ART REVIEW : ‘Friedrich’: Another Side of the Romantic Tradition

The L.A. County Museum of Art’s new historical exhibition is so intriguing, unusual and important a citizen might be forgiven for rushing in without reading its title. Never mind. You can probably guess the matter at hand from the contents of the first gallery.

What artistic period produced an attitude where a big togas-and-sandals classical extravaganza painting hung next to a heart-tugging little genre scene of a child and a flower seller? What hunk of history spawned a situation where one guy feverishly depicted a woman lunging at her faithless lover with a knife while the next chap coolly contemplated an iceberg? Which tick in time saw its artists as noblemen of the spirit who longed to live among ancient Greeks and noble savages at the same time?

Right. Of course. The Romantic Era, the late 18th and much of the 19th centuries, that stewpot of style where everything that had ever been done before was done again, but this time with an unprecedented pulse of personal passion. It was the time when the modernist impulse to untrammeled creativity writhed uneasily inside the limits of old forms.

But, even given the historical limits of Romanticism, there seems to be something missing in this exhibition. Where are the creamy, nude goddesses and supine Moroccan slave girls that so tantalized the overheated imaginations of French artists like Delacroix and Gerome? Scarcely a one to be found. This must be some other brand of Romanticism, more bottled up, less well-known.

Sure enough. This is more than 100 images traveling under the banner “Friedrich to Hodler: A Romantic Tradition, Paintings and Drawings From the Oskar Reinhart Foundation, Winterthur.” This is Teutonic romance from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Winterthur is a small town outside Zurich where connoisseurs make pilgrimages to see two collections put together by Reinhart, a member of a leading local merchant family that developed a lifelong passion for collecting such art. This group, normally seen only in its own museum, is traveling for the first time while the building is being renovated. The tour encompasses Berlin, New York, London and Geneva as well as Los Angeles; it’s installation here was overseen by departing LACMA curator of European painting Philip Conisbee, who, sadly, is leaving for a new post at the National Gallery. This is his valedictory gesture as he passes the baton to successor J. Patrice Marandel.

The exhibition is a rare opportunity for Angelenos to get first-hand education in an art that teaches that, aesthetically speaking, a little repression is not a bad thing. It should also be entertaining for the casual visitor, as it is chock-a-block with precisionist precursors of Norman Rockwell, like Wilhelm Leibl, narrative painting that stirs the innocent eye with spectacular sunsets like those of Carl Rottman and touches the pure heart like Albert Anker’s scene of orphans and a kindly nurse. Well, what did you expect? Kitsch and sentimentality are as much a part of the German tradition as Sturm und Drang .

Outside specialist circles, few of the artists here pass for famous. The best known is landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, who is counted as a modernist precursor. The reason is apparent in five small works combining anxiety and longing. The tension comes from his use of forms as jagged as broken razor blades. The level of Angst in canvases like “City at Moonrise” is so high you literally have to step back from them and they still suck the eye in, vortex fashion. Friedrich captured a sense of aching, unfulfilled desire with deep space and dusky, downbeat color, dramatically compelling in “Chalk Cliffs at Rugen” with silhouetted figures and sharded terrain.

Friedrich’s intensity is shared by virtually every artist in the show. Philip Otto Runge turned it into metaphysical fantasy. Henry Fuseli waxed violent and erotic. Arnold Bocklin infused the figure with symbolic clout. Adolph von Menzel infused naturalism with spooky overtones in a moonlit city and the image of the head of a dead horse.

By contrast, a group of artists dubbed “Biedermeier” were so earnest they turned the quest for perfection around the corner into a kind of Jane Austen-naive charm. Jacques Sablet’s “Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman” makes you think, “Isn’t that nice? He painted the guy nobody notices.”

The urgent urge to get things just right takes many forms. Italy was the craze of the epoch and the German speakers jumped right in. Mixed results. Hans Thoma tried to apply Teutonic rigor to the ebullient waterfalls at Tivoli and was nearly defeated by the sheer lyricism of the subject. Some open-air painters did better. Alexandre Calame combined Constable’s sobriety with his own sense of drama and came up with a small, breathtaking “Rocks Near Seelisberg.”

German Romantic art is unique in the clarity with which it expresses a time that sensed its new feelings would need new forms. In the final gallery, two pairs of paintings tell the story.

In 1893, Giovanni Giacometti painted a worthy genre landscape, “Stonebreakers on the Lungotevere.” By 1912, his “Portrait of Ottilla Giacometti” was a flowering of Fauvist color. (Giacometti’s sons Alberto and Diego carried the work to full modernism.) An 1890 landscape by Ferdinand Hodler was a straight exercise in Impressionism; by 1911 his “The Jungfrau Massif From Murren” has the powerful simplifications that detonated the explosion that was German Expressionism.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Jan. 2, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (213) 857-6000.