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Carl Blechen (1798 – 1840) was a German Romantic painter. He was one of the later Romanticists and his work, while still overly dramatic, is more grounded than the earlier Romanticists. He is best known for his landscapes. His mental health gradually deteriorated and he died of a total mental breakdown.
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| Carl Blechen self-portrait |
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August Macke (1887-1914) was a German artist who travelled extensively in his brief life. He died young. You can tell he was interested in form and color, with his work becoming increasingly abstract as his art evolved. While classified as an Expressionist, he almost certainly would have drifted further into the Abstract movement had he lived.
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| August Macke |
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Jacob Philipp Hackert (1737–1807) was a German painter known for his landscapes. He was a neo-classicist and a romanticist. He was quite successful in his life. He moved to Italy where he was the court painter of King Ferdinand IV of Naples. Eventually, wars in northern Italy forced him south where he was to spend the remainder of his life.
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| Jacob Philipp Hackert by Wilhelm Titel |
The above video is from a site named Essen Recipes, which would indicate it is coming from Germany. Plus, the bottom captions are in German. Still, when I watched it, I thought it had Slavic touches to the cooking. It turns out I was partially right; in reading the comments the cook is a Ukrainian woman. Still, the dishes she whips up are tasty looking.
No, this post isn't about Tchaikovsky's ballet, nor is it about young ladies that majored in 'Womyn's Studies' at one of our fine universities, rather it is about the decorative Christmas nutcracker that is ubiquitous during the holidays.
The above video gives a historical overview of its evolution from a tool for cracking nuts to its current form as a colorful staple of Christmas decor. Below is a video of a German factory that produces them.
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Karl Hagemeister (1848-1933) was a German landscape artist. In the 1880s he spent time in Paris where he absorbed impressionistic influences. The play of light and form became more pronounced in his work, and he developed a richer and vibrant color palette. He was well known and regarded in his day. The German hyper-inflation after WWI financially ruined him and he retreated to a more private and eventually less productive phase before his death.
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| Karl Hagemeister |
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Oskar Schlemmer was a German artist active in the first half of the 20th century. He was an early member of the Bauhaus School. Bauhaus was a movement that attempted to merge all of the visual arts types -- architecture, theater, painting, etc. -- into a single uniform style. Bauhaus inspired art featured straight lines, simple planes and a general lack of ornamentation. It was very influential at its height, but the rise of the Nazis put an end to it. Adolf Hitler greatly disliked it.
Schlemmer started out designing costumes for their theater (and his costumes are every bit as ridiculous as you might imagine), but he eventually moved on to painting. With Hitler's rise he was forced out of his academic positions and maintained a low profile for the rest of his life.
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| Oskar Schlemmer self-portrait |
The above video shows the construction methods and workings of a Fokker DVII biplane. The planes entered service in 1918, late in the war, but proved to be an excellent warplane. After the war all existing DVIIs were transferred to the allies as part of the armistice. Below are a pictures of surviving planes.
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Carl Gustav Carus was a 19th century German who, as was common among well-bred gentlemen of his day, was multitalented. He was physiologist, philosopher, biologist and a painter. These are some of his paintings. In his art he was of the Romantic school and was interested in capturing the workings of geology. Hence his paintings focus on the landscape, with a lot of ruins and small figures in them.
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| Carl Gustav Carus |
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In 1870 Otto von Bismark maneuvered to place Prince Lepold on the Spanish throne. This created a crisis in France because they felt it would have led to them being surrounded by a Prussian/Spanish alliance. Leopold's name was withdrawn, but the crisis simmered.
In July of 1870 the French, believing they had a much better equipped army, declared war on Prussia. Alas for the French, the Prussians mobilized much quicker and pushed into France. By September the Prussians were besieging Paris. The French government collapsed and the resulting treaty ending the war resulted in the French paying an indemnity to Prussia as well as ceding Alsace and part of Lorraine (one of the grievances that was to lead to WWI). The war also unified Prussia with southern German states, which led to modern Germany.
These are paintings from that war. They were done after the war and some of them give the 19th Century romantic version of war as a noble thing, Others, at least from the German perspective, commemorated victories. The French paintings tended to nurture grievances that were to fester.
There are more images after the jump.
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These images are from the Book of Miracles, a German early Renaissance work that shows various miracles, natural disasters and visions of the apocalypse drawn from Biblical sources and legends. There are more examples after the jump.
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Gustav Wunderwald was an early 20th century German painter. He started as a scenery painter and set designer, but at the end of WWI he became a full time painter. His final exhibition was in 1934. After that show the Nazi government, who considered his paintings to be improper, prevented him from selling or exhibiting his work. He died in 1945.
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| Self portrait |
