German art

[citation needed] After lengthy wars, the Roman Empire settled its frontiers in Germania with the Limes Germanicus to include much of the south and west of modern Germany.

[citation needed] German medieval art really begins with the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne (d. 814), the first state to rule the great majority of the modern territory of Germany, as well as France and much of Italy.

Early Christian art had not featured monumental sculptures of religious figures as opposed to rulers, as these were strongly associated by the Church Fathers with the cult idols of Ancient Roman religion.

The wooden Gero Cross of 965–970 in Cologne Cathedral is both the oldest and the finest early medieval near life-size crucifix figure; art historians had been reluctant to credit the records giving its date until they were confirmed by dendrochronology in 1976.

According to Henri Focillon, Gothic allowed German art "to define for the first time certain aspects of its native genius-a vigorous and emphatic conception of life and form, in which theatrical ostentation mingled with vehement emotional frankness.

[11] The style was spread around the wealthy cities of Northern Germany by artists such Conrad von Soest in Westphalia, Meister Bertram in Hamburg, and later Stefan Lochner in Cologne.

[12] Martin Schongauer, who worked in Alsace in the last part of the 15th century, was the culmination of late Gothic German painting, with a sophisticated and harmonious style, but he increasingly spent his time producing engravings, for which national and international channels of distribution had developed, so that his prints were known in Italy and other countries.

The greatest artist of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer, began his career as an apprentice to a leading workshop in Nuremberg, that of Michael Wolgemut, who had largely abandoned his painting to exploit the new medium.

Dürer supported Martin Luther but continued to create Madonnas and other Catholic imagery, and paint portraits of leaders on both sides of the emerging split of the Protestant Reformation.

[16] Lying somewhat outside these developments is Matthias Grünewald, who left very few works, but whose masterpiece, his Isenheim Altarpiece (completed 1515), has been widely regarded as the greatest German Renaissance painting since it was restored to critical attention in the 19th century.

[22] This style was continued for another generation by Bartholomeus Strobel, an example of an essentially German artist born and working in Silesia, in today's Poland, until he emigrated to escape the Thirty Years War and become painter at the Polish court.

In the late 18th century the portraitist Heinrich Füger and his pupil Johann Peter Krafft, whose best known works are three large murals in the Hofburg, had both moved to Vienna as students and stayed there.

[26] Neoclassicism, which was born largely thanks to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, appears rather earlier in Germany than in France, with Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79), the Danish painter Asmus Jacob Carstens (1754–98), and the sculptor Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850).

Carstens' shorter career was turbulent and troubled, leaving a trail of unfinished works, but through pupils and friends such as Gottlieb Schick, Joseph Anton Koch and Bonaventura Genelli, more influential.

His paintings and hundreds of prints, book illustrations and political cartoons are an invaluable visual record of the everyday life and the increasingly complex mentality of Enlightenment Germany, and its emerging Nationalism.

The combined effect of all the elements of these buildings in South Germany, Austria and Bohemia, especially their interiors, represent some of the most complete and extreme realizations of the Baroque aspiration to overwhelm the viewer with the "radiant fairy world of the nobleman's dwelling", or the "foretaste of the glories of Paradise" in the case of churches.

[30] The earliest German academy was the Akademie der Künste founded in Berlin in 1696, and through the next two centuries a number of other cities established their own institutions, in parallel with developments in other European nations.

In Germany the uncertain market for art in a country divided into a multitude of small states meant that significant German artists have been to the present day more likely to accept teaching posts in the academies and their successor institutions than their equivalents in England or France have been.

[34] Adrian Ludwig Richter is mainly remembered for his portraits, and Carl Wilhelm Kolbe was purely an etcher (as well as a philologist), whose later prints show figures almost swallowed up by gigantic vegetation.

[35] The Nazarene movement, the coinage of a mocking critic, denotes a group of early 19th-century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty and spirituality in Christian art.

Biedermeier art appealed to the prosperous middle classes by detailed but polished realism, often celebrating domestic virtues, and came to dominate over French-leaning aristocratic tastes, as well as the yearnings of Romanticism.

[40] The Berlin Secession was a group founded in 1898 by painters including Max Liebermann, who broadly shared the artistic approach of Manet and the French Impressionists, and Lovis Corinth then still painting in a naturalistic style.

Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905 by architecture students who wanted to be painters: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976), with Max Pechstein and others later joining.

[45] The intense sculpture and printmaking of Käthe Kollwitz was strongly influenced by Expressionism, which also formed the starting point for the young artists who went on to join other tendencies within the movements of the early 20th century.

[46] Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were both examples of tendency of early 20th-century German art to be "honest, direct, and spiritually engaged"[47] The difference in how the two groups attempted this were telling, however.

"[48] Die Brücke also had Utopian tendencies, but took the medieval craft guild as a model of cooperative work that could better society- "Everyone who with directness and authenticity conveys that which drives him to creation belongs to us".

Max Ernst led a Dada group in Cologne, where he also practiced collage, but with a greater interest in Gothic fantasy than in overt political content—this hastened his transition into surrealism, of which he became the leading German practitioner.

It describes the stripped-down, simplified building style of the Bauhaus and the Weissenhof Settlement, the urban planning and public housing projects of Bruno Taut and Ernst May, and the industrialization of the household typified by the Frankfurt kitchen.

Grosz and Dix were leading figures, forming the "Verist" side of the movement with Beckmann and Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz (in his early work), Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, and Karl Hubbuch.

[55] In July, 1937, the Nazis mounted a polemical exhibition entitled Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art), in Munich; it subsequently travelled to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria.