Vivid Insight, Images in German Drawings

The Getty Center offers Angeltown a rare look at the finest 19th century German art. “Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe” presents 80 works by 47 artists who were the epoch’s superstars.

The compendium announces itself as a class act. Works come predominantly from the collection of Alfred Winterstein, who ranks among the most perceptive and discriminating of modern German connoisseurs. Before roosting in L.A.’s acropolis, the trove appeared at Harvard’s Sackler Museum and Manhattan’s Frick Collection.

Anyone who still feels slightly underwhelmed should forgive themselves. Many regard drawing as a minor art form and appreciation of Teutonic art an acquired taste. Even those of us who have it sometimes find German Romantic painting vaguely disappointing, so why should drawings be any better?

Well, historically Germany has a genius for draftsmanship. The great Durer’s prints have more emotional density than his paintings. Hans Holbein’s magically delicate drawings are far more vivid than his canvases. Romantic and Neo-Classical Germans inherited their forebears’ linear probity. These sheets are so extraordinary the exhibition arguably has greater expressive power than a comparable painting survey. We see the artists at their absolute best.

Bracketing time for a century beginning around 1750, the show begins with the rational smile of the Enlightenment, tracks a tumultuous century of political, social and aesthetic revolution and ends at the dawn of Modernism. Such upheaval makes for complexity. German drawing might be said to exist as their psychic media for confronting confusion. Not surprisingly, images combine empirical observation with soul-searching. The ensemble is too intensely serious to be winsomely entertaining. It’s just plain gripping.

“The Miracle of Blossoms” by J.H.W. Tischbein, for example, is a symbolic, folk-like representation of hope after Napoleonic troops leveled the city of Hamburg.

Henry Fuseli, a native of Zurich, established his career in London where he was a great friend and admirer of William Blake. That suggests the international quality of this art and Germany’s own geographic splintering. It had art centers in Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, Munich and later Dusseldorf. Fuseli embodies the Romantic Sturm und Drang reaction against rationality showing modernist Symbolism and Expressionism in embryo. The artist’s dramatic “Perseus With the Gracae” mirrors fascination with Greek mythology, Shakespeare and Michelangelo. The over-arching influences, however, are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ideas on the organic unity of man and nature.

Goethe’s multifaceted genius is hardly encapsulated by two small drawings. It is, however, reflected in the almost touching number of vast landscapes where the individual is reduced to a footnote in nature. The best of these is Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Source of the Elbe in the Riesengebirge.” Its soft textures and curves subtly dramatize sheer emptiness.

Carl Gustave Carus’ “Castel dell’ Ovo in Naples” shows a massive fortification. It seems to float unmoored in the haze between sky and sea. Aptly, Carus, a physician and philosopher, is said to have pioneered the concept of the subconscious.

Such anxiety about humankind’s place in nature was bound to create nostalgia for religion. In Germany, this longing brought together a group of young Catholic artists who moved to Rome, lived for a time in a deserted monastery and were dubbed the Nazarenes. They influenced a similarly minded coterie of English artists, the Pre-Raphaelites. The religious paintings of both groups tend to look a bit campy today. All the same, escapism notwithstanding, both movements spoke to Modernism. Their striving for purity was so obsessive it became enticingly neurotic.

The precision of Nazarene Peter Cornelius’ “Head of a Boy” harks back to Holbein. Its decorative line, however, prefigures Art Nouveau. The subject’s androgynous youth, symmetrical placement and nearly cross-eyed introspection have the clinical quality of psychoanalytic insight. Portraits like this and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s enraptured “Portrait of Johannes Metzger” surely inspired such German modernists as Otto Dix.

Adolph Menzel closes the brackets opened by Fuseli in the exhibition’s title. If any artist here equals the touch of a realistic French Impressionist like Degas, it’s Menzel. A portrait of his brother Richard has the detached urbanity of a Parisian. His “The Opera Glass” infuses a snippet of bourgeois life with the mystery of unmeditated everyday things, of pure phenomenon.

How quietly startling that this Germanic ensemble of humble drawings does something even a chronologically comparable show of much more famous French paintings probably wouldn’t. It reminds us that at a certain point, art such as Menzel’s offered the 20th century the option of tolerant objectivity and we turned it down.

The traveling exhibition was initiated and organized by Harvard’s Busch-Riesinger Museum and put together by Winterstein curator Hinrich Sieveking. Local presentation was coordinated by Getty associate curator Lee Hendrix.

* “Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe,” the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive; through Nov. 29. Parking reservations: (310) 440-7300. Closed Mondays.