BIEDERMEIER ~ The Invention of Simplicity ~ at the ALBERTINA

Written by Harriett Lecroy Wednesday, 10 November 2010 15:53

Vienna, Austria - In the exhibition entitled BIEDERMEIER – The Invention of Simplicity  the Albertina is showing around 450 exhibits from all art genres created in the period between 1810 and 1830. Paintings, drawings and water colors, crafts and home culture illustrate the new aesthetic ideal, which originated at the court and among the nobility, and then around 1800 went on to conquer the capitals of Central and Northern Europe. On exhibition until 13 May, 2007.

The identifying characteristics of the new Biedermeier style are abstract forms – sometimes completely reduced to simple geometry – lustrous colors, and the absence of surface decoration. In furniture design surface structure, color and sheen of the materials were autonomous values in themselves and dominated form, construction and ornament.

The exhibition
BIEDERMEIER – The Invention of Simplicity in the Albertina presents the style of early Viennese Biedermeier as a European phenomenon alongside works created during the same period in Weimar, Munich, Berlin and Copenhagen. Outstanding and representative exhibits are being loaned from approximately 80 institutes such as the Danske Kunstin dustri museet in Copenhagen, the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague, the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg Potsdam and the Vienna Court Furniture Depot.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Director of the Albertina: "BIEDERMEIER – The Invention of Simplicity" is probably the most important exhibition for the Albertina since its reopening. It has a direct link to the early decades of the Albertina, to the history of its interior design, when Archduke Karl, the sole heir of the Albertina’s founder, had the entire palais refurnished and redecorated by Josef Danhauser and his workshops. It was done in the latest style of that era, articulated in the total reduction to simple geometry on the one hand and on the other in the utmost interest in surface quality, for example veneering. It is an exhibition that combines all media: furniture, glass, porcelain, silver, painting, water colors, drawings, scientific instruments. This new, radical simplicity, which originated in Vienna, the city of the 1815 Congress, and then spread abroad to influence Berlin, Copenhagen, Munich and Dresden, finds expression in astyle with a deep-lying connection to Archduke Karl and the imperial house. The exhibition will at the same time demonstrate that the early Biedermeier period – so different from the later, sentimental Biedermeier – also gave birth to the modern movement. For what Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser and Otto Wagner discovered around 1900 is precisely this style of early Biedermeier, which they saw as the most important source of inspiration for the Viennese modern movement.

The exhibition was conceived as a scholarly cooperation between the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, the Albertina in Vienna and the Musée du Louvrein Paris.  the exhibition will travel to Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin June 6 – September 9, 2007; and Musée du Louvre, Paris October 15, 2007 – January 15, 2008.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

" The Invention of Simplicity " is one of the most important exhibitions in the Albertina’s history, since it deals with the beginnings of the interior decoration of this archducal palace. Around 1822, Archduke Charles, the universal heir and adoptive son of the Albertina’s founder, entrusted the workshop of the young cabinet maker Joseph Ulrich Danhauser with one of the largest interior decoration commissions of his time, envisaging a radical modernization of the palace.

This noble commission, as well as numerous pieces of furniture once owned by the imperial household, are proof of the fact that this new style of simplicity was not a bourgeois style, but was rather launched by Central Europe’s highest princely families. This style, which reduced the shape of furniture, silver, and porcelain to simple geometric form, combined rational design and economical production. Together, these two created a promising symbiosis for the future. Within a short period of time, Biedermeier, which originated among the higher nobility, wasto become the paragon of bourgeois domestic interior culture.

Eventually, around 1900, Josef Hoffmann, Kolo Moser, and Adolf Loos believed to have discovered the ideal of bourgeois functionality in the radical simplicity of early Biedermeier and thus established its aesthetic principle as the authentic manifesto of modernity. Therefore, the Albertina’s show also elucidates the birth of Modern Art and the phantom of its identification with the democratic expression of the early bourgeoisie. The essential formal characteristics of pre-modern simplicity around 1820 were the reduction to geometric basic form, the revelation of the tectonic structure of things – be it furniture, plants, or mountains -, as well as the renunciation of detail, décor, and ornament. Simultaneously,particular emphasis was placed upon the materiality of objects, the treatment of surfaces by means of modern polishes, reflections, and smoothness. This is illustrated by shining writing cabinets and table bells, as well as by the artificial reflexes on the porcelain-like complexions of children’s portraits. Beauty is nature itself – with the grain of wood, the polished section ofcut stone, or shimmering skin turning into ornament.

Only the diversity of genres reveals that apparently peripheral movements in the visual arts – such as the chamber painters in the circle of Archduke Johann or the artists’ group of the Nazarenes – were indeed typical phenomena of the epoch of early Biedermeier.
The descriptions of nature also articulate an interest in the natural sciences, and the tectonics and structure of plants and mountains were captured with crystalline sharpness and objective austerity. From the capital and residence – the venue of the Congress of Vienna – major accomplishments of this radical style of simplicity spread internationally, to the other metropolises of Central and Northern European Biedermeier, such as Munich, Berlin, and Copenhagen. But their was no other artistic centre where the design principles of simplicity – the contrast of light and dark, an emphasis on silhouettes, and the juxtaposition of warm and cold colors  were handled with so much wit and irony as in Vienna.

