Art

Romanesque (11th-12th C.)

Artistic expression in early medieval Germany was largely church-related. Because Mass was said in Latin, the illiterate masses had to learn Bible lessons via bas reliefs (sculptures that project slightly from a flat surface) and wall paintings, which told key tales to inspire faith in God and fear of sin.

The best examples of this period include:

Sculpture. Scraps of surviving Romanesque sculpture are the superb 11th-century, carved wood doors on Cologne's St. Maria im Kapitol, Augsburg's Dom St. Maria, and the intricate The Shrine of the Magi reliquary (1182-1220) in Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral).

Wall paintings. Rare examples survive in Trier's Rheinisches Landesmuseum and Cologne's St. Maria Lyskirchen.

Gothic (13th-15th C.)

Late medieval German art continued to be largely ecclesiastical, including stained glass, church facades, and massive wooden altarpieces festooned with statues and carvings. In Gothic painting and sculpture, figures tended to be more natural looking than in the Romanesque, but remained highly stylized, with features and rhythmic gestures exaggerated for symbolic or emotional emphasis.

The best examples and artists include:

Stained glass. This art was refined in Ulm Münster, Rothenburg's St. Jakobskirche, and Cologne's St. Gereon's Sacristy.

Stephan Lochner (active 1400-51). High Gothic painter of gold backgrounds and dainty figures, Lochner was the premier artist of the School of Cologne, where he painted the Cologne Cathedral's Altar of the City Patrons (ca. 1440) and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum's Madonna in the Rose Garden (1450).

Bamberger Reiter. This anonymous equestrian statue in Bamberg's Kaiserdom is a masterpiece of 13th-century sculpture.

Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531). Germany's genius Gothic woodcarver of languid figures draped in flowing, folded robes, he was the first to refrain from painting his sculptures. Some of his best works remain in Würzburg, including statues in the Mainfränkisches Fortress and three sandstone tombs in the Dom St. Kilian. His masterpieces are the Tomb of Heinrich II (1499-1513) in Bamberg's Kaiserdom and the massive altarpiece in Creglingen's Herrgottskirche.

Renaissance (Late 15th-16th C.)

Renaissance means "rebirth," of classical ideals in this case. During this time, humanist thinkers rediscovered the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome, while artists strove for greater naturalism, using newly developed techniques (such as linear perspective) to achieve new heights of realism.

Though Germany enjoyed a few towering Renaissance masters such as Dürer, most Protestant Reformation movements played down the role of art in worship -- some of the stricter sects outright condemned it as idolatry. This left private patronage as the main revenue stream for artists, which resulted in lots of portraits, and some landscapes from those working in Vienna in the early 1500s, but precious little else.

The German Renaissance masters include:

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Genius painter, superb illustrator, and one of the greatest draughtsman ever, Dürer was the most important Renaissance artist outside Italy. While he was influenced by Giovanni Bellini and admired Leonardo da Vinci, his art remained distinct, matching the scientific and geometric precepts of the Florentine Renaissance with a command of color learned in Venice, a Flemish eye for meticulous detail, and the emotional sensibility of the German Gothic. He was the first to paint stand-alone self-portraits (including one in Munich's Alte Pinakothek), as well as watercolors and gouaches for their own sake rather than merely as sketches. More paintings grace Berlin's Gemäldegalerie and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in his native Nürnberg.

Matthis Grünewald (1470-1528). Grünewald was a retro foil to Dürer, adopting and adapting Renaissance techniques and compositions to pump up the emotional intensity of his paintings, but stamping the look firmly Gothic. You can see his paintings in Munich's Alte Pinakothek and Stuppach's Church.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553). Cranach melded Renaissance sensibilities with a still somewhat primitive, medieval look, but was always on the forefront of artistic movements. As a young artist in Vienna, he helped popularize landscape painting as a member of the Danube School (Rest on the Flight into Egypt [1504] in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie), and invented the full-length portrait (Duke of Saxony [1514] and The Duchess [1514] in Dresden's Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, in the Zwinger complex). A personal friend of Martin Luther's (Portrait of Martin Luther in Nürnberg's Germanisches Nationalmuseum), Cranach also did the woodcuts for the first German translation of the New Testament.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). Second only to Dürer in the German Renaissance, and one of the greatest portraitists ever, Holbein actually spent most of his career in Basel and later as a court painter in London. Germany preserves precious little of his work, but you can see the Portrait of Georg Gisze (1532) in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie and a Nativity in the Freiburg Cathedral.

Baroque & Rococo (16th-18th C.)

The baroque is more theatrical and decorative than the Renaissance, mixing a kind of super-realism based on the use of peasant models and the exaggerated chiaroscuro ("light and dark") of Italy's Caravaggio with compositional complexity and explosions of dynamic fury, movement, color, and figures. Rococo is this later baroque art gone awry, frothy and chaotic. Most baroque and rococo art in Germany consists of stuccoes and frescoes decorating the fabulous churches that don't really stand alone as works of art in their own right.

Artists from this period include:

Andreas Schlüter (1660-1714). He came back from Italy crazy about baroque and proceeded to make sculptures in the style, which can now be found at Berlin's Schloss Charlottenburg.

Balthazar Permoser (1651-1732). He studied in Salzburg and Florence before bringing the baroque style of Italy's Bernini back with him to Dresden, where as court sculptor he created the stone pulpit in the Katholische Hofkirche and sculptures adorning the Zwinger.

