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 scraps of surviving Romanesque sculpture on the 11th-century, carved wood doors at 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).

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.

The best examples and artists include stained glass in Ulm Münster, Rothenburg's St. Jakobskirche, and Cologne's St. Gereon's Sacristy. Stephan Lochner (active 1400-51) 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 is an anonymous equestrian statue in Bamberg's Kaiserdom, a masterpiece of 13th-century sculpture. Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531) was Germany's genius Gothic woodcarver of languid figures draped in flowing, folded robes. Some of his best works remain in Würzburg, including statues in the Mainfränkisches Museum.

Renaissance (Late 15th through 16th C.)

The German Renaissance masters, striving for greater naturalism, included the greatest of them all, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). A genius painter, superb illustrator, and one of the greatest draughtsman ever, Dürer was the most important Renaissance artist outside Italy. His art matched 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. His paintings grace Berlin's Gemäldegalerie and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in his native Nürnberg.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) melded Renaissance sensibilities with a still somewhat primitive, medieval look. 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). Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was second only to Dürer in the German Renaissance, and one of the greatest portraitists ever. 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. Artists from this period include Andreas Schlüter (1660-1714), whose sculptures can now be found at Berlin's Schloss Charlottenburg. Balthazar Permoser (1651-1732) was court sculptor at Dresden. His stone pulpit stands in Katholische Hofkirche, his sculptures in the Zwinger.

Romantic (19th C.)

The paintings of the Romantics were heroic, historic, dramatic, and beautiful in contrast to the classically minded Renaissance artists or the overly exuberant baroque artists. Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) 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 Flight into Egypt (1609) resides in Munich's Alte Pinakothek. Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was the greatest of the German Romantics. Dresden's Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in the Zwinger complex houses his famous Cross in the Mountains (1808).

Early 20th Century

Until Hitler, Germany was one of Europe's hotbeds of artistic activity. But the Nazis outlawed and confiscated what they called "degenerate" modern art. 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. 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, which 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, especially Die Brücke, founded in 1905 Dresden, which sought inspiration 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 in Berlin. The second movement was Der Blaue Reiter group 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, and bright, vibrant color schemes to seek an emotional, visceral intensity in their work. 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 cut-outs 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 eventually 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) was a 1920s Berlin movement opposed to the abstraction of the expressionists. Their caricature-filled art was painted in harsh colors and focused on even harsher subjects such as sex and violence. 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 neo-expressionism (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. Notable Post-World War II artists include Josef Beuys (1921-86), an iconoclast and nonconformist who made constructivist sculpture from trash; Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), who made a return to huge, mixed-media figurative art often with a strong historical bent; and Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), a figurative painter -- and a sculptor, since the 1980s -- a neo-expressionist with a penchant for portraying people upside down.