ART: Mentioning the war
Masterpieces from Dresden at the Royal Academy
For a couple of centuries, the city of Dresden was famous for being, as contemporaries put it, ‘Florence on the Elbe’ — a place remarkable for its art, music, architecture and most other refinements of cultivated and courtly taste, as elegant as the much-prized Meissen porcelain it also produced. But in 1945 it became famous for something different. On 13 February of that year, more than 773 RAF Avro Lancasters set out to bomb Dresden; over the next two days, 527 heavy bombers from the USAF completed the job. The resulting firestorm obliterated one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, killing at least 135,000 civilians or perhaps many thousands more — the fact that 200,000 refugees were sheltering in the city, and that the heat destroyed so many of the bodies, makes exact figures impossible. Unsurprisingly, less than sixty years after those fires cooled, debates about the rights and the wrongs of that action still touch raw nerves, both in Britain and in Germany. Whatever one makes of the arguments, however, it has hard to think of another instance in which the phrase ‘war is hell’ been made manifest in such a literal way. And by the same token, while the mere mention of Dresden once conjured up images of civilised pleasure, it now is inextricable from images of a different, darker kind.
In the decades that followed, Dresden has seen other troubles, as well as an apparently endless programme of rebuilding. In 1945 the treasures of Dresden’s great art collections, having been stored by their curators in the protective depths of various nearby mines, were crated up by Soviet ‘trophy commissioners’ and carried off to the USSR. Only in 1956 did the Soviets see fit to return these to what was by then the GDR. Reunification brought in its wake much-needed funds, permitting a further restoration of Dresden’s magnificent Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. But in August 2002, the waters of the Elbe rose dramatically, flooding the Gemäldegalerie’s vaults and threatening 4,000 works of art. Happily, extremely prompt action by museum staff, volunteers and the armed forces rescued virtually all these works, and the Gemäldegalerie has now reopened, albeit without adequate storage space. A new storage facility has been proposed, but the necessary funds have not yet been secured.
All the same, in celebration of this re-opening — and possibly to raise money for extra storage — the Gemäldegalerie has sent to London more than fifty paintings which are now on display at the Royal Academy. And if the title chosen for Masterpieces from Dresden, sponsored by ABN AMRO, is a slight exaggeration — well, it is only a slight one, and in the current climate of blockbuster hyperbole, that is understandable enough. Certainly there are a fair number of real masterpieces here. But there are also scores of handsome, appealing and sometimes surprising works, many of which have never been seen in London before. The result is a really beautiful show, none the worse for its modest scale or lack of marketing gimmicks.
The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister houses one of Europe’s great princely art collections. Its roots lie in the sixteenth century, when Elector Augustus of Saxony (1526-1586) established a kunstcammer, which in accordance with the fashion of the time included everything from scientific instruments to paintings blessed with optimistic attributions, in Dresden. His successors strengthened and gave focus to the collection. Elector Frederick Augustus I (1670-1733), also known as Augustus II, purchased (inter alia) the Sleeping Venus begun by Giorgione and finished by Titian, and Rubens’ magnificent Diana Returning from the Hunt (included in the present exhibition). The accession of his heir, Augustus III, saw the beginning of a more serious programme of collecting. Not only did Augustus III learn from his father’s example, but he had also undertaken a lengthy Grand Tour between 1711-1719, visiting both France and the Italian states. From the 1740s, the Gemäldegalerie blossomed, acquiring works that reflect, more than anything else, the educated courtly taste of the time: great works of the Italian renaissance and the Baroque, paintings by Claude Lorraine and Poussin as well as canvasses by the ‘Little Dutch Masters’. Augustus III acquired the hundred best works from the collection of Francesco III, Duke of Modena, including Titian’s Tribute Money and four large paintings by Veronese, along with works by the Carracci brothers, Guido Reni, Guercino, Velasquez, Rubens and Holbein. As the years passed, he was able to buy Jan Vermeer’s Procuress and paintings by Frans Hals. The ultimate acquisition came finally in 1754, however, when the Elector was able to buy Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. The Sistine Madonna is most famous now for those two bemused-looking putti gazing up at the Virgin, familiar from so many greeting-cards and undergraduate rooms, but it is also, by any standard, an important work by a painter esteemed at that time above any other. In short, the Gemäldegalerie had become a world-class collection.