Romantic (19th C.)

The Romantics felt that the classically minded Renaissance had gotten it wrong and the overly exuberant German baroque was way over the top. The Gothic Middle Ages became their inspiration, and with a surge of Teutonic nationalist pride, the Brothers Grimm collected folk tales, builders created fantasy castles, and artists set up easels in the forests and on mountaintops. The Romantics had a suspicion of progress and a deep respect for nature, human rights, and the nobility of peasantry. Their paintings tended to be heroic, historic, dramatic, and beautiful.

The best examples from this period include:

Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610). Elsheimer created tiny paintings that bridged the gap from late Renaissance Mannerism (a style characterized by twisting figures in exaggerated positions), through baroque, to proto-Romantic. His friend Rubens admired him for knitting figurative painting and landscape together so convincingly. His Flight into Egypt (1609) resides in Munich's Alte Pinakothek.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Greatest of the German Romantics, Friedrich specialized in majestic landscapes of closely examined detail but dramatically exaggerated proportions, often with pro-Protestant/anti-Catholic overtones. Dresden's Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in the Zwinger complex houses his famous Cross in the Mountains (1808), though he also has works in Hamburg's Kunsthalle, Berlin's Schloss Charlottenburg, and Munich's Neue Pinakothek.

Early 20th Century

Until Hitler, Germany was one of Europe's hotbeds of artistic activity, a crucible of the modern that gave rise to several important movements whose influences echoed throughout international 20th-century art. But the Nazis outlawed and confiscated what they called "degenerate" modern art (partly because many of the artists, including the expressionists, were pointedly anti-Aryan).

Almost all the artists listed below are represented at Cologne's Museum Ludwig, save Höch and Grosz, who you can find at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie alongside Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Dix, and Beckmann. At least one artist from every movement is at Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie, and there are also good modern collections at Düsseldorf's Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and Dresden's Albertinum. Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne is strong on expressionist artists.

The major artists and movements of the early 20th century include:

Expressionism. Very broadly, expressionism describes art in Germany up through World War I (and beyond) that abandoned realism and embraced, to varying degrees, exaggeration, visible artistry (thick paint, obvious brushstrokes, and strong colors) and, most importantly, abstraction -- all to try to "express" the emotions or philosophy of the artist himself. Pure expressionism fell into two main groups:

Die Brücke, founded in 1905 Dresden, turned its back on the modernizing 20th century and contemporary cubist and futurist movements and sought inspiration instead in folk art, medieval examples, and "unspoiled" landscapes. Its greatest members were Ernst Kirchner (1880-1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), though Impressionist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) also later joined for a while. They have their own Brücke Museum.

Der Blaue Reiter group was set up in Munich in 1911 by Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Franz Marc (1880-1916), and August Macke (1887-1914) to oppose the cultural insularity and antimodern stance of Die Brücke. The "Blue Riders" embraced international elements, modern abstraction techniques, spontaneity (a lot of their stuff looks almost childlike -- an assessment they would love to hear), and bright, vibrant color schemes to seek an emotional, visceral intensity in their work.

Dadaism. "Dada" is a nonsense word adopted by a bunch of disillusioned artists in Zürich in 1916, but the movement quickly spread to Germany. Dadaists were by turns abstract, nihilistic (inviting gallery visitors to help destroy the art), and just generally anti-art (many made random collages of found materials).

Its proponents included Hannah Höch (1889-1978), who collaged photographs and magazine cutouts to make social statements; George Grosz (1893-1959), who was more strictly a painter, and later moved on to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement (below); and Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who later started his own splinter group called "Merz" which experimented with abstract and Russian constructivist elements.

Both Max Ernst (1891-1976) and Alsatian Jean "Hans" Arp (1887-1966) started as Blaue Reiter expressionists and, after their dada collage period, ended up in Paris as surrealists (Ernst as a painter, Arp as a sculptor and painter of amorphous shapes).

Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). This 1920s Berlin movement opposed the elitism and abstraction of the expressionists with caricature-filled depictions of harsh colors and harsher subjects (sex, violence, and the plight of the urban worker). Proponents included Otto Dix (1891-1969), who started as an expressionist but quickly became one of the most scathing and disturbing New Objectivity painters; George Grosz; and Max Beckmann (1884-1950), who also was originally an expressionist.

Post-World War II Art

Germany hasn't had any one style or school to define its art since World War II, though terms such as neoexpressionism (an anti-abstract, antiminimalist, anticonceptual trend that grounds itself more in tradition and figurative art) are often bandied about. There have been, however, several important artists. All three listed below are represented in Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie and Bonn's Kunstmuseum. In addition, Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne has a Kiefer, and Cologne's Museum Ludwig has Beuys (as does Düsseldorf's Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen) and Baselitz.

Notable Post-World War II artists include:

Josef Beuys (1921-86). An iconoclast and nonconformist who made constructivist sculpture from trash, he helped form the fluxus group (which rejected the growing commercial gallery scene), and participated in "happenings" of performance art (once, memorably, strutting around the stage lecturing on art to a dead rabbit in his hand).

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Ignoring the 20th-century tendency for abstraction and minimalism, Kiefer made a return to huge, mixed-media figurative art often with a strong historical bent -- the bleak landscape (and bleak national feelings) of post-World War II Germany.

Georg Baselitz (b. 1938). Baselitz is a figurative painter -- and a sculptor, since the 1980s -- and important neoexpressionist with a penchant for portraying people upside down.