“I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions,” a defiant Caspar David Friedrich declared as his art and the Romantic ideals of the early nineteenth century were falling out of favor towards the end of his life. “I spin a cocoon around myself;…
Category: German art
Paula Modersohn-Becker: When Life Imitates Art
The name Paula Modersohn-Becker may not say much to you outside of Germany, but at 30 years old she was the first woman to paint herself in the nude, in Self-Portrait at Sixth Wedding Anniversary. Here, one quarter turned with her face flushed, she exposes two small, perky breasts crowned by an amber necklace, one…
Max Liebermann – Free Period in the Amsterdam Orphanage (1881 – 1882)
It was a warm and sunny day when Max Liebermann, strolling on the streets of Amsterdam, with not a care in the world, laid eyes upon what would become one of the most consequential scenes he’d ever witness. This was the 29-year-old German artist’s second workation in the Netherlands – part vacation, indulging in the…
Otto Dix – Portrait of Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926)
If you were to travel back in time to 1920s Berlin and head into the Romanisches Café, located on the end of the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, you’d suddenly find yourself surrounded by all the great minds of that bustling period. You would meet writers like Bertolt Brecht and Erich Maria Remarque, New Objectivity artists who want…
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