| The Balcony Room | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Adolph Menzel |
| Year | 1845 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 58 cm× 47 cm(23 in× 19 in) |
| Location | Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
The Balcony Room is an oil-on-canvas painting by the German artist Adolph Menzel, executed in 1845. It is one of the main works of his early period and one of his most famous paintings. It has belonged to the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, since 1903.
Menzel painted numerous paintings of interior views until 1848. This room belonged to the Menzel family's apartment on Schöneberger Strasse, at the time on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin, where the artist lived with his mother and siblings. During this time he also made the illustrations for the multi-volume history of Frederick the Great by Franz Theodor Kugler (until 1842), which marked his artistic breakthrough. [1] In Kugler's work, Menzel had already used the motif of a door letting light through in chapter 42. It is a woodcut of the round library in Sanssouci Palace, which shows the windows that reach down to the floor flooded with light. In addition to the picture from this apartment, Menzel made other pictures of the apartments in Ritterstrasse and Marienstraße. [2]
The painting has the dimensions 58 by 47 cm and is executed using the painting technique of oil on canvas. Menzel's signature is on the lower right: AM / 45. The art dealer R. Wagner bought it from the artist in Berlin. In January 1903, two years before Menzel's death, Hugo von Tschudi acquired the picture as director of the Nationalgalerie. Since then it has had the inventory number AI 744.
The picture creates the atmosphere of a bourgeois apartment on a summer afternoon. The cool comfort of the room contrasts with the heat outside. The room is noticeably sparsely furnished or cleared out and is flooded with sunlight that penetrates through a white curtain. The curtain is slightly puffed, which suggests a weak gust of wind. In its emptiness, the room looks almost dull. It has just a few everyday pieces of furniture: a mirror, two arbitrarily placed chairs facing each other, a modest carpet and a dimly indicated sofa on the left edge of the painting, which appears more clearly in the mirror, are there. The room appears uncomfortable completely in contrast to the usual room paintings of the Biedermeier period that convey comfort, prosperity and a sense of style. It is deserted, carelessly furnished and unspectacularly usual. Nothing is staged or told here. In Menzel's representationally empty picture, the restrained colors alone appear independent, atmospherically fresh and lively. In particular, the incidence of light through the open balcony door gives the picture its enigmatic charm. The light illuminates the polished wooden floor and the wall mirror, which half reflects an indefinable gold-framed picture in the invisible area of the room above the sofa.
The wall, which takes up the entire left half of the picture, has a surface in a lighter color scheme with a recognizable structure of the paint application. Viewers asked themselves whether the picture was possibly unfinished there, whether it is a reflection of light or whether a new coat of paint on the wall has been interrupted. However, according to the art historian Claude Keisch, the composition of the left half of the picture with its shadowy sofa does not allow any “plasticity”. [3]
Art historian Lucius Grisebach believes the painting is unfinished, even though it is signed, and believes it is one of his private studies that were not intended for the public. The painting is to be understood as a kind of exercise in the use of light for his later official paintings, such as Frederick the Great Playing the Flute at Sanssouci (1852). These studies only became known in the last years of Menzel's life. Menzel's private painting aimed to capture an attractive situation with painterly means. In the private sphere, he anticipated what the French Impressionists but also Max Liebermann, only later publicly represented.
On 14 June 2012 the painting was issued for the stamp series “German Painting” as a 260 cents postage stamp named "Adolph Menzel-The Balcony Room".
Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel was a German Realist artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings. Along with Caspar David Friedrich, he is considered one of the two most prominent German painters of the 19th century, and was the most successful artist of his era in Germany. First known as Adolph Menzel, he was knighted in 1898 and changed his name to Adolph von Menzel.
The Alte Nationalgalerie is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin, Germany. The gallery was built from 1862 to 1876 by the order of King Frederick William IV of Prussia according to plans by Friedrich August Stüler and Johann Heinrich Strack in Neoclassical and Renaissance Revival styles. The building's outside stair features a memorial to Frederick William IV. Currently, the Alte Nationalgalerie is home to paintings and sculptures of the 19th century and hosts a variety of tourist buses daily. As part of the Museum Island complex, the gallery was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 for its outstanding architecture and its testimony to the development of museums and galleries as a cultural phenomenon in the late 19th century.
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Female Half-Length Nude with Hat is an oil-on-canvas painting by German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, executed in 1911. It his held at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Departure of King Wilhelm I for the Army, July 31, 1870 is an oil on canvas painting by German artist Adolph Menzel, created in 1871. It depicts a scene that takes place in the avenue Unter den Linden, in Berlin, where a crowd is paying tribute to King Wilhelm I of Prussia, as he passes in an open carriage, on his way to the Franco-Prussian War, who had started two weeks earlier. The painting is part of the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, since 1881.
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The Berlin-Potsdam Railway is an oil-on-canvas painting by German artist Adolph Menzel, created in 1847. It belongs to the early creative phase of the artist and depicts a section of the Berlin-Potsdam Railway, opened in 1838, at the southwest of the city center of Berlin, in a style that seems to anticipate impressionism. This is the first painting to depict a railway train in the landscape in German painting. The work belongs to the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, since 1899.
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