Leopold-Museum-order in sight

Who does not think of homeliness, foreclosure from the world and retreat to private? The exhibition »Biedermeier. An epoch in the start «in the Vienna Leopold Museum shows a different picture of the time, namely-the title says it-one from the departure to new shores that reflected in the arts. Although the Vienna Congress was initially the bourgeoisie, the path to political power was initially adjusted, but it continued to scratch the hooves. Until the revolution of 1848, the pressure was constantly increasing, of which one later said that he would evaporate everything that is constant and standing. Steam engine and new processes in steel production created the large industry, a building boom dominated by the city and the country.

There can really be no question of a lack of interest of the Biedermeier on the outside world if you look at the selection of paintings in the exhibition. The steel flows into melt and forging, it is hammered and done, everything is through Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. The stone bridge pillars are monumental in “Establishing the chain bridge under Emperor Franz I” by Karel Würbs in front of a landscape that only appears as an obstacle to be overcome, not as a place of longing of a universal poetics as before in romance. Here a realism is already appealing, which everything metaphysical is considered to be little useful for the business, which prefers this on this side of the hereafter.

The sobriety of the gaze is also evident in the cityscapes of Hubert Sattler, from the Acropolis to Cairo to Mexico City. It is already the view of a business traveler who in New York the almost infinite factory buildings with smoking slopes, in front of which the shovel bike steamships do their rounds, as admired as the minarets of Istanbul or the pyramids on the Nile: as a technical performance. The fact that painters like Sattler traveled the big wide world was also due to the increasingly far -reaching trade relationships according to the Napoleonic wars. Or in the case of the painter Thomas Enders, from which a city view of Rio de Janeiros is exhibited, the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, which extended to the distance of Brazil.

From the sugar hat it went to the Alps, where Großglockner or Matterhorn were immortalized in large -format paintings. The snow -covered peaks represent a nature that cannot be overcome with no bridge and for the time being beyond natural control, which makes it interesting as an object of tourist use. The silent shower of the sublime at the sight of the mountains is the echo of the shudder in front of the large industry, to which the petty bourgeoisie in Biedermeier, like the Virgin came to the child. Unlike in France, for example, it did not fought and probably did not intend. The new time circumstances was experienced as an eternal, unfathomable fate that was rediscovered in the mountain.

A self -portrait of Carlo Canella looks like a symbol image in his Milan Atelier. Through the window you look at multi -storey buildings of the booming metropolis in the Lombardy, but on the painter’s easel – surrounded by a well -ordered bourgeois interior – a landscape in idyllic dim light can be seen that never seems to have come into contact with human work. Here the outdoor and interiors of the Biedermeier are strangled in a strange way, which, however, connects one: order. Wherever you look in the exhibition, everything appears well -ordered. You have come to mind with the restoration frame, you accepted it and even more, you can’t and do not want to imagine anything else.

A hint of broken expressivity only becomes visible where the exhibition turns to the interiors: the family, fashion and the furniture. With “Girl after the Ball”, József Borsos shows a group of young women in an intimate round, the dress slips over the shoulder, half exposed to the breasts, the cheeks red, the look feverish and lustful. It is not a religious experience that heats these girls so much, it is simply the pleasure. So the act painting from its mythological references is also solved, a slumbering woman or a souvenir that draws a sleepy-erotic look at in Friedrich von Ameling’s “The Souvenir” are simply shown. Again there is this, here in their most human expression.

Nothing can be felt in the paintings anymore from the metaphysical drama of the Baroque, nothing more of the allegorical overload of classicism – and nothing more of its ideals. “Steam engines and railways, customs associations and government papers are the expression of what is more common in the whole and more appropriate than the depths,” wrote the Hegel student Eduard Gans about this era. The end of the Biedermeier does not indicate the exhibition with a view to the revolution of 1848, but to the first global economic crisis of 1857. In Eduard Swoboda’s “Gambling” from 1849 you can see a game table filled with coins, all around men and women, winners and losers. After order, the risk becomes an ideal – and as is well known, many more such crises followed in the 19th century alone. This can also be called a departure, one that can become demolished by a whole society.

“The peace is surface: In the pleasing botanisier drum, threatening cockchafer of emancipation and transition,” the dramatist and poet Peter Hacks once wrote, who in his doctoral thesis dealt with the theater of Biedermeier, which unfortunately – despite Vienna protagonists such as Johann Nestroy and Ferdinand Raimund – does not appear in the exhibition. For this you can see numerous wonderful exhibits that the Biedermeier show as an era of “cold revolution” (hacks). Even if the exhibition on the question that is still hotly discussed in research is, where Biedermeier stops and starts in front, you will gain a new look at this time, which was still politically in the corset of the old order, but have already dropped a few bonds economically.

»Biedermeier. An epoch in the departure «, Leopold-Museum, Vienna, until July 27th