TY - JOUR
AU - Burke, Kirsten J
AB - Adolph Menzel’s 1871 drawing of binoculars seems, at first glance, to require little in the way of art-historical intervention – or rather, at least little descriptive explication (Fig. 1). Menzel’s drawing appears to have already written about itself, so to speak, acting as both object and archive. We might imagine its isolated object belonging to a larger historical or technological puzzle playing out somewhere off-stage; one that necessitates certain kinds of working knowledge about this particular binocular’s mechanics, down to the exact dimensions scribbled on the right. Yet at the same time art history intrudes: we may be distracted from such functional questions by the way in which the object takes on a strangely animate quality, transforming across the page as if not to be pinned down by any one representational contingency or situational caprice. Indeed, this image is often invoked in art-historical thought-experiments and narratives concerning much-contested matters of ‘realism’.1 Perhaps art historians respond instinctively to its thematization of vision, its imaging of binoculars as themselves an instrument for seeing beyond seeing’s limits.2 But there is also something more particular about the gambit of its graphic substratum: the interplay of interior and exterior materiality foregrounds Menzel’s drawing as itself an image-making apparatus that is animate, mutable, and capable of mobilizing multiple registers of visual knowledge simultaneously. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Study of the Binoculars of Field Marshal Hellmut von Moltke, 1871, pencil and gouache, 26 × 40 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) For example, Menzel evidences an intimate connection between the binoculars and their carrying-case. Faint rings index the binoculars’ former occupancy in the faded red velvet interior.3 More than merely a perfunctory encumbrance, the well-worn leather of the case’s strap performs a convincing display of elasticity in quasi-calligraphic swirls and connective buckles. This leather strap is a much more unbridled version of the linear language that records, in skeletal terms, the diameter of the lenses on the right. In putting the object through its paces, Menzel’s drawing also takes us through a graphic modulation from makeshift pencil stroke to highly finished gouache – with a surprising outcome. It is as if we catch Menzel in the act of becoming unexpectedly captivated not by the binoculars per se, but by their container, instigating a detour into intermedial, rather than purely schematic or technological questions. The entire ensemble’s traces of facture become an almost ‘art-historical’ kind of archive, an instrument of both seeing and historicizing that turns objects inside-out.4 Menzel was the most celebrated German artist of the nineteenth century next to Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) – and one of the most remarkable draftsmen in the entire history of art – yet he is still largely unstudied outside of German scholarship.5 This is perhaps in part an inauspicious accident of place. Menzel spent most of his life, which spanned 90 years from 1815 to 1905, in Berlin, coming of age in what Peter Paret has described as a ‘thin artistic culture’.6 Goethe’s critical view, first published in a review of the Berlin Art Exhibition of 1802, has long remained a touchstone: …there seems to be at home in Berlin naturalism with its demand for reality and usefulness, and the prosaic spirit of the time manifests itself there most of all. Poetry is displaced by history, character and the ideal by portrait, symbolic treatment by allegory, landscape by views, general humanity by the narrowly patriotic.7 Berlin fell afoul of an age-old debate between ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic’ modes in nineteenth-century German art criticism, with its artists accused of cultivating vulgar trivialities of realism rather than aspiring to heroic or monumental subjects. Even the landscape of the city itself was too amorphous to inspire: its low-lying maze of gritty streets, waterways, railroads, and sand lacking natural landmarks appeared instead a staging-ground for constantly-changing patchworks of construction.8 This was a story of many things in-the-making; however, a setting seemingly conducive to all things cutting-edge except in art. While some Prussian artists such as sculptor Gottfried Schadow attempted to defend Berlin’s realism (claiming a virtue of how ‘every work is treated here as a portrait or likeness’), no gloss has yet been able to situate this chapter of nineteenth-century Germany within larger narratives of art history, nor make sense of Menzel as fully a ‘modernist’.9 Menzel was little understood even in his own time. At the age of eighteen, he enrolled in the Berlin Academy of Art and began the traditional process of learning from plaster casts of ancient sculpture, but quickly withdrew to become entirely self-taught.10 He took over his father’s lithography workshop and began his career producing small-scale historical designs and lithographic invitations, ornamental decorations, greeting cards, announcements, menus, diplomas, and reproductions of portraits – incidental graphic materials that had to keep pace both with rapid societal change and industrial production.11 Menzel’s rise to prominence began in 1839, when he was commissioned to provide 400 drawings for wood engravings to illustrate Franz Kugler’s History of Frederick the Great, a comprehensive life and times of the eighteenth-century Prussian king. These illustrations not only helped make the book a bestseller, but also led to long-lasting changes in the way in which history itself was conceived and illustrated in print thereafter – a phenomenon still largely unrecognized outside of Germany.12 Menzel went on to execute another 200 designs for a spin-off project called Works of Frederick the Great, followed by 436 more for The Army of Frederick the Great and Its Uniforms, laying the foundation, as I will argue, not only for history but also for the possibilities of drawing as an experimental site of seeing in modernity.13 The enormous success of the Frederick histories catapulted Menzel from the lithographic workshop to the sphere of Prussian courtly commissions.14 He created huge canvases based on the repertoire of his popular Frederick illustrations such as Frederick the Great Playing the Flute at Sanssouci (1852), before tiring of the theme later in the 1850s. The most that can be said of his political opinions is that he seemed to fall in line with the liberal Berlin bourgeoisie, yet his views cannot be deduced from his work – neither from his choice to depict the horrors of bodies in the streets following the revolution of 1848 and industrial working conditions on the one hand, nor the monarchical histories of Frederick the Great and military scenes on the other. He makes sense only in terms of how he made, rather than in the ‘who’ or ‘what’. Even in the glittering majesty of court paintings, Paret has described Menzel’s subtle details of disquiet, social settings and crowds in which individuals are caught ‘hovering between delight and discomfort’,15 and Christopher Wood aptly marveled at how ‘Menzel dreamed an airless world of automatonlike courtiers, treacherous physiognomies, periwigs and tricorn hats, and gargantuan crystal chandeliers.’16 See for example, the man with the hat jammed unceremoniously between his legs, turned away from the group while wolfing down food in The Supper at the Ball (Fig. 2). Already in his Frederick the Great wood engravings, Menzel had insisted on total control over the choice of illustrations and filled the pages with many less-glorifying anecdotal moments of the historical monarch’s life. He integrated them into the text in unorthodox ways, such that images told their own story centered around pictorial experiments with darkness and inward-looking scenes of self-reflection. Ultimately his ambiguous position vis-à-vis official patronage seems due both to his own lack of interest and the ‘court’s silent unease with the unpredictable and uncontrollable pictures of an artist whom it was perhaps safer to honor than to employ’.17 Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, The Supper at the Ball, 1878, oil on canvas, 71 × 90 cm. Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Safer indeed, the more we look to the re-visions of drawing: Menzel’s graphic archive includes sketched-portraits of monocular sight in which the artist does violence to his own face, poised on the far edge of the sketchbook with one eye cut off as if even the most direct frontality of sight is forestalled by the intervention of the page’s edge (Fig. 3). These kinds of experiments are not necessarily only ‘about’ Menzel himself, but something inside-out about drawing sight, whether of subject or object. The ambidextrous artist pursued an unusually programmatic practice of drawing unceasingly on sketchbooks he carried with him in special pockets sewn into his coats.18 His aim, he writes, was to ‘draw everything’.19 What often intrigues viewers about these drawings is Menzel’s penchant for a quasi-forensic degree of documentation (Fig. 4), as well as what Michael Fried calls ‘his uncanny ability to bring lifeless objects under his spell and fill them with mysterious life’ (Fig. 5).20 In 2002, Fried wrote what was the first book in English to tackle the wide scope of Menzel’s work. Fried asserted that the peculiar quality of Menzel’s ‘realism’ is due to the artist’s evocation of the multi-sensory, embodied nature of visual experience. Drawing on later nineteenth-century empathy theory and notions of projection, Fried argued that for Menzel, the visual (whether drawn or painted) carries with it traces of corporeality.21 However, two questions remain: first, what can we make of the incessant return to drawing?22 Menzel himself makes much of the specificity of the medium, filling sketchbooks with drawings that survive by the thousands, together with epistolary correspondence in which writing and drawing seamlessly interpenetrate to create a remarkable graphic archive of nineteenth-century visuality. Yet there is no study dedicated to Menzel’s graphic oeuvre nor his interrogation of questions of history and modernity through experiments in drawing. Is it possible to articulate a more contextualized framework – materially and historically – for considering the ‘work’ of Menzel’s drawing practice? Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Partial Self-Portrait, 1876, pencil, 15 × 8.8 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Study of Transport Truck, 1872, pencil, 22.3 × 30.5 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Unmade Bed, c. 1845, black stone and stump on greenish-gray paper, 22 × 35.5 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) This last question is prompted by a particularly abstract example. In the opening lines of T.J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, Clark imagines Menzel’s gouache study of binoculars unearthed by some future archaeologist, as one ‘among a handful of disconnected pieces whose context, history, and language has somehow been wiped out’.23 What forms of life, he wonders, could future viewers reconstruct from this material? The binoculars stand as a mute backdrop as Clark muses that the patrimony of art-historically construed ‘Modernism’ is by now already a ruin, its fossilized fragments teetering on the brink of illegibility. However, Menzel’s treatment of the binoculars seems actively to resist such ossification, calling attention to the very notion of legibility through form and facture, as well as the historicity of material knowledge embedded within the graphic rendering. Moreover, these are not, in fact, Menzel’s binoculars. Rather, the inscription above spells out their precise spatio-temporal placefulness: ‘Field Marshall von Moltke’s binoculars (and: case), which he used in the 1870–71 war.’24 And, line itself speaks volumes. The binocular’s varied tracings evince a concern not only with the object, but with the very possibilities and plausibility of descriptive modes that animate objects’ otherwise hidden forms of life. Rather than extracting the object from the graphic space of Menzel’s drawing – as in Clark’s thought-experiment – I suggest that we consider the descriptive work of the drawing as itself engaging in something analogous to a thought-experiment – what I call a sight-experiment. My investigation proceeds in three stages and follows Menzel’s own mode of looking from the inside out: first, the question of how Menzel made these sight-experiments out of history; second how their experimental mode contended with matters of modernity and mechanical media that transformed drawing’s site, and lastly, the way in which Menzel’s radical inside-out-ness of sight mobilizes an ‘anecdotal’ mode that would prove central not only to his art, but to art history itself. Sight-experiments A thought-experiment – something that most of us intuitively perform on a daily basis without much reflection – is a device of the imagination, typically for the purpose of thinking through the