Although religious devotion may have played some part in the choice of works (Augustus III had converted to Catholicism during his Grand Tour, following here in the footsteps of his father who had converted to Rome in order to become King of Poland) it appears that artistic fame and quality mattered much more to him when it came to acquiring pictures. At the time, this stance was still sufficiently novel as to merit comment. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first visited the Dresden collection in 1768, only a few years after Augustus III’s death. He commented that these masterpieces, carefully displayed in a grand setting,
produced a unique feeling of solemn splendour that is more akin to the sensation one has upon entering a church, particularly since the adornments of certain temples, and certain objects of devotion, seemed to be displayed here solely for the holy purpose of art.
But ultimately, even here, there was a good deal more than ‘the holy purpose of art’ at sake. During his long travels, Augustus III had been impressed by Versailles and had learned a great deal from the example of Louis XIV. If Augustus spent lavishly in order to build up this body of work and to house it amid appropriate splendour — and if he encouraged musicians, dancers, gem-cutters, scholars and architects as well — at least part of his purpose was to demonstrate to the rest of the world that Dresden was not only prosperous and increasingly powerful, but also that it was a wholly admirable place, suitable to be counted amongst the grander courts of Europe, benefiting from the absolute rule of a wise and benevolent prince. And indeed, the strategy worked. Augustus’ troublesome neighbour Frederick the Great wrote, perhaps not entirely in jest, ‘I buy what I can pay at a reasonable price, but what is too expensive I leave to the King of Poland.’ Even being overrun by Frederick’s forces during the Seven Years War (1756-63) did little to tarnish the lustre of the city’s reputation as a centre of the arts. The nineteenth century even saw a new burst of acquisitions that not only filled gaps in the existing collection but brought in the work of new masters such as Caspar David Friedrich. Indeed, Dresden remained a magnet for cultural life well into the 1930s, attracting both broad-minded connoisseurs, dreamers and the sort of artists the Nazis were to label ‘degenerate’. And then came the war, the fires of February 1945, the grim denoument of invasion and the long, slow path of recovery.
Perhaps the experience of so much loss so recently inclines the people of Dresden to invoke the happier moments of their civic past as often and as tangibly as possible — who knows? In any event, although parts of the city retain the marks of their past, other areas were rebuilt to appear as if all that destruction had never happened. (As in Warsaw, sources for rebuilding included the vedute of Bernado Bellotto, Canaletto’s pupil and nephew — confusingly, often called Canaletto in Germany and Poland — several of which are included in the Masterpieces of Dresden exhibition.) The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, damaged terribly during the war, was reconstructed very much along its previous lines — the high ceilings, ornate cornices, shining marquetry floors and richly-coloured walls all conveying a distinctly regal ambience. In some rooms, the pictures are still hung in two tiers, albeit less densely than in earlier times. The net result, though, only underscores the fact that the collection is not just about Goethe’s ‘holy purpose of art’ for its own sake — rather, it is a group of works gathered together in a particular place over a particular space of time for particular historic and cultural reasons. Translated to London, the works take on an additional ambassadorial function of the sort that Augustus III might have recognised and appreciated. They speak not only of a city determined to retain its distinctive character in the face of catastrophic change, but perhaps more interestingly, they are frank in their account of the elements that went into forming that character in the first place.
