A ‘Sketch’ as ‘Finished’ Artwork
and Precious Cimelium to the Oil of 1895 burnt in 1942
of the Neue Pinakothek Munich
“ Cranes of Ibycus ”
Strathmann, Carl (Dusseldorf 1866 – Munich 1939). Ibycus. In meadow-land overgrown with mushrooms and three trees the friend of the gods walking to the right, mightily singing, the lyre in the outstretched left. Black pen, watercolor + gold on strong sketch paper mounted on cardboard, on which the work together is completed and repeatedly bordered. Inscribed with black pen on the sketch paper below right: C. Strathmann. 80 x 58.5 cm.
Literature
Thieme-Becker XXXII (1938), 160; Vollmer VI (1962), 436; Lovis Corinth, Carl Strathmann, in (Art and Artists) 1903, pp. 255-263, reprinted in (Legends from Artist’s Life), 1909, pp. 71 ff.; The same, (My Early Years), 1954, p. 132.; Heusinger v. Waldegg, (Grotesque Art Nouveau – Carl Strathmann … Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Graphic / Catalog of the Exhibition in the Rhenish Regional Museum Bonn March/May 1976 with 4-page selection of exhibitions + literature [Art + Antiquity on the Rhine 63]); Catalog of the Exhibition “Munich 1869-1958 / (Departure into Modern Art)”, Munich, House of Arts, 1958.
Single Exhibitions
Retrospective Exhibitions: 1916/17 Berlin Secession (Special exhibition); 1931 Munich Art Society; 1958 Gallery Wolfgang Gurlitt, Munich; 1976 Rhenish Regional Museum Bonn. – 1902 + 1910/11 Gallery Paul Cassirer, Berlin; 1907 Arnolds Kunstsalon, Dresden; 1911 Munich Art Society; 1914 + 1918 Emperor Wilhelm-Museum Krefeld; 1914/15 Art Society Frankfort on the Main, Augsburg, Leipsic; 1921 Leopold Hoesch-Museum Düren; 1924 Glass Palace Vienna (Special exhibition); 1931 Munich Art Society (Special exhibition).
Group Exhibitions
1892 + 1894 Gallery Fritz Gurlitt, Berlin; 1893-1922 repeated International Art Exhibition, Munich; Munich Annual Exhibition; Munich Secession; Great Berlin Art Exhibition; Berlin Secession; 1894/95 Munich Art Society (together with Walter Leistikow); 1895/96 Glass Palace Dusseldorf; 1905 2nd Exhibition of the German Artists Union, Berlin; 1907 German National Art Exhibition, Dusseldorf; 1958 House of Arts, Munich (Munich 1869-1958 / Departure into Modern Art).
FINE LARGE-SIZED + TYPICAL WORK
as painterly executed detail sketch
to “Cranes of Ibycus”
of 1895 (Cat. Bonn ills. 138; Boetticher, Oils, 1; exhibited still in the same year on the Munich Annual Exhibition and the Special Exhibition of the Artists Union Laetitia in the Artist Hall Dusseldorf + 1898 on the Great Berlin Art Exhibition; 1942 burnt in the Neue Pinakothek Munich) as beside Salambo (1894/95) – see below – and together with The Saint Franziskus preaching to the Animals of the same year
“ main works of the decorative ornamental Munich Art Nouveau ,
in which mix different influences of applied art, Symbolism, Byzantinism and Academism (Stuck’s sensational success ‘The Sin’, 1893) “
(Catalog Bonn, 1976, p. 9). – And Lovis Corinth 1903 :
“ At the same time with the ‘Salambo’
his most charming picture
‘Ibycus , the Friend of Gods’
was created, too. It is not unaffected by the Japanese (‘Paints pictures of large figures, landscapes and still lifes in a manner influenced by Japan’, Thieme-Becker). Flying gilt cranes occupy the upper part of the subject. To them Ibycus greetingly stretches out one hand; around the head he has a golden gloriole and rich clothes surround his body, a rich vegetation of not existing plants and trees cover the rest part of the picture.
I personally not hesitate to count
this picture to the best works of our time “
(quoted after Catalog Bonn, p. 82).
Here then Ibycus apart, in reverse to the right, greeting the cranes not silently, rather moved emphatically, with mighty song at correspondingly curved body, strongly looking up and laurel-wreathed. Adequate hereto the compact instrument held calmly in the left in the oil, but here long stretched in the left stretched up, far-reaching over subject + golden border on the mounting, crowned with bows and entwined with a garland of flowers. If the gloriole of the oil is thought here just so appears doubtfully as shown as a mighty golden half disk, suggesting rather a sunset in respect of the events, placed into the blue of the sky behind the trees, head/breast and the lower part of the lyre marked off by the meadow populated here only sparsely with mushrooms. As then also the garment still without train and kept almost monotonously. All concentrated freely of any turning off on the just audible mighty voice, the lyre breaking the picture, the mighty gold disk. In contrast to the charm of the oil
the anticipated drama of the forthcoming
reflected by the lineaments, the appeal to the cranes not present here as prosecutor: “By you, your cranes there up, If no other voices speaks, May be the suit of my murder!” (Schiller). Shortly, very fine example for the “strictly flat-like arrangement of the pictures during the 1890s” as then generally the works before 1900 are the decisive ones representing the “high art”.
