Legacy on the wall in Adolph Menzel’s Studio Wall paintings

Werner Hofmann’s 1977 essay “Menzels verschlüsseltes Manifest” (“Menzel’s Encrypted Manifesto”) argues that Adolph Menzel’s (1815-1905) Studio Wall (1872) is a “Realist manifesto” addressing the artistic possibilities of the late nineteenth century. Hofmann reasserts the standard Modernist narrative, often applied to Menzel’s career, of the self-determining Realist artist triumphing over the obedient academician. Following the examples of Marc Gotlieb and Norman Bryson, both of whom problematize the relationship between tradition and originality in productive ways, this paper proposes that Menzel’s two Studio Wall paintings (1852 and 1872), are less about a break from tradition and more about Menzel’s own relationship with tradition, both in terms of the burden it placed on him as he sought to find a distinctive achievement of his own, and the place his art would find in tradition when viewed by future generations. There is no question that Menzel’s art ushered in many of the distinctive aspects of Modernism in Germany through his turn toward contemporary Berlin life, prioritization of reality, and interest in the fragmented body, but to focus only on this achievement neglects the concerns he possessed regarding both his relation to the past and his place in the future canon of German artists. The Studio Wall paintings, with their collections of death masks, artists tools, and plaster casts—all weighty embodiments of tradition—show the way in which the different stages of his career generated destabilizing questions about the entire apparatus of academic tradition: from the hierarchy of genres, to the superiority of painting as a medium, to the classical ideal, and the different modes of academic training.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Art History

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Gooding, Rebekah

Contributors dc:contributor

• O'Brien, David

• Adolph Menzel
• Adolph Von Menzel
• Realism
• Art Academies
• Studio Wall
• Painting
• Legacy
• Tradition

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Rebekah Gooding

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129896

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129896