The Invention of Simplicity illustrates that this early period of Biedermeier was an international phenomenon. It reveals resemblances between Austrian and Danish art and finds a connection between the Humboldt Brothers in Berlin and Weimar Classicism: aside from the adoption ofclassical antiquity, which had been taken over from Neo-Classicism, and the discovery of nature, Goethe’s Theory of Colours was the third keystone of this epochal and new simplicity.  The Biedermeier years fall within The Golden Age of Austrian painting and drawing. Biedermeier’s emphasis on reality, on what is empirically graspable, without romantic, symbolic, or ennobling overstatement, was revolutionary in its time. The immediate »visual experience« – in the newly discovered local landscape or in the reality of the human image devoid of all idealization– became an autonomous, valid pictorial subject in its own right. Landscapes and city scenes were core subjects of paintings, watercolors, and drawings. One important factor contributing to the development of landscape painting in the waning eighteenth century was an increased demand for pictures among the upper strata of the bourgeoisie, manifested above all in numerous, popular series of »voyages pittoresques« Jakob Altoccupies an important position within this context.

The discovery of the Salzkammergut, a region of Austria depicted in numerous watercolors and oil paintings of the Biedermeier period, is attributed primarily to Ferdinand Olivier. While Olivier viewed the landscape primarily as a symbol of complex, predominantly religious, allegories, Biedermeier artists concentrated on visible phenomena. Alt himself – often accompaniedby his son Rudolf – took hikes to the lakes of the Salzkammergut, which he painted inintricately executed gouaches in which realism is blended with a subtle,  occasionally Romantic, atmosphere of light.

Franz Steinfeld’s painting The Hallstättersee in Upper Austria is regarded as the work that »gave birth« to Viennese painting of the Biedermeier period. Here, perspective is expanded far beyond the scope of the sensitive nature studies of earlier years and realism with its obsession with detail for the first time controls the entire composition. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller chose a similar point of view in his View of Hallstatt, in which the almost palpable forms of light drenched buildings surpass even Steinfeld in terms of realism. Waldmüller’s Salzkammergut landscapes from the mid-1820s are considered highlights of Biedermeier painting by virtue of their unpretentious subjects and the often almost surreal depiction of light.

A key figure in the development of new regions and themes as worthy subjects for painting was Archduke Johann Baptist of Austria, a leading intellectual of his time. He was passionate about documenting not only the local landscape but also the customs and indigenous culture of the region. Devoid of all external symbols of class and noble background, Leopold Kupelwieser’ saustere, objective portrait vividly conveys the strong-willed man who broke with many of the prevailing conventions of his age. The court painters he appointed and instructed to document the alpine landscape of the Steiermark were among the leading landscapists of the time.For example, Matthäus Loder, appointed court painter in 1816, painted View of Brandhof  around 1824.

In portraiture, one of the most admired pictorial genres of the Biedermeier period, increasingly sought after among the upper bourgeoisie, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller was certainly one of the most uncompromising advocates of a new truth to nature. Along with Waldmüller, Friedrich von Amerling, who trained his eye primarily on the English paintings of such artists as Thomas Lawrence, was a preferred portraitist among the nobilityand the affluent bourgeoisie in Vienna, especially during the 1830s and 1840s. The appeal of his portraits lies in his refined painting style, as reflected, for example, in the depiction of porcelain skin or his effective color harmonies, primarily warm, vibrant browns. The description of reality is often combined with heightened sentimentality, especially in his greatly admired children’s portraits. The mere posture of a young girl gazing dreamily into the distance with her head resting on her arm in an emphatic gesture of melancholy clearly implies the sentimental concentration of expression in a moody image of adolescence.

The world of simple craftsmen – often viewed under aspects of social criticism – now becameworthy of depiction for the first time. The »industrial painting« as an invention of the Biedermeier is embodied in an early gouache by Carl Agricola showing a blacksmith’s shop. Beforethen, such a motif would have been conceivable only in a mythological context, such as adepiction of the furnace of Vulcan (Hephaestus). Johann Baptist Reiter and Franz Eybl would continue the evolution of similar themes into the 1830s and even the 1840s.

Flower paintings occupied a privileged position in Austrian Biedermeier art. While an interestin exotic plants was confined primarily to a small circle of aristocrats until the eighteenth century, the lovingly tended house garden now became an important place of retreat in bourgeois households. Erasmus von Engert, who has been unjustly ignored by most scholars, depicted the idyllic setting of such a house garden in Vienna. Moritz Michael Daffinger’s fine flower paintings exhibit close affinities to botanical illustrations. A highly successful portraitist during the Biedermeier period, he devoted his attention during the last two decades of his life to the theme that had always been closest to his heart – the illustration of local flora.

The Albertina is a museum in the Innere Stadt (First District) of Vienna, Austria. It houses one of the largest and most important printroom collections in the world with approximately 65,000 drawings and approximately 1 million old master prints, as well as more modern graphics works.

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