German art

Painting and sculpture in the Germanic north of Europe from the 8th century AD to the present. This includes Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The Gothic style is represented by a wealth of woodcarvings and paintings for churches. Influences came from first the Low Countries and then Renaissance Italy, shown in the work of such painters as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein. The baroque and neoclassical periods, though important in Germany, had no individual artists of that stature; the Romantic movement produced the nature mysticism of Caspar David Friedrich. In the 20th century, expressionism began as an almost entirely German movement; Dada was founded in Switzerland; and the Bauhaus school of art and design was influential worldwide. Recent German art includes the multimedia work of Joseph Beuys, dealing with wartime experiences.

Ottonian: about 950-1050

Many prehistoric artefacts have been found in Germanic areas, and a wealth of Celtic works remain, but it was not until the Ottonian era that a distinctively national style emerged. This drew on earlier Carolingian and Byzantine art, but developed a vigorous character of its own. Manuscript illumination flourished in Trier and in Reichenau, where the Gospel of Otto III about 1000 (Bayerische Staatsbibliotek, Munich) was produced. Works of sculpture include the wooden Gero Crucifix about 970 (Cologne cathedral) and the bronze doors and column of Hildesheim, near Hannover, 1015.

Middle Ages: 12th-15th centuries

The 12th century was a period of little artistic activity, though the rock carving of The Deposition at the Externsteine, near Detmold, 1215, is an extraordinary achievement. At the beginning of the 13th century, the Gothic style reached Germany from France. The most important surviving monuments of this style are the series of figures (dating from between 1230 and 1250) decorating the cathedrals of Freiburg, Bamberg, Naumburg, Strasbourg, Paderborn, and Münster. The Bamberg Rider late 13th century, in Bamberg cathedral, a free-standing equestrian carving, is one of the most original sculptures of the period. Painting flourished during the 14th century, the style being that of International Gothic. An elegant, courtly style, International Gothic was common to most of Europe, though by the early 15th century distinctive regional variations had been developed by German artists such as Bertram von Minden (c. 1345-c. 1415) and Konrad von Soest (c. 1378-c. 1415) in Westphalia, Stephan Lochner in Cologne, and Meister Franke in Hamburg. A second generation of 15th-century painters, drawing increasingly on Flemish, Burgundian, and Renaissance influences, includes Hans Pleydenwurff (c. 1420-1472) and Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519) in Nuremberg, Lucas Moser (fl. 1430s), and Holbein the Elder in Swabia, Hans Multscher (c. 1400-1467) in Ulm, Michael Pacher (c. 1435-1498) in Bavaria, Konrad Laib (active 1440-1460) in Austria, Konrad Witz in Switzerland, and Martin Schongauer in Alsace.

Renaissance: 16th century

The first 30 years of the 16th century, during which deeply rooted German medieval traditions struggled to come to terms with ideas from Renaissance Italy, saw some of the finest achievements in German art. The leading sculptors were Veit Stoss and Peter Vischer the Elder (c. 1460-1529), both of Nuremberg, and Tilman Riemenschneider of Würzburg, all of whom combine a mannered angular development of Gothic drapery with considerably increased freedom of movement and naturalism of expression. Vischer made the bronze statues on the tomb of Emperor Maximilian in Innsbruck 1513.

Among painters, Matthias Grünewald was an artist of great emotional force, his essentially medieval vision almost entirely untouched by the Renaissance. However, the greatest figure of the period, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, sought to merge German and Italian styles. He twice visited Venice and was strongly influenced by the Renaissance art he saw there, though the influence was mainly confined to his paintings and was not wholly beneficial, as may be seen in his two panels of apostles in Munich. He excelled at portrait painting, engraving, and drawing, where he combined clarity of design with rich and exquisite detail. Important contemporaries were Hans Holbein, Hans Baldung Grien, and Albrecht Altdorfer, one of the first true landscape painters. Lucas Cranach the Elder, a painter of portraits and mythological scenes, carried to the middle of the century something of the spirit of its opening years. From the 1530s onwards the Reformation brought about a sharp decline in artistic activity.