It is a pity that the Sackler Galleries of the Royal Academy do not look particularly princely. Low, crepuscular, airless, windowless, their walls painted a cold blue-white and their ceiling bristling with shiny metal grills and bits of tubing, these galleries sum up more or less everything that is wrong with late twentieth century display tactics. Aztecs gains a certain frisson — obvious but effective — from the juxtaposition of the apparently ‘primitive’ with the genteel elegance of the RA’s main galleries; sadly, the marriage of modernism-on-the-cheap with Old Masters is a far less happy affair. Hung up amidst the pale expanses of wall, the Dresden paintings struggle with the odds in attempting to retain any force or charisma whatsoever. It is a testament to their quality that most succeed. Fair enough to display, say, Philip Guston’s oeuvre in a place like this — plenty of twentieth century work was meant for museums anyway — but to display eighteenth century art in a place where people have never listened to music, danced or hatched conspiracies is a particularly nasty anachronism that will do us few favours in the eyes of our puzzled descendants a few centuries hence.
This, though, is really such a common problem these days — c.f. the National Gallery’s increasingly desperate attempts to make anything look good in their basement exhibition rooms — that it hard requires amplification. On, then, to something far more interesting — Masterpieces from Dresden itself. Spread over four rooms, the selections from the Gemäldegalerie’s collection are arranged, as in the Gemäldegalerie itself, in order of national school (Italy, France and Spain, Holland and Germany), with the first room is devoted to art about Dresden. Here Augustus II is represented by a portrait bust by Paul Heermann, while paintings of a portly, genial-looking Augustus III and his Jesuit-influenced, immensely fertile wife survey the proceedings with complaisance. Poignantly, it turns out that these latter are copies (very good ones) of vanished originals by Count Pietro Rotari, but this makes its own sort of point, demonstrating that the claims of institutional and civic propriety rank at least as high as those accounted ‘masterpieces’.
The obvious stars of the first and second rooms, though — and probably the stars of the exhibition generally, not least because they are the sort of thing so rarely seen in London and yet so evocative of Dresden — are Bernardo Bellotto’s vedute. Bellotto probably studied with his more famous uncle, but was unable to emerge from his shadow in Venice; instead, he travelled north of the Alps, where he achieved enormous success, becoming court painter at Dresden (1747-56) before moving on to Warsaw. In each of these places he combined a crisp handling and a slightly cold palette with a strong compositional sense and a sure grasp of the use of the camera obscura. The result was a series of large, meticulous, realer-than-real views of Dresden — works that must surely still be as mesmerising today as they were two and a half centuries ago — works full of swans, long shadows, couples strolling by the river, laundry flapping in the late afternoon sun, as well as palaces and churches and bridges. If their appeal is not necessarily particularly sophisticated, it is no less profound for that. The elaborate architectural descriptions are placed within a lyrically compelling yet rigorous linear framework; the level of detail is engaging but never purely incidental; the light effects are so cleverly done, with such a firm organising hand, as to give these pictures a gravity, an emotive quality almost, that transcends mere anecdote. Whatever David Hockney may like to think, no mere photograph could have done this. But to the people of Dresden, Bellotto’s work must at least potentially mean something more, too — a magical window back into their city’s distinguished and irrecoverable past, as solicitous of its homely side as of its magnificence. Perhaps that is why they seem a bit melancholy, somehow — an example, if one were needed, of the sort of meaning a viewer imposes on a painting, regardless of what its creator may have intended.
As a point of reference, the exhibition also offers two actual Canalettos — which is to say, paintings by Antonio Canal, rather than Bellotto — a view north from the Rialto, and a view from the Palazzo Balbi, both of which spent most of their history ornamenting various royal palaces rather than the Gemäldegalerie itself. They are both beautiful works in their own right, but the comparison with Bellotto is particularly instructive, showing off each painter’s distinctive strengths without detracting from the reputation of either. Among other things, the juxtaposition reminds one how very atmospheric Canaletto’s treatment of light can be, how soft his effects, how warm his colour. Those storm-clouds in both are grey, threatening and thoroughly Venetian in their seductive equivocation; the crisp intensity of Bellotto’s scenes seems somehow to look to northern European models rather than the expressive handling of his great Venetian predecessors. Meanwhile, in this context one is also reminded how badly mistreated and overcleaned some Canalettos have been — not least in our own National Gallery. But then the state of preservation of all the Dresden works looks amazingly good — no plasticky varnishes, no missing modelling, and plenty of dark, mysterious, shadowy areas. It would be interesting to know why this is the case, although the tradition of sensitive conservation at the Hermitage may offer up some answers. But at any rate, it is at the very least paradoxical that works which have gone through so much end up wearing it all so well, while so much of what is in Trafalgar Square looks rubbed-down and ruined despite a century of relative peace and security.
