Adolph Menzel - The Dinner at the Ball [1878]

Adolph Menzel - The Dinner at the Ball [1878], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

After the 1860s, Menzel was a regular guest at the large gatherings in the Berlin Stadtschloß (City Palace). He recorded his impressions as paintings, of which The Dinner at the Ball is the most complex. The company is shown from a high viewpoint during a pause in the dancing. In a vibrant play of colour, Menzel captures small, individual incidents in the midst of Gründerzeit (c. 1871–1890) pomp, showing with subtle irony the difficulty of maintaining the correct posture while eating, the chattering of voices, and the overall sense of animation. The throng seems to be without a focal point, but the composition is held together by the movement of the entire crowd towards the viewer. There is no place for detail in this work that is, while sketchy, more of an atmospheric whole. 

As in earlier interiors, the room is divided and layered by the refraction of the lights at numerous points in the mirrors and chandeliers. The interiors, chandelier light, and magnificent clothes of Menzel’s late work balance his contemporaneous street and factory scenes like The Iron Rolling Mill and mark his increasing interest in painting large crowds of people. As so often elsewhere, what looks like meticulous attention to detail on Menzel’s part turns out to be illusory: neither are the rooms accurately portrayed nor are there any actual portraits of particular individuals in the crowd. The painting conveys a picture of Wilhelmine society whose lustre Menzel was brilliantly able to convey, and yet whose ambivalence he did no more than register as an apparently neutral chronicler.

[Oil on canvas, 71 x 90 cm]

Adolph Menzel - Theatre du Gymnase, Paris [1856]

Adolph Menzel - Theatre du Gymnase, Paris [1856] , a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel, (Breslau, December 8, 1815 – Berlin, February 9, 1905) was often compared to his French contemporaries, usually in the search for a German counterpart to the French Impressionists, even perhaps for a precursor. However one-sided this view may have been, his Théâtre du Gymnase cannot be dissociated from thoughts of theatre scenes by Daumier and, above all, Degas, although the latter did not even exist when Menzel painted this work. Menzel had visited Paris for the first time one year previously and ever after called it “Babel.” The notion of an excited but anonymous audience in the confusing artificial light leaves less opportunity for narrative detail than in Menzel’s later scenes of town life. But already in this work, there is no clear central focus of attention: from the actors playing a musical comedy in contemporary dress to the stalls and the boxes, everything seems to be peripheral. 

[Oil on canvas, 62 x 46 cm]

Adolph Menze - Flute Concert with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci [1850-52]

Flute Concert with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci [1850-52], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In the 1840s Menzel produced numerous illustrations for Franz Kugler’s ever popular History of Frederick the Great. Menzel’s intense work on the times and character of Friedrich II, who reigned from 1740 to 1786, was to bear fruit, even apart from the book illustrations which made Menzel famous. Along with the self-contained “society piece,” Die Tafelrunde, the Flute Concert may be regarded as one of the paintings where Menzel, in free and full possession of his powers as a painter, deepened and transformed his subjects in a subtly shifting mix of world history and parochial patriotism. 

The King of Prussia, a passionately keen flautist who also composed for the flute, is playing on the occasion of a visit from his sister, the Margravine of Bayreuth. Keeping time with his left foot, he is improvising at a high music stand which prevents any eye contact with the ensemble, so that the composition, arranged parallel to the picture plane, is divided by his figure into audience on the left and chamber ensemble on the right. Among the pronounced verticals of the composition, the extreme foreshortening of the flute is very noticeable. 

Menzel’s portrayal of the scene, with its attention to historical accuracy in both dress and furnishings, does not depict the instrument as simply another anecdotal detail, but rather concentrates on the musically flickering, warm candlelight of the theatrically illuminated concert room in Sanssouci, which seems to flow backwards with its own choreographed rhythm. Rather than an apotheosis of the cultivation of the arts at the court of Frederick the Great, Menzel has created an atmospheric portrayal of music-making.

[Oil on canvas, 142 x 205 cm]

Adolph Menzel -The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) [1872-75]

Adolph Menzel -The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) [1872-75], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The theme of physical labour had already made its entry into the pictorial world of the nineteenth century with Gustave Courbet’s Stonebreakers of 1851. Menzel made his first drawings of an industrial setting, the Heckmann Brassworks in Berlin, in 1869. The impulse for The Iron Rolling Mill most probably came from Menzel’s friend Paul Meyerheim, who was working on a series on the history of the railways for the industrialist Albert Borsig. 

In 1872 Menzel travelled to Königshütte in Upper Silesia in order to familiarize himself with factory conditions there, and spent weeks making hundreds of preparatory sketches. Drawing on the creative powers he had gained from his rich experience of painting large group scenes, here Menzel creates a composition positively filled with figures demonstrating the force of modern industrial work. In the steam-filled gloom, flickering lights and bizarre shadows merge to become a demonic drama depicting the struggle between men and machines. The animated, tonally dynamic central section of the picture is set against the calmer upper third of the composition with its diffuse daylight. 

The apparent chaos of the complicated iron rolling equipment emphasizes the dependence of the workers, who must submit to the unbending workings of the machinery. Yet Menzel’s main concern was not the socially critical aspect of this scene, but the artistic challenge of portraying the production process and the groups of people involved in it. He was interested in everyday life, not in representing the existential threat to humanity posed by the age of the machine. In The Iron Rolling Mill, Menzel’s artistic skills have reached their greatest heights.

[Oil on canvas, 158 x 254 cm])

Adolph Menzel - Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens [1867]

Adolph Menzel - Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens [1867], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Adolph Menzel (Breslau, December 8, 1815 – Berlin, February 9, 1905) was the leading German artist of the second half of the 19th century. This painting of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris was executed by him in 1867 following a visit to the city to see that year's Universal Exposition. It was almost certainly inspired by Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens, painted just five years earlier. Both paintings share a fascination with the bustling social scene of the day in the Tuileries Gardens, adjacent to the Louvre in the heart of Paris, but are executed in strikingly different styles. Menzel's approach is both more realistic and filled with detail. He invites the viewer to move from incident to closely observed incident across the canvas. 

Menzel made several sketches in the Tuileries Gardens which he took back to Berlin with him although none of these actually anticipate the composition of the finished painting. Although painted in a more traditional, academic style, Menzel does pay a kind of homage to Manet by quoting from his painting. The standing man in top hat in the foreground just right of centre closely resembles a similar figure in Manet's painting. When he first exhibited the work, Menzel made the point of indicating that it was executed from memory.

[Oil on canvas, 49 x 70 cm]