Tracing God's Fingerprint

By ROBERT HUGHES

There was a time when right-thinking modernists hardly thought about the first half of the 19th century at all. For them, pretty well everything painted or sculpted between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848 was the art from which modernism, as the phrase went, "freed itself" -- a dim if permanent background to the ongoing drama of the new.

Does anyone share this illusion of a radical break today? Not likely. Precisely because the 19th century (except for impressionism and its consequences) was once shunned, for the past 20 years it has been the curator's mother lode. This new curiosity radiates not only from grand exhibitions like those of Degas and Courbet, but also from others more modest in size, like "The Romantic Spirit: German Drawings, 1780-1850," which is on view at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City through Jan. 29.

This fascinating show deals with an area of art about which most non-Germans know next to nothing. Beethoven, of course, everyone knows. Goethe is more invoked than read. But one would be hard pressed to find much public recognition of their contemporaries in painting. There is Caspar David Friedrich, the darling of the art historians, with his cloaked and silent watchers, his chilly crags and moonstruck ships. But Philipp Otto Runge? Carl Gustav Carus? Franz Pforr and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld? Johann Overbeck? Franz Horny or Adrian Zingg? Not household names, exactly -- yet interesting and sometimes remarkable artists, all the same. Hence the Morgan's show fills a distinct gap. None of the drawings and watercolors in it have been seen in America before; they are all lent from two great collections in the German Democratic Republic, the Nationalgalerie in East Berlin and the Kupferstich- Kabinett in Dresden.

To browse through this show is to be vividly reminded of the continuities in the past two centuries of German art. Some are not altogether welcome. That gentle, scholarly neoclassicist Johann Tischbein, the friend and portraitist of Goethe, would have been aghast to see what German state culture in the 1930s got up to -- and yet the first item in this show, his elaborate drawing entitled The Power of Man, 1786, showing a hunter and his young companion on horseback dragging home the carcasses of a lion and a huge eagle, predicts many of the elements of Nazi classicism if not its overweening vulgarity. The taste for earnest, portentous and sentimental allegory, which now and then muddies the work of even the best German artists in the postwar years -- Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer -- is well and truly installed by the early 1800s in the elaborate metaphorical drawings and prints of Runge. His paeans to innocence, with their flying babies and virgins and lilies, waver close to visionary kitsch. And of course the attitudes to nature and society that permeate German expressionism were not invented in the 20th century: they are Romanticism topped up with more anxiety.

These earlier German Romantics found an obsessive imagery in innocence, whether that of childhood or the supposed moral calm of rural life. Recoiling from industrialization (the first steam pump, the catalog notes, wheezed into action in the Ruhr in 1789, and by 1849 there were almost 2,000 steam engines in Prussia alone), they rediscovered the Volk just as Wordsworth and Constable did with their country idylls. The Germans' pictures were filled with gnarled trees, old walls, villages unchanged since the Middle Ages. A favorite spot for Germans studying in Italy was Olevano, a hill town not far from Rome, where the Nazarenes, a group roughly equivalent to the English Pre- Raphaelites, liked to convene.

There was a moral value in being close to the soil, since nature was the source of all allegory and the direct fingerprint of God. Nature could stir the broadest emotions so long as it was rendered with scrupulous fidelity. Hence the special character of so much German Romantic landscape drawing, as in the work of Joseph Anton Koch or Friedrich: the impaction of vast amounts of detail into panoramic scenes. One sees both close up and for miles, with the focus equal everywhere. The ideal was a Goethean panorama in which sublimity and scientific curiosity were inextricably mingled. Among the Nazarenes, like Schnorr, the desire for precision became almost hallucinatory, with every stroke of the pen given the steeliness of a Durer engraving. But the best moments of broad-view landscape occurred where the elements most nakedly met -- on mountain peaks, or at the edge of the sea, as in Friedrich's wonderfully evocative drawing Rocky Shore with Anchor, 1835-37, with its broad tranquil planes of water, rocks and sky.

Where does classicism end and Romanticism start? The impulses interweave, within the life of one artist and sometimes in the same work. Karl Friedrich Schinkel's buildings, like the Altes Museum in Berlin (1822-30), were the very essence of neoclassicism, strict and canonical, their design underwritten by extreme tenacity in the refinement of detail. Yet as a young man in the mountains, on his way to Rome in 1803, he used generalization to express his yearning for the infinite. The twin blue peaks of the Bohemian Mittelgebirge that he worked up into a watercolor from sketches two years later -- Mountain Range in Bohemia at Sunset, circa 1805 -- are mere silhouettes, as is the dark fringe of pines in the foreground. But that is the source of their visual power. Such drawings warn you that words like classic and Romantic are, indeed, leaky containers.