Rooted in Symbolism + Art Nouveau Strathmann started as pupil of Crola and Lauenstein in Dusseldorf and from 1886 on at the more modern Weimar of Kalckreuth who lets him a longer lead and whose master pupil he is in 1888/89. On friendly terms with Th. Th. Heine, with whom he belonged to the artists group Laetitia, and Corinth who painted his portrait (Lenbachhaus Munich). Since 1891 in Munich and there a member of the Allotria and the Cococello Club and from 1894 on in the Freien Vereinigung as a splinter group of the Munich Secession,
“ whose members … form the center group of the Munich Art Nouveau … Common to these painters is the academic origin and the device ‘The Overcoming of Naturalism’ ”
(Cat. Bonn, p. 26); 1907 finally of the Berlin Secession. Since 1895 contributor to the just established Pan, since 1896 to the Jugend and the Fliegende Blätter (“Strathmann’s contribution to the book illustration of the Art Nouveau is not very extensive, but of high quality”).
“ Presumably no second one among the successful painters of our younger generation is more difficult to be classified than Karl Strathmann. He suits into none of the conventional drawers of aesthetics … – he has something from everything and is at the same time still
a strangely own weighty closed personage “
(Wilhelm Schäfer 1904 in [One Hundred Masters of the Present], quoted after Catalog Bonn, pp. 16 f.).
And “to make evident more intelligibly as hitherto the unjustly undervalued autonomous position of Strathmann within the style trend (of the namely Munich Art Nouveau)” was then also one of the aims of the work-comprising Bonn exhibition deepening therewith at the same time Hans H. Hofstätter’s preceding discussion of Strathmann. As then Brigitte Lohkamp quotes in her catalog contribution “(Strathmann in the Evaluation of Research and Art Criticism)” that voice, too, which sees in Strathmann a
“ draughtsman and decorator
inspired of genius up to the outermost finger-tip ”
(p. 72).
Whose “grotesque” style packed not least those following younger ones, too, whose new stylistic means made respected international reputation to German art of the first half of the 20th century :
“ Like many modern artists who started at the ‘grotesque illustration’ (Kurt Bauch) of art nouveau, among them Feininger, Barlach, Nolde, also the young Paul Klee finds in his fantastic-satiric drawings about 1901 … here his starting point … (Strathmann’s) quasi autonomous play with forms tends towards the direction of abstract art in the sense of the ‘Self expression of the artistic medium’ (Juliane Roh) and leads into the ‘Hieroglyph’ of expression (E. L. Kirchner) of the expressionists resp.
Many expressionists are rooted in their creativeness in the art nouveau
… later Kirchner came to his stylish formal language: it had been reserved for the expressionism to radicalize the abstracting stylistic means of the art nouveau “
(Catalog Bonn, pp. 65 ff., already before, p. 64, reminding of painted postcards by Strathmann whose “fantastic inventions with realistic single forms … suggest collages by Max Ernst”).
Correspondingly then in 2008 the exemplary exhibition “(Freedom of the Line – From Obrist and the Art Nouveau to Marc, Klee and Kirchner)” in the LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster presenting
“ the general known art of the ‘Blue Rider’
(especially Kirchner) in a new connection. For the first time
the origins of Expressionism in the Munich Art Nouveau about 1900
were made evident …
Common theme of the exhibited works of art is the movement. In applied arts and architecture , in pictures and sculptures the Art Nouveau created expressive linear movements depicting sensations already by their mere runs …
(Also) shown in the exhibition a main work of the Munich Symbolism: the 1895 large-format painting ‘Salambo’
by the excentric artist Carl Strathmann …
(from the year of the Ibycus, too, as already mentioned). It shows a scene from the famous novel ‘Salambo’ by Gustave Flaubert: the Serpent Magic … a harp symbolizes the sound of music … When in 1895 the picture was shown to the public it was a scandal … Nevertheless – or just for that reason – already then it became a public success ”
(Claudia Miklis in the then press statement of the museum).
In respect of the strong element of gold in the work here may finally pointed out to this as a “symbolism of the Symbolism”, as “a medium standing beyond all colorful naturalness and giving ‘sacral solemn mood’ (to the work of art), by which definition Hofstätter picks up Oswald Spengler to perceive after all in this whole allegorism evaluated in its contents
“an admirable sublety” ,
a “completed invasion of the applied arts into the painting”.
Among the 128 Strathmann pieces of the 1976 Bonn exhibition
not any one with a recognizable reference to Ibycus ,
from which the examplary preparatory work here accrues
beside the artistic document together an exceptional one , too ,
in the result of the destruction of the oil in 1942.
The italic style of the signature corresponding with that of Mohammed Fleeing in Munich (no. 49 of the Bonn catalog with ills. 147; about 1900) the underline of which here already outgoing from the little t-line. Similar, if not the same, also that of the lost First Kiss (ills. 49 of the cat.; about 1892/93) as then also that of the burned 1895 Ibycus oil in its likewise capitalization and use of small letters differing to the more regular spelling in printed majuscules.
Thinkably fresh in the conservation, nevertheless, the bronze tone of the gold should be conditioned by age. The mounting with its varied borderlines in pen + completions of the composition with some weak little smudges and isolated fox-stipples in the left lower field. Coming along by the way with at least a
50-year absence from market in the drawers of a connoisseur .
Offer no. 14,751 / price on application
„ Herzlichen Dank für die sorgfältig verpackten Bände … “
(Herr H. M., 26. Mai 2007)