Discover Munich's long-lost artistic treasures
What is not destroyed by war may well be destroyed by peace. After the buildings had been leveled, the history books burned and the canvases slashed, in came the postwar theoreticians. These were the rebuilders, the people who did away with the last traces of yesterday’s celebrated ideas. For them, there was nothing better than clearing out the old and making space for the new. In post-World War II Munich this was the fate that befell the Glyptothek frescoes of Peter Cornelius. The monumental paintings of mythological figures that had adorned the walls of the Glyptothek since 1830 survived the war undamaged. But, when the building was reconstructed, the city’s art directors, their attentions otherwise occupied with fostering new modernist talent, allowed the frescoes to be destroyed. Fortunately for us, the frescoes were but the final product of a comprehensive collection of cartoons, all depicted in charcoal by the renowned German academic artist Peter Cornelius. And what is more fortunate still, is that the original cartoons—full-scale drawings that artists use to draft out the large oil paintings and frescoes—that Cornelius created between 1818 and 1830 are now on display for the first time in almost 70 years, at the Haus der Kunst in an exhibition entitled “The Gods of Greece.” Born in Düsseldorf in 1783, Peter Cornelius developed, early on in his life, strong technical skills, a lofty imagination and a desire to cultivate an art of a heroic scale. In October 1811 he traveled to Rome, where he quickly gained prominence among a circle of German painters—the so-called Nazarenes—that included Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Wilhelm Schadow, Philipp Veit and Ludwig Vogel. Back then Germany had no national school of art. But this small group of artists sought to revive the art and techniques of medieval Germany and early Renaissance Italy, and to found a new German school of art. The impressive paintings and frescoes that Cornelius completed in Rome led to his being called back first to Düsseldorf in 1819 to become the director of the Academy of Fine Arts, and later to Munich to become the director of the Academy there and to oversee the decorative work for the new Glyptothek. Cornelius’ assignment for the Glyptothek, a building intended for the exhibition of ancient sculpture, was to decorate the walls and ceilings of two halls and an entrance vestibule with depictions of the great figures of Greek mythology. The exhibition now on display at the Haus der Kunst features 42 of Cornelius’ cartoons of Hesiodic gods and goddesses and Homeric warriors and heroes, some as large as 4.5 by 8.5 meters. In many ways it is fortunate that the cartoons were preserved while the frescoes were lost, and not the other way around. The cartoons were considered works of art in their time, and Cornelius had already arranged for them to be exhibited at the Berlin Academy of Art in 1820. Additionally, it was no secret that Cornelius had an imperfect eye for color, for which his frescoes were duly criticized. Besides, it was not he but his pupils and apprentices who executed the actual frescoes. Cornelius’ skill as a draftsman, on the other hand, was outstanding and these drawings betray an undeniable grandeur and nobleness of conception. A final advantage of the cartoons is that, pulled down from the lofty heights where they were situated as frescoes in the Glyptothek, they have a greater power over the viewer with their superhuman scale, striking forms and dynamism. After Cornelius’ death a special room in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin was dedicated to the cartoons. They were, however, taken down shortly after the turn of the century and have not been exhibited since 1933. The current exhibition, the first to be organized by León Krempel, a new curator at the Haus der Kunst, therefore marks not only a rediscovery of Cornelius’ modernist attitude in which the artist’s concept is more important than the final implementation of that concept. But also a recelebration of an artist who in fewer than 50 years founded a great school of art, revived mural painting and turned the gaze of the 19th-century art world towards Munich. The exhibition also commemorates the ideals and concepts that inspired the frescoes in the Glyptothek, long ago destroyed and, until now, largely forgotten. Also on this month at the Haus der Kunst: