the French painter who so admired him. And yet his remarkable oeuvre, which encompasses both formal Prussian history painting and Romantic works of startling modernity like the present painting, deserves far greater appreciation and study than it receives. An important forerunner to the Impressionists and to Whistler’s nocturnes (fig. 1), Menzel’s revolutionary influence can be understood far into the 20th century in the emotive gestural brushwork of the Expressionist and Abstract painters (fig. 2).
This painting was formerly in the collection of Alfred and Gertrude Sommerguth, prominent members of Berlin society in the early 20th century. The Sommerguth collection was wide-ranging, including Dutch and Italian old masters, French and German Impressionists, and also a number of works by Menzel. As a result of increasing anti-Jewish measures enacted by the Nazi government in the 1930s, the Sommerguths were forced to sell part of their art collection, including this present work, in 1939 to meet the discriminatory 'flight taxes' imposed before emigration. They fled Germany in 1941, travelling via Cuba to New York, where Alfred passed away in 1950 and Gertrude in 1954. The sale of this painting will address its history, as generously acknowledged by the parties involved.
The cloud study forms an important subgenre of its own within the broader context of Romantic landscape painting. Motivated by the desire to capture a fleeting moment in time, which would later come to define the Impressionist movement, as well as an interest in contemporary natural sciences and cosmology, the Romantic painters returned time and time again to the ever-changing sky. While John Constable is perhaps the Romantic artist best remembered for his cloud studies today, the genre held an equally important place in the development of German Romantic painting, and painting clouds, particularly in the light of the moon, became a recurring motif in the work of the movement’s three most important exponents – Caspar David Friedrich, Johan Christian Dahl (who, while Norwegian by birth, was an important figure in the Dresden art scene), and Adolph von Menzel.
From the advent of German Romanticism moonlight became one of the most used motifs in art and literature, symbolizing internal contemplation of the presence of the divine within nature. ‘Why has looking at the moon become so beneficiary, so soothing and so sublime? Because the moon remains purely an object for contemplation, not of the will. […] Furthermore, the moon is sublime, and moves us sublimely because it stays aloof from all our earthly activities, it sees all, yet takes no part in it…”, wrote German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in 1840. While the moon as an object of contemplation was mediated by either a human presence or landscape in the works of both Dahl and Friedrich, by the time Menzel undertook the present work in 1855-1860, the landscape was no longer a necessary element to understand the subject matter of the nocturnal cloud study. Instead, Menzel has reduced the landscape to the mere suggestion of the upper levels of buildings in the lower right-hand corner of this small masterpiece, only visible upon close examination, and devoted the bulk of the sheet to a lyrical, gestural, almost abstract study of the moon and clouds over Berlin.
Much like Schopenhauer’s depiction of the moon as above earthly activities, Menzel himself seeks to similarly elevate his artistic viewpoint, determinedly untethering himself from the landscape to express the transcendent emotional state of his soul while looking at the night sky through his rendering of it. The only concrete element to which the viewer could fix their attention is the bright circle of the moon, and yet this is partially obscured by the black, mauve and lavender clouds passing before it. Instead, our attention is captured by the light reflected on the clouds behind the moon, which in turn helps define what is obscured, an astonishingly modern approach which Menzel’s contemporaries struggled with. The writer and critic Theodor Fontane recalled seeing one of Menzel’s compositions called Berlin by Night, describing it as a ‘sheet of black paper. With enough imagination one could distinguish clearly the cupola of the castle and the towers of the Gendarmenmarkt, but for most mortals, it was merely a large blot of ink, that’s all!’ (Letter from Fontane to W. van Merckel, 21 December 1857).
To modern eyes, however, trained on the later Impressionist and abstract painters, Menzel’s more experimental work is not at all inaccessible. Instead, we can appreciate both the artist’s ability to capture his emotional state in looking at the moon, and his almost contradictory ability to express objective observation of meteorological phenomena. The thin washes of low, scudding clouds along the horizon which dissolve into the suggestion of the buildings are contrasted against the thick, fluid application of undulating passages of gouache to indicate the higher altitude Altocumulus clouds – what are known as Schäfchenwolken, or sheep clouds, in German, and as a ‘mackerel sky’ in English. The reflected light behind the moon is defined by dry brush scumbling of gouache, which emphasizes the broken structure of the clouds, reflecting the light in some places while suggesting that it passes through in others. Finally, the dark clouds passing in front of the viewer are rendered in alternating thick and thin applications of dark gouache, completing the three-dimensional effect of the light by obscuring it in some places while allowing it to almost pass through the thinner portions of the cloud and toward the viewer in others.
Described by Edgar Degas as the ‘greatest living master’ during his lifetime, Menzel is less remembered today outside of Germany than the French painter who so admired him. And yet his remarkable oeuvre, which encompasses both formal Prussian history painting and Romantic works of startling modernity like the present painting, deserves far greater appreciation and study than it receives. An important forerunner to the Impressionists and to Whistler’s nocturnes (fig. 1), Menzel’s revolutionary influence can be understood far into the 20th century in the emotive gestural brushwork of the Expressionist and Abstract painters (fig. 2).
This painting was formerly in the collection of Alfred and Gertrude Sommerguth, prominent members of Berlin society in the early 20th century. The Sommerguth collection was wide-ranging, including Dutch and Italian old masters, French and German Impressionists, and also a number of works by Menzel. As a result of increasing anti-Jewish measures enacted by the Nazi government in the 1930s, the Sommerguths were forced to sell part of their art collection, including this present work, in 1939 to meet the discriminatory 'flight taxes' imposed before emigration. They fled Germany in 1941, travelling via Cuba to New York, where Alfred passed away in 1950 and Gertrude in 1954. The sale of this painting will address its history, as generously acknowledged by the parties involved.