17th century

At the very beginning of the century there was the solitary figure of Adam Elsheimer, who made an important contribution to the development of landscape painting. But the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) checked almost all artistic activity and the art of the second half of the 17th century is mainly a court art, based on imported baroque models and with little connection to anything that had gone before. It was not until the end of the century that Germany produced an architect and sculptor of note in Andreas Schluter (1662-1714), who built part of the Schloss (palace) in Berlin and made the equestrian statue of the ‘Great Elector’, Frederick William of Brandenburg.

Baroque: 18th century

During the first half of the 18th century a development of the baroque style took place in southern Germany in which architecture, sculpture, and painting were combined to produce the most striking theatrical effects. Although the origins of this style are to be found in Italy, it represents an important and original German contribution to the baroque movement. The 18th century produced little notable native painting. The most important painter working in Germany during the first half of the century, Anthoine Pesne (1683-1757), was French, and the great Venetian Giovanni Tiepolo worked some years in Würzburg in the middle of the century.

The end of the century, however, saw the development of neoclassicism, a style that was enthusiastically adopted in Germany and retained its popularity until the middle of the 19th century. Anton Raphael Mengs, its leading painter, spent many years in Italy and based his style on the Italian painters of the High Renaissance. The theoretician of neoclassicism was the art historian Johann Winckelmann, its leading sculptor Gottfried Schadow (1764-1850).

19th century

Running parallel with the neoclassical style was the Romantic movement in painting. At the head of this movement stand the Nazarenes, a group of painters, active in Rome, who in their aims and methods anticipated the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their leader was Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869). Philip Otto Runge followed a similar line. More frankly Romantic was the work of the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose work is gloomy and full of religious sentiment. The Romantic style was carried on in the next generation by Ludwig Richter (1803-1884), Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871), Alfred Rethel (1816-1859), and, later in the century, the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.

Realism was adopted by Adolf von Menzel (1815-1905) and Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900), and Impressionism by Max Liebermann (1847-1935) and Lovis Corinth (1858-1925); Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was inspired by post-Impressionism, her style making her a precursor of expressionism.

A long-lost painting by the 19th-century German artist Moritz Oppenheim was discovered in early 1997. Oppenheim was the first major Jewish artist of modern times and only about 30 of his pictures survived the destruction of Jewish art carried out by the Nazis. The small portrait - The Cantor - was slipped into a book in 1939 when its owner escaped from Germany to Palestine.

20th century

The early 20th century was dominated by expressionism, practised by two major groups. Die Brücke, formed in Dresden 1905, included Ernst Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Erich Heckel. The more lyrical die Blaue Reiter, formed in Munich 1911, included August Macke, Gabriele Münter, and the Russians Alexei von Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky, perhaps the first totally abstract painter. Other expressionists were the sculptor Ernst Barlach, the graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz, the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, and the Swiss painter and graphic artist Paul Klee.

The Dada movement, formed in Zu-rich 1916, was a reaction to World War I, its anarchic iconoclasm appealing to George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst. Also a reaction to the horrors of the war was the Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity movement, which expressed the bitter social criticism of George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix. On the other hand the social and constructive possibilities of modern art were developed in the Bauhaus art school.

When the Nazis condemned all these movements as ‘degenerate art’, there was a wholesale dispersal of German artists in Europe and America. After World War II many German artists sought an art that tried to come to terms with the traumas of the country's recent history. The first to win an international reputation was Joseph Beuys, who was increasingly drawn to performance art. Another artist to gain prominence was Anselm Kiefer. Jorg Immendorf (1945- ) and Georg Baselitz (1938- ) brought about a revival of figurative painting known as neo-expressionism, a style that combined the dynamic colours, forms, and brushwork of the expressionists of die Brücke with a keen irony typical of the post-war world.