Although all the works obviously reflected the taste of those who collected them, in some cases the disjunction between their taste and the prevalent taste of our own age is particularly evident. It is a thought that has struck me before at Dulwich and elsewhere, but would it not be a wonderful thing to be able to love a painting like Annibale Carracci’s Christ Wearing the Crown of Thorns, Supported by Angels or Murillo’s Mary with Child, as much as eighteenth century connoisseurs did? The latter painting was damaged by several bullets during the revolutionary unrest of May 1849, and while I certainly don’t mind it that much, I find it extremely hard to like. One can admire the relatively subtle use of colour, the softness of the brushwork, and something like monumentality in the composition — admire it, perhaps, even at the level of apparent devotional conviction — and yet there is something in what contemporaries would have praised as its ‘sweetness’, something verging on sentimentality, that somehow comes across as cloying and insincere. Thus are we inadvertently disinherited from some of our forefathers’ subtler pleasures. On the other hand, Giovanni Battista Piazetta’s Young Ensign (c. 1742) looks startlingly as if it had come from the easel of Delacroix, Corbet or even Manet, so informal is the pose and so loose and suggestive the handling. Here the bad temptation is to discern in it signs and portents of a modernism that still lay some way off, and to forget that Piazetta was in fact looking back to Rembrandt rather than forward to painters and movements not yet born.
The catalogue for Masterpieces from Dresden merits some comment in its own right. Scholarly, reserved and fairly informative, it provides both essential background about the history of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and accounts of each of the works shown in the exhibition, including provenance and bibliographical references. The colour in the plates is better than one often sees in relatively affordable publications, and plenty of Gemäldegalerie treasures not actually in the exhibition are at least depicted here. It is also the case, apparently, that some of the proceeds from catalogue sales go to help fund the creation of those new stores the Gemäldegalerie curators so urgently require. It would be difficult to emerge from this exhibition without thinking that this must be, perforce, a good thing.
Which, then, are the absolute masterpieces? As implied a few lines above, some of the Gemäldegalerie’s best works were quite rightly left at home. These include Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Titian’s Tribute Money and Vermeer’s Procuress, among others. Dresden has lost enough over the years to have an admirably sane attitude about sending their patrimony jetting about the globe for no good reason; certainly, this exhibition has made me very keen to see the Gemäldegalerie as soon as possible, to see these works and others, and I suspect others will respond the same way. So it says something striking about the Gemäldegalerie’s collections that the works in the RA are as good as they obviously are, given what was left behind at the Gemäldegalerie itself.
Let’s pick out some masterpieces, then — and the list is not a short one. In my opinion, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (1647) by Claude Lorrain falls into this category, because it has everything one would want from a Claude — the tranquillity, the delicate shifts in tone, the air of being an accurate representation of a perfect dream-world — complete, in this case, with a touching subject, all in excellent condition. Ditto Poussin’s elegant Pan and Syrinx (1637), with its weirdly arrested motion and incredibly subtle palette. Antoine Watteau’s Festival of Love (c. 1717) probably also qualifies, although I am less sure about its condition. On the other hand, the colour, frieze-like composition and general sense of overwhelming, refulgent fruitfulness in Rubens’ Diana Returning from the Hunt (c. 1616) is beyond criticism — it is a classic example of Rubens doing what he does best, which is to transform something unlikely into something so full of life that all doubts vanish before its warm insistent vigour. While Van Dyck’s Man in Armour with a Red Scarf (c. 1625/7) is certainly not the artist’s finest work, its grace and glamour, let alone its very Titianesque handling, give it considerable appeal. Two portraits by Velasquez, Juan Mateos (c. 1634) and Portrait of a Knight of the Order of Santiago (c. 1635) are as notable for the impression of psychological perceptiveness as for their stunningly assured technique and subdued colours. Meanwhile, three paintings by Gabriel Metsu — Portrait of the Artist with his Wife Isabella de Wolff in a Tavern (1661) and two scenes of poultry being sold — make a powerful case for this badly underrated Leiden artist, who at his best produced works that can stand side by side with those of that darling of current taste, Vermeer.
Unsurprisingly, there are some very fine German works. Dürer’s sensitive portrait of Bernard von Reesen is one of these. Better by far, though, is Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Elector John the Constant of Saxony (1526), not least because it is such an hilariously perfect example of a certain sort of north European, late medieval art. The Elector — again, part and parcel of Dresden’s history before it acquired its later airs and graces — appears in his portrait as a grumpy-looking, pink-nosed, piggy-eyed creature. Presumably he must have been content to have been portrayed in this fashion. Cranach works here in broad forms, crisp lines and incidents of almost hallucinogenic detail, as on the necklace, complete with three rings and one cross, which hangs around the Elector’s bullish neck; other areas, such as the background and the black robe that he wears, are simply monochrome. Sturdy, pragmatic, stolid, the Elector’s portrait is, however, livened up considerably by the disconcerting wreath of red carnations that surmounts his big head. Apparently these suggest that the portrait was created in celebration of the wedding of Elector’s son, but the result (in our eyes, anyway) verges on surreal humour. This painting is simply a delight.
Meanwhile Lucas Cranach the Younger’s marvellous Adam and Eve (after 1537) is also here. The figures show considerable knowledge of antique statuary — but antique statuary seen through the eyes of someone who still saw in the Gothic S-curve the sinuous hallmark of beauty itself. For centuries paintings of this sort were rather despised, simply because they appeared primitive and embarrassing next to, say, the sophistication of Titian and Raphael. No longer, however. First came the Romantics, who saw in them (wrongly, but never mind) a ‘naturalness’ and honesty; later came formal criticism, which found a lot to like in their flat surfaces, emphasis on pattern and tense relationship between content and presentation. Somewhere alongside both these qualities lies another layer of meaning, too — the sort of religiosity that caused such works to be commissioned, painted and admired. Given their suggestive proximity to the early days of protestant reformation and all that followed on from these, this is not exactly surprising. What does surprise, though, is how much more interesting such questions seem in front of the actual Cranach panels, which have a scale and presence not conveyed in reproduction, than they do when one is forced to make do with photos instead.
Finally, I have never really warmed to Caspar David Friedrich, but his Bohemian Landscape with Mount Milleschauer (1808) is simply beautiful — tired though that word can sound. From the darkened foreground back towards the rhythmic undulation of the foothills, the breastlike eminence of the two monochrome peaks in the distance, and then the gilded dusk of the huge sky beyond, this is the sort of Romantic vision that did everything to transform the way in which Friedrich’s more cultured contemporaries saw and understood the natural world, but without any of the bombastic excess of symbolism that would later come to trouble landscape painting. Dreamy yet intellectualised, depopulated as on the day of Creation yet infused with such a human imagination, this may well be the best painting Friedrich ever produced. Yes, ‘masterpiece’ is merited here.
