Germany has produced some of the greatest artists in history, Malen nach Zahlen eigenes bild from Renaissance painters to modern sculptors and photographers. It also has a distinctive artistic identity that distinguishes it from other European countries. This is particularly true of German painting, which grew out of the country’s own history and culture.
German Romanticism
During the period between the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th, German painters were among the most important artists in the world. Their works combined the great themes of the era – landscapes, religion and the afterlife – with depictions of loneliness and depression. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, from 1818, is one of these paintings and is an icon of romantic art.
The Impressionist Movement
The German painter Max Liebermann is known as a leader of the German impressionist movement, which influenced Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir in France. His style aimed to capture light and shadows with separate strokes of colors.
He embraced color theory, which divides the spectrum into two groups of warm and cool colors. Using these colors, the painters could transfer their immediate impressions of objects most accurately.
These painters were influenced by the work of other artists from around the world, including Michelangelo and Raphael. They also admired the work of Dutch masters, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer.
Expressionism
The Expressionist Movement originated in Germany before the outbreak of the First World War, and arose out of a desire to express emotion rather than accurately portray things. The group included such famous painters as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl and Erich Heckel.
This group of artists was crucial to the development of Expressionism, a key movement in the early avant-garde. Its members rediscovered woodcut as a legitimate medium and laid the groundwork for many abstract concepts.
Franz Marc s Animal motifs
In the late 19th century, Munich-based painter Franz Marc turned to animal motifs in an effort to depict innocence and harmony. He also delved into color theory, and began to use blue for spiritual masculinity. This was a particularly important aspect of his style, as shown in his famous Blue Horse I from 1911.
The political side of art
During the Cold War, there was a lot of bottled-up energy in German art that didn’t quite make it out of the country. Then, in the 1990s, when Rauch became one of the chief gallerists representing artists from the former East, he was able to bring them out of hiding.
But the politics of the time didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Several German artists still had family in the old East.
When I visited a gallery in the former GDR in the nineties, I met with an art historian named Stefan Ziegler. He had organized an exhibit of German art that the Nazis viewed as offensive to their values.
The gallery had several rooms that displayed works that the Nazis considered to be religious offenses or moral violations. In the first room, for example, hung a painting by Beckmann titled Descent from the Cross that allegedly offended religion because its colors and form weren’t realistic.