consequences of a principle, theory or action.25 Thought-experiments attempt to grasp an experiential dimension of some operation that cannot actually be performed in reality by imaginatively testing it out from all points of view, or by letting it run its temporal course, before drawing a conclusion. Thus we can imagine navigating the world beyond the typical spatio-temporal contingencies of embodied experience, experimentally placing ourselves in situations we would otherwise be unable to see or understand – as if seeing somehow from outside of ourselves. (One famous example: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?) While they do not lead to new empirical information, thought experiments often ‘present some previously un-recognized property of the world with a logical force’ that bypasses the ordinarily incoherent morass of sense perception.26 Similarly, Menzel’s drawings seem to generate an entire spectrum of ways of seeing, as if working through an object to apprehend the totality of its material situation. Importantly, I suggest that this mode of drawing is bound up not only with sight, but also with a notion of site; that is, conditions and contingencies of situatedness. For example, the relation of a container to its content, bodies and instrumental apparatus, or even people, places, and atmospheres brought together by attachments and encumbrances that often go unnoticed in everyday life. Menzel is concerned with crafting the connective tissue between things, so to speak. Indeed, one contemporary, watching Menzel sketching Field Marshall Moltke from life, recalls his perplexity at Menzel’s seemingly circumlocutory process: ‘While we were on tenterhooks, Menzel squandered his time painting the decorative charms around Moltke in chocolate brown and yellow ochre.’27 Menzel himself described his process as one of ‘durchraisonnieren’ – what is typically translated as ‘reasoning out’ an object.28 I propose, however, that it is crucial to re-consider Menzel’s neologism as it more literally translates to ‘reasoning through’ an object. My investigation of ‘through-ness’ contextualizes Menzel’s drawing practice alongside a historical dimension of the artist’s graphic work that is often given short shrift in discussions of his ‘realism’. Simply put, I propose that Menzel’s approach was deeply influenced by his early career designing wood engravings for Franz Kugler’s History of Frederick the Great (1840). Kugler was a pioneer art historian and head of the Prussian Ministry of Culture in Berlin who counted cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt among his prominent students. Menzel’s own fascination with this art-historical aspect of the project knew no bounds. He conducted a thorough study of Frederick’s life and the history of eighteenth-century Germany, down to the most minute matters of style and social customs29 Menzel also worried about the visual accuracy of these designs in their transition from drawing to print. Because there were few highly skilled wood engravers in Germany around 1840, Menzel’s publisher had to send the woodblocks with the artist’s designs to Paris, to the engravers who had worked on French history painter Horace Vernet’s illustrations for the recently completed Histoire de l’Empereur Napoléon (1838–39) by Paul Mathieu Laurent.30 This did not bode well: the Parisian engravers had developed certain types of hatchings that they routinely employed in order to render forms, patterns, and backgrounds with maximum efficiency.31 When they failed to reproduce the detail of Menzel’s drawings precisely the artist was driven practically to despair, and sent years of heated letters back and forth in fear for the fidelity of his designs. He was so troubled by the experience that he even sought out his own German wood engravers to train from scratch.32Ultimately, he personally guided a team in Leipzig and Berlin to achieve the proficiency of their French counterparts.33 Yet try as they might, the engravers still struggled to reproduce Menzel’s subtly differentiated physiognomies and the atmospheric gradations of light and shadow that perfused his compositions, as illustrated in an 1840 edition now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Fig. 6). Indeed, while scholars have noted Menzel’s innovative introduction of anecdotal scenes into the highly formalized genre of illustrated history,34 less often considered are his remarkable experiments with atmosphere and modes of visibility in nocturnal settings.35 As shown on a little-known sketch sheet (Fig. 7), he began with an inky field and let the image emerge by gradually scraping away to reveal the white paper below. This allowed him to filter his spectral figures quite literally through the darkness. Such operations do not seem merely a matter of probing the limits of the depictable, as Werner Busch has suggested;36 but rather, a matter of beginning already from the point of drawing’s utmost limit – pure opacity – and then pulling through, wresting the figures from the encasement of darkness as if creating life-forms through a process turned inside-out. But how to preserve such finicky nocturnal nuances in wood engraving? To Menzel, at least, we know that the end results – transposed by Parisian intermediaries – rarely passed muster. Ultimately, I suggest that Menzel’s ongoing concern with the situatedness of his drawing has to do in part with the exigencies of years spent dislodging his drawings from their own originary site and relinquishing their transposition to far-off foreign engravers – ultimately losing detail, depth, and the kind of ‘inside-out-ness’ that drove his creative process. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Crown Prince Frederick Appears after his Pardon at a Court Ball in the Berlin Palace (left); Battle of Rossbach; French Infantry Fleeing to the Right at Dusk (right). Wood engravings for Franz Kugler’s History of Frederick the Great, 1840, 102 × 75 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett, Hamburg. (Photo: Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk.) Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Sketch sheet of studies for Franz Kugler’s History of Frederick the Great (1840), brush and ink over pencil, partly scraped, 36.4 × 43.9 cm. Private Collection. Menzel’s letters – surprisingly little-studied – provide another avenue for contextualizing the impact of such dislocations. In these we find that Menzel drew copiously, freely pastiching different points of view into hybrid sight-lines that do away with the rigidity of representational categories as well as the conceits of framing devices. On 22 October 1840, he describes a rainy day excursion to three Berlin landmarks, juxtaposing a cartographic below with footprints marking the way below, and above a panoramic slice of the same journey seen from ground level – a literal experiment with seeing site (Fig. 8).37 In this hastily scribbled sketch, the lines that form rain ooze down to become ‘ground’, which then, in turn, trickle teasingly into continuity with the writing immediately below. Object and ‘description’ become coextensive sites. In an earlier 1839 letter to his publisher, Menzel wrote of his work on the Frederick the Great designs as perpetually digressing into peripheral costume studies (we may recall contemporaries’ bafflement about Menzel’s attention to ‘the decorative charms around Moltke’): ‘I am still deep in studies … the costume of the time is an infinite field … I want to use them [costume studies] in order to endow my works with the utmost authenticity…’.38 In exploring the situated-ness of his own work, Menzel even depicted the conditions of different modes of picture-making in drawing, re-staging their visuality through the all-encompassing ‘eyewitness’ of his graphic line. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Letter to Wilhelm Puhlmann, 22 October 1840. Zentralarchiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, SMB-ZA, IV/NL Menzel, X. 4. (Photo: Zentralarchiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.) Menzel was also more aware of contemporary artistic developments than one might suppose from conventional descriptions of him as an outsider. His writings about the Frederick the Great illustrations reveal the artist’s in-depth knowledge of Parisian engraving projects. He also developed an abiding interest in studies of horses’ heads, reminiscent of the heads and limbs that Théodore Géricault studied for projects such as the Raft of the Medusa.39 Discussions of Menzel’s realism tend to downplay such influences, however, as if the notion of ‘realism’ necessitates a reading of his drawing practice as a hermetic snapshot of the here-and-now, rather than in terms of material processes of generation. So, too, blindness to the ‘durch’ of Menzel’s durchraisonnieren – an ironic misprision given the artist’s own thematization of conditions of sight and blindness. I propose that we consider Menzel’s drawings not merely as a quest for achieving some sort of realism, or a study of haptic qualities, but rather, as sites of sight-experiments that deal with changing conditions of seeing and knowing in an expanded purview of rapidly-urbanizing nineteenth-century Berlin – conditions manifested in the very mechanics of art-making itself. Menzel was certainly no stranger to the procedures of mechanical reproduction (first through assisting in his father’s lithography workshop and then later as an advisor for his brother’s photography studio), but he also appears to have understood himself as a kind of historian excavating the manual matter of facture and its relationship to the mechanics of modern manufacture. Investigating this ‘through-ness’ often comes down to the quiddity of myriad in-between bits which form the connective tissue of objects, attachments, and sites. What is it that makes things cohere in the world, or on the page? After the turbulence of his early-career wood engraving projects, it seems telling that Menzel adhered staunchly to drawing despite conflicting commercial imperatives. Later we catch him drawing on the margins of lithographs and photographs in the Kupferstichkabinett, Hamburg, as if pulling the objects out of the page and turning the medium itself inside-out to see past the limits of sight (Fig. 9). As we will see, this attention to the ‘through-ness’ of drawing emerges most directly in Menzel’s sight-experiments of the eye and body. It allows us to re-orient discussion from over-psychologized readings of Menzel’s appearance, or assumptions of a personal ‘alienation’ expressed through his drawing.40 Rather, we can uncover Menzel’s ability to make drawing perform not simply a snapshot of ‘realism’ or truthfulness,41 but more specifically, a kind of placefulness. Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Pencil Drawings on a Photograph of Pistols Belonging to Princes of Saxony (16th Century), graphite on cardboard (with photograph); 47.2 × 31.7 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. (Photo: bpk Bildagentur/Hamburger Kunsthalle/Elke Walford.) The Site of the Eye: Drawing, Inside-out Head of a Woman (c. 1881) shows Menzel in the thick of things, thematizing the materiality of the graphic mark in relation to substances of the body and its internal and external situation (Fig. 10). In the upper corner of the page, Menzel tries out a disembodied eye, as if peering down toward its own embodied portrait in situ below.42 A similar re-working of a disembodied eye appears on the page of one of Menzel’s letters – interlacing visual and verbal notations of the artist’s attention to sight – as he illustrates this feature’s mis-transposition from its original drawing into wood engraving. For Menzel, even the most minute matters of positioning had implications for his attempt to negotiate material relationships between persons and their different fields of vision. In light of Head of a Woman, perhaps we can imagine the imbrications of binocular and case, with which I began, in analogy to Menzel’s calibration of the relationship between eye and face. He stages not only the graphic support, but also the graphic surround. This displacement, I suggest, forms a central theme of Menzel’s graphic oeuvre. It coalesces more specifically around the eye and the body in studies from the 1870s to 1890s (Figs 11–13), drawings that depict anonymous subjects – ‘people he encountered by chance on his summer travels and in the streets and restaurants of Berlin or models chosen from among the many who presented themselves at his studio each morning’.43 Fig. 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Head of a Woman, 1894, pencil, 20.9 × 12.9 cm. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA. (Photo: Harvard Art Museums.) Fig. 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Head Studies, c. 1882–4, crayon on wove paper, 12.7 × 20.3 cm. Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI. (Photo: Rhode Island School of Design Museum.) Fig. 12. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Woman Combing Her Hair, 1894, graphite, 31.0 × 22.9 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) Fig. 13. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Studies of a Young Woman, 1870 or 1879, graphite, 15.9 × 24.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.) These studies triangulate between interconnected operations of face, eye, and hand. Perfused by the ethereal textures of stumping, Menzel’s isolated eye is not merely the excised organ itself; but rather, the eye as embedded within the contours of the face – the eye with surrounding filaments of flesh and shadow (see Fig. 10). Wavy graphite marks beside the eye flesh out this study even further. Indeed, years before, in one of his many missives accompanying designs for use in Frederick the Great, Menzel implored the Parisian engravers to attend most carefully to the particularities of his figures’ heads.44 Menzel seems to have found this procedure infinitely fascinating; for example, staging a version of the very same confrontation in reverse: in a drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a woman faces her own excerpted eye head-on, the disembodied watcher now becoming the watched (Fig. 13). The eye has been similarly excised and investigated for its ‘inset’ ensconcement within the face. A fringe of marks above sketches out the full arc of hair that eludes our gaze in the woman’s left profile. This is, I suggest, not merely a matter of ‘decontextualization’ of part from whole. Rather, it interrogates how an object is elaborated and transformed through the space of the page, testing out the three-dimensional coherence and connectivity of even the most fragmentary forms Menzel’s highly self-conscious drawing of this ‘thickness’ of sight, so to speak, parallels a turning point in the history of the eye. As Jonathan Crary noted, scientific discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century shifted decisively from centuries-old geometrical optics, based on the properties of light to a new physiological optics begun by Goethe and others.45 The shift culminated between 1856 and 1866 with the three volumes of Hermann von Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics. According to Crary, One of the effects of Helmholtz’s widely read work was to undermine with finality any sense of the eye as a transparent organ and to put forth a comprehensive account of human vision in all its anatomical and functional complexity. The eye emerges in this text not only as a marvelous apparatus but as one with built-in aberrations, proneness to error, and inconsistencies in its processing of visual information. Helmholtz emphatically embeds the eye within the thickness and opacity of the body.46 Sight itself was no longer something rational and geometric, nor could it be adequately understood in schematic terms such as mere ‘lines of sight’. The possibility of seeing becomes embedded with a larger network of perceptual possibilities. Following Helmholtz, Wilhelm Henke, a professor of anatomy in Rostock, published a text called Zeichnen und Sehen (Drawing and Seeing) in 1871.47 The text achieved prominence as it appeared in volume edited by Rudolf Virchow, one of the leading physicians of the nineteenth century. Henke is virtually unknown today, yet in publications that also included Das Auge und der Blick (The Eye and the Gaze, 1869) he discussed the eye in terms of pictorial representation: what are the conditions that make observation possible and, the other way around, how can different modes of representation help us to understand the nature of vision?48 Henke identifies two kinds of image processes, one he associates with art and the other with science: ‘the purpose of drawing is twofold: either the production of vivid images in the imagination of the observer … Or the representation of a precisely correct knowledge of objects’.49 Menzel, however, turns these categories on their head: in his drawings, it is through imaginative sight-experiments, often with the workings of vision turned inside-out, that one arrives at precise knowledge of objects. Jörg Probst has also recently called attention to Menzel’s mode of drawing a thing from all sides, as if rotating it in a series of transformations across the page, in relation to Henke’s own discussion of the eye’s fleshed-out physiology in terms of drawing and photography.50 Henke claims that scientific insights are best facilitated by drawing, and problematizes photography in part for the difficulty of choreographing and capturing sitters’ gazes in ways that appear true to sight.51 Menzel’s relationship to photography has proven difficult to assess, despite the fact that Frederick the Great publisher Franz Kugler marvelled at the impression of ‘daguerrotypical’ fidelity the artist achieved already in the 1830s.52 Yet I propose that many of Menzel’s sight-experiment drawings can be related to photographs not only in the more obvious sense of their documentary precision and carefully-chosen framing effects, but also in more invisible operations of sight. For example, as I have argued, Menzel’s point of departure was to treat the surface of drawing not as a blank page per se, but as a dark ground that begins from invisibility. He sometimes served as an advisor to his brother, who owned a photography studio, and we have already seen how he drew on the margins of photographs to re-imagine historical objects inside-out (see Fig. 9). Thus Menzel would also have been familiar with photography’s tricky relationship to the temporality of the moment that a photo is taken.53 If lighting conditions too harshly accentuated sitters’ signs of age or distorted their eyes, artists often resorted to post hoc re-touching, disrupting the fiction of photographs’ frictionless capture as the ‘pencil of nature’ and returning again to the handmade.54 According to Walter Benjamin, himself born in Berlin during the final decade of Menzel’s life, ‘what was invariably felt to be inhuman, one might even say deadly, in daguerrotypy was the (prolonged) looking into the camera, since the camera records our likeness without returning our gaze’.55 In German, the word for ‘moment’, Augenblick, literally means ‘eye glance’, or in English the ‘blink of an eye’. The piercing sight of Menzel’s sitters sometimes uncannily gives the impression that they have been looking out at us already for a long time. But unlike Benjamin’s camera, Menzel’s pencil results not in a singular congealed image but in many different moments, materializing the Augenblick as moments-as-glances-of-the-eye that unfold across the page. Nothing about the temporality of the image seems lost to sight, in the drawing’s temporality of looking. These invert Benjamin’s idea of photographs that record likeness without returning our gaze; rather, the viewer’s sight is sometimes outnumbered by the multiple eyes borne of a single portrait. If not satisfied, Menzel scratched out the eyes with his pencil or even went so far as to cut them out of the page with scissors while leaving the rest intact (Fig. 14) – a more extreme violence than that implied even by his own monocular self-portraits (see Fig. 3).56 One of Menzel’s friends wrote of the artist’s visual acuity, or ‘Sehschärfe’ (literally, ‘vision sharpness’) that earned him the nickname ‘Ophtalmographiker’.57 He also reported that the elderly Menzel once showed him a reproduction of one of the artist’s most famous Frederick the Great woodcuts, and remarked with great consternation: ‘You see, this flabby cowardly face and forced taut posture show the aged king. I am satisfied with that. Only these eyes I can no longer approve of. No old man can look like that.’58 Fig. 14. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Half-Length Portrait of a Man, pencil, 18.4 × 11.6 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) Scaling out from the ‘outwardness’ of the gaze itself, sometimes a whole section of the face is detached along with the eye, a spectral doubling that oscillates between a space of intimate proximity and the literality of dis-embodied distance. Perhaps most extreme is the Met drawing, which reproduces the entirety of two polar-opposite heads – one in light, one suffused by shadow – while a cross-hatched swathe of graphite in the interstice between them creates an eerie sense of physical connection between these two versions of the same ‘self’. Even within a single self, like the Harvard Art Museum’s Head of a Woman, one finds that the woman’s gesture again gets at the question of extension, as if she is pulling her body through the page. Her comb appears to merge with hair, object, and incidental patch of graphite. In the uncertain haze of the drawing’s stumping, she seems somehow in danger of smudging her face out of existence, were she to continue. In fact, what seems to be another version of the Harvard Art Museum’s Head of a Woman survives in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, bearing neither eyes nor face, but with a deliberate doubling of this gesture (Fig. 15): here, she seems already to have unravelled herself. In the absence of the eye, the hand engages in an inverted procedure of through-ness, revealing the subject through a deconstructive act of unmaking. Such gestures stage the eye within subjects’ relation to their cosmetic self-making, private moments of combing, carrying, or dressing that ordinarily take place away from others’ gaze. Fig. 15. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Study of a Woman Powdering Herself, c. 1881, graphite, 20.9 × 13.0 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) From the trappings of the eye and the fleshed-out forms of clothing, Menzel’s investigation often expands outward to the situatedness of the body as a whole and its external encasements. Indeed, Menzel’s notion of scale (and ‘detail’) abjures the simple linearity of scaling up or down; rather, drawing inside-out and through the page. For example, further exploration into the making of Menzel’s binoculars reveals a lesser-known pencil and gouache study depicting the equipage of interior and exterior in Field Marshall Moltke’s rubber raincoat (Fig. 16). Although detached from any person, the space of the page itself becomes a ‘body’ that the coat clings to. One wonders: is it animate in and of itself, or because of some uncanny collusion between the graphic support and surround? Faint sketches of the arms and back encroach from all directions, enhancing the coat’s imagined sense of rain-proof imperviousness as it somehow emerges unscathed from this melée of marks. Posed playfully as if pointing, it further highlights this rubber material in a prodigious display of rippling folds and high-gloss surface. From the opening of the left sleeve, a finger emerges, pointing down to a faint sketch of the coat’s shoulder – perhaps implying that one could pick this sketch off the surface of the page as well, and critically inspect it against its more finished gouache counterpart. We are left to wonder about the relationship between the body and this encasement that seems to contain already its own internally-crafted animacy. So, too, Menzel’s earlier studies of suits of armour in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin: absent of bodies’ internal occupancy yet nonetheless alive as ‘external’ forms (Fig. 17). Does armour passively surround the body, is it an extension of the body, or has it somehow sublimated the body altogether into the mechanical apparatus? Incomplete patches reveal that beneath it all lie spectral lines of Menzel’s sketches, experimenting with different modes of seeing as if to assess which combinations of buckles and joints most readily springs to life. Fig. 16. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, the Waterproof Coat of General Hellmut von Moltke, 1871, graphite with black and gray wash heightened with white gouache on tan wove paper, 39.6 × 25.4 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) Fig. 17. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Six Suits of Armor Standing against a Wall, 1866, gouache on olive-brown paper, 38.3 × 52.3 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) Perhaps it is by now a truism to note that this nineteenth-century era was one of increased fascination with the culture of the machine – but also at the same time an era of increased anxiety about the body. Menzel’s animation of antiquated armorial specimens is all the more fascinating in this modernizing moment of arms manufacturing, and in light of a new wave of treatises problematizing the overlap between technology and the body.59 Ever since his ‘art-historical’ inquiry for Kugler’s Frederick the Great, Menzel worked back and forth between historical and modern conditions, as if investigating how the mode in which things are rendered belongs to a specific place with specific attachments. Moreover, Menzel’s inquiry resonates not only with contemporary scientific study, but also with what we now recognize as early forays of a formalized ‘history of art’ in nineteenth-century Germany. Heinrich Wölfflin, in a theoretical chapter in Renaissance and Baroque (1888) entitled ‘Causes in the Change of Style’, wrote that ‘we have only to compare a Gothic shoe with a Renaissance one to see that each conveys a completely different way of stepping’.60 It seems telling that in studying Menzel, one never comes face-to-face with the mysterious Field Marshall Moltke – his binoculars, his costume, even his raincoat, but never a Menzel-made image of the man himself. Only Moltke’s trappings and encumbrances. Different objects reveal different things about their people, and their places. From just a brief glimpse of Moltke’s binoculars, one gets the sense that these are binoculars that have a style, a place, and a history – or at least, a story to tell. Menzel foregrounds the placefulness of even the most quotidian or small-scale object. Later, in his unfinished Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin famously mused that: …the nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case … What didn’t the nineteenth century invent some sort of casing for! Pocket watches, slippers, egg cups, thermometers, playing cards – and, in lieu of cases, there were jackets, carpets, wrappers, and covers.61 Menzel’s concerns often start from the literality of facture, but extend beyond such cases and holders to grapple more generally with the question of through-ness as an operation that situates objects and bodies – an operation made possible through drawing’s own freedom to mobilize multiple registers of visual and manual knowledge. This could include conditions of sight and blindness simultaneously, as well as construction and deconstruction examined inside-out. The concept of ‘outside’ itself scaled rapidly, thanks to Berlin’s newly-expanded railroads. These advancements in transportation upended even the notion of what constituted center and periphery, inside and outside, by more smoothly connecting far-flung regions. And by connecting (or rather, colliding) people: as Berlin-born philosopher Georg Simmel (1858–1918) would write in 1912, ‘before buses, railroads, and trams became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never put in a position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a word’.62 Menzel was the first German artist to depict railway travel as a mass phenomenon after he saw the landscape change with the establishment of a Berlin-Potsdam line.63 Not only that, but he also experimented with representing the train from the inside, focusing on what individual people look like in this experience of silently seeing and being together, rather than only the representation of travel itself – one of his many secret histories that make personal sites out of even the most seemingly mechanistic innovations of modernity. ‘Secret histories’ How can we recover the layers of context, innovative spatio-temporal calibrations, and continuity of object-description that Menzel himself so carefully crafted? We have to re-think the notion of ‘scale’ to include a dimension of inside-out-ness, and to follow his graphic trajectories from scribbled schema to fully-fleshed form. These sight-experiments open up spaces and subjects that reveal a remarkable attention to conditions of situatedness, both at the level of motif and of medium itself. Moreover, it seems that Menzel’s concern with site is bound up with the larger question of how to make legible the changing conditions of the nineteenth-century environment, a negotiation of both inward and outward, manual and mechanical. He confronted a patchwork of old things in new containers, modern photographs of historical artifacts, familiar sites made foreign through now-unfamiliar urbanized surrounds, and forms of facture and manufacture obstructed by new opacities of de-personalized production. Towards the end of his life, as he withdrew from society, Menzel remarked that ‘there is no self-made glue between me and the outside world’ (‘es fehlt an jedem selbstgeschaffenen Klebstoffe zwischen mir und der Aussenwelt’).64 This perception of his own relationality resonates with Menzel’s life-long attention to the connective tissue, the graphically-calibrated material equivalences – the durch – of his ‘reasoning-through’ drawing, as he drew the Aussenwelt both from inside out and outside in. Yet Fried translates Menzel’s ‘selbstgeschaffene Klebstoffe’ as ‘self-generated glue’, thus departing from the more literal dimension of ‘made-ness’ typically associated with ‘geschaffen’. In addition, he explicitly focuses on ‘the notion of “self-generated” rather than that of “glue”’.65 But Menzel’s drawings make the ‘glue’ (‘Klebstoff’ literally meaning ‘attachment stuff’) a substance of investigation, heightened by Menzel’s selbstgeschaffen sense of ‘self-made-ness’. Drawings are inherently themselves ‘close’ things that often live in more intimate relation to makers and viewers than do other forms of art. In this they are similar in kind to the dusty papers and personal objects that Menzel depicts in drawings such as Move from a Basement (Fig. 18), so haphazardly stacked as if they might swallow up the young girl who sits on the edge of the pile. Menzel reputedly never once made a picture directly from nature, instead always beginning work from drawings as if they were the fundamental scaffolding, to speak, of all representation itself.66 In addition, his early years making things typically kept ‘out of sight’ from the realm of fine art such as menus, diplomas, and other small lithographic designs contributed to the artist’s ability to coax histories from everyday sites and anecdotal moments of personal care-taking. Indeed ‘anecdote’ is the closest critics usually come to finding common ground about many of Menzel’s works.67 Paintings such as Supper at the Ball (see Fig. 2) are the usual points of reference, but also in the drawing Move from a Basement, there is more to the huddled girl’s story: on a table to the far right lies a doll, its splayed-out limbs dangling at the far edge of table and drawing alike (see Fig. 18). In between girl and doll, as if keeping them apart, is the precarious hodgepodge of things unearthed from some subterranean cellar and just now brought to light. The closer we look, a story similarly seems to come to light about the contingency of this excavated pile, the lone girl, and her relation to the plaything on the table. It also illustrates a typically Menzelian blurring of boundaries between human and object, animacy and archive – between the still child on the left and the faceless-yet-animate doll on the right, and in the middle the patchwork of similarly anecdotal things suddenly made placeless. Thus if we scale outward, towards a final bird’s-eye view of Menzel’s drawings, what emerges is a curiously anecdotal mode of making and knowing. Fig. 18. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, Moving from a Basement, 1844, pencil on paper, 13.1 × 20.8 cm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) Anecdote: the ‘narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting and striking’. Joel Fineman has elaborated on this definition to provide the most influential discussion of anecdote in recent years: ‘the anecdote … as the narration of a singular event, is the literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real’.68 For Fineman, it is ‘a historeme, i.e. the smallest unit of historiographic fact’, which therefore raises the question of the ‘historiographic integration of event and context’.69 Calling into question the relation of the particular to the general, anecdote ‘introduces an opening’ into grand historical narrative by uniquely representing the force of contingency.70 It is the ‘hole’ within the ‘whole’, that produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by establishing an event as an event within and yet without the framing context of historical successivity.71 While generating alternative histories, anecdotes also often involve an implicit claim to personal experience or eyewitness, akin to the way in which Menzel’s makes even mundane objects appear ‘personal’ or filled inner life, calling into question their relation or ‘glue’ to places and people. Menzel once compared himself to a novelist who often starts out intending write one small note but then writes a book, seizing on a single object and traveling into its depths (‘ich fahre mit einem Gegenstand in die Tiefe’) – a tendency that may have contributed to Menzel’s difficulty fitting into art history or its modernisms72 As Christian Weikop has observed, ‘on the one hand Menzel’s paintings give us unrivalled cross-sectional and often critical insight into nineteenth-century German society, but on the other his art lacks the unifying and universal qualities of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting’.73 While his work may seem ‘too specific’ to make for a coherent narrative, its digressiveness is a way of approaching larger questions. His sight-experiments create, in their momentary Augenblick, a world that looks like our own – but one that is is separate, looking beyond. It is a different reality for staging visual experience, akin to how we inherently ‘see’ something happening when we experience a thought experiment in our imagination.74 This is perhaps in part why the designation ‘Menzel’s realism’ can feel unsatisfyingly like a dead-end. Ultimately what Menzel opens up is not an extension of our reality, but another, more capacious one: an anecdotal world where it is possible archaeologically to interrogate the nature of seeing itself and to denature its ‘glue’ within the graphic space. Werner Hofmann has pointed to Menzel’s ‘destruction of genre-like painting of events – that is, the liquidation of a painting’s aura of comfort’ as an overlooked innovation of Menzel’s that foreshadows the later course of twentieth-century German art, despite the fact that the artist’s drawings are not typically considered in such radical terms75 Closer to Menzel, it was, in fact, Walter Benjamin who is credited with seeing in anecdote the potential for radicality. As Paul Fleming explains: If, according to Benjamin, historical constructions are like instruction books that command and contain life, then their opposite is the street insurrection of anecdotes, which oppose the empathy demanded by history: ‘The true method for making things present is: to represent them in our space (not us in their space). Only the anecdote can move us to do this.’76 Menzel’s drawings often take to the streets as if enacting a literal version of anecdotal ‘street insurrection’. A situatedness akin to his sites of the eye underpins these landscapes, with their focus on through-lines of oblique perspective and frequent motifs of construction-site scaffolding (Fig. 19). Dividing Menzel’s drawings according to genre or subject matter has long obscured the overarching questions of ‘self-made’ site, and the building blocks of attachment to one’s surroundings that run throughout his graphic work. For example, Menzel seemed to return time and again to the challenge of depicting makeshift scaffolds, calling attention to the way in which these wooden constructions situate workers in unusual and precarious relation to buildings and things. Providing a platform for processes of repair, scaffolds are also literal structures for seeing ‘through’ in their semi-transparent skeletal frameworks. They allow the viewer to examine the buildings that they buttress from typically unreachable points of view. Yet as sight-experiments with lines of site they are always temporary ones. Scaffolds are necessarily ephemeral because built to be disposable – constructions with no place in history except the one made by Menzel’s own page. Fig. 19. Open in new tabDownload slide Adolph Menzel, View from the Window onto a Scaffold and the Street, c. 1875, graphite, 26.0 × 20.4 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.) More literally recalling Benjamin’s notion of anecdote as making things present by representing them in our space, Menzel’s drawings both look outward and physically come ‘out’ toward us in their experimental seeing-through. Not only vertiginous scaffolds and aerial perspectives, but also endless re-visions of arms and hands appear to reach through the page (see Figs 11 and 16). This outwardness in part inverts Michael Fried’s proposal regarding empathetic projection of the viewers’ own body into such scenes77 – and gestures towards what I have already described as Menzel’s inside-out-ness. And when it comes to historical structures, Menzel’s Frederick the Great project did, in fact, ‘interrupt’ history in Fineman’s sense. It changed the making of history not through the historical text itself, but through pictorial anecdote and visual structure. Often overlooked, too, is the way in which Menzel’s graphic practices persisted despite new mechanics of production that threatened to obscure such connections to the made-ness of surroundings in the past. It seems that Menzel saw in drawing a medium that maintained the means to mobilize this made-ness, bringing both history and modernity to a level of personal familiarity through facture. As Crary has explained, Benjamin also wrestled with the changing nature of observation such that ‘there is never a pure access to a single object; vision is always multiple, adjacent to and overlapping with other objects, desires, and vectors’.78 Menzel’s drawing captures this elusive kind of multiplicity, while also preserving a capacious sense of transparency by way of graphic legibility. His sight-experiments often stray far from