And even when one drops far below the ‘masterpiece’ level, beyond the ambit of superstar painters and iconic treatments, there are works here so beautiful and surprising that they stand out in their own right. Who, for instance, has heard to Abraham Mignon? But his Glass of Flowers and an Orange Twig (1660s) is simply magnificent — its rich colour exploding from a bravely monochrome background, each stroke laid on with a mad but compelling meticulousness, the whole producing a swirling, dancing, deeply mysterious image out of an everyday flower picture. Another amazing painting, Portrait of a Man with a Black Cap in His Hand (c. 1525/30), is attributed, speculatively, to Barthel Beham. Who? No, I hadn’t heard of him either, but the portrait is mesmerising. The anonymous sitter rises up through the middle of the lime wood panel like a sturdy monument, his plain brown robe more than occupying the space available; every wrinkle of those hands is clear to us as he clutches at that cap; his shrewd, weathered face, unruly hair and appraising scowl seem to conjure up the individual himself, for all the world as if he were in the room with us. Who was he? What were his politics, what was his faith? What became of him? We’ll never know, obviously, and yet the specificity of the portrayal is such that one stares and stares again, as if the mute paint might start to divulge answers. Some of the most powerful experiences of Masterpieces from Dresden are the wholly unexpected ones.
From the descriptions above, such as they are, it will be seen that few if any of the pictures in this splendid exhibition have anything to do with the theme of war. Rather, their concerns appear to lie elsewhere — with capturing a likeness, telling a story, making manifest a spiritual truth or sublimating the truths of religion in a human vision of landscape. Scarred as we are by the experience of modernity, we also read them on the level of form, colour and technique. As I pointed out earlier, the viewer inevitably brings layers of meaning to a painting that its creator can never have intended. So although in some sense it is irrelevant to the works themselves, it has to be said that on the day of the press view of Masterpieces from Dresden, it was hard not to think about war. As I left the RA, the Evening Standard was sporting enormous headlines about the preparations for war; as I sat down to glance through the exhibition catalogue, the television news was broadcasting footage of an American bomb, said to be the largest conventional explosive device ever made, presumably intended to intimidate the Iraqi leadership. Each of these was another minor step in the apparently unstoppable build-up to a war in which many old and important things will doubtless be destroyed, and — more to the point — in which many people will probably be killed. And because Dresden is now about bombardment and fire and death, as well as about operas and baroque architecture and art galleries, Masterpieces from Dresden somehow made this prospect seem particularly immediate and unsettling.
All of which sounds extremely grim. Yet strangely — and I have pondered this at some length over the past few days, trying to understand it — the experience of seeing Masterpieces from Dresden was very much a happy, exciting and deeply satisfying one. Of course beauty per se is distracting, which is one reason why people are so drawn to it. ‘We have art’, as Nietzche wrote, ‘that we might not perish from the truth’. But there was, perhaps, just a little more to it than that. For while at one level the story of Dresden is a wretched one, showing up the human condition in a particularly frank and unflattering light, at another level there is something almost inspiring about it — not just in the stubborn desire to rebuild, the ability to reconnect with the past without being devoured by its reproaches, but even in the resilience of these dumb, fragile, lovely objects themselves. Shuttled from place to place, lost and found, overpainted and cleaned and overpainted again, analysed and systematised and inevitably misunderstood, here they still are — speaking, even if we cannot properly understand them, of the tastes and aspirations not only of their creators, but of the patrons who commissioned them, the connoisseurs who cherished them and the generations of admirers who have wandered and flirted and daydreamed their way through the Gemäldegalerie over more than two centuries — Augustus III, yes, but also Goethe and Winkelmann, Dix and Beckmann, Polke and Gerhard Richter. Here, if we could only understand it, is something about all those people, and many more, that hasn’t been destroyed — something we can still share with them, however incompletely, inaccurately and at such a great remove. A silly notion? Almost certainly, but art mostly operates off silly notions, and on the day of the exhibition, this seemed no worse than many. Art often looks ineffectual, irrelevant or even disgustingly self-regarding in the face of matters of life and death and warfare. It is a tribute to the qualities of Masterpieces from Dresden that it seems to have something interesting to say about such matters, and the scope and depth to say it, while at the same time having so much to say about the arts of peace, too.
Masterpieces from Dresden, sponsored by ABN AMRO, will be at the Royal Academy from 15 March - 8 June 2003. Tickets cost £7.50 for adults; various concessions apply.
Bunny Smedley is ERO’s arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, March 14, 2003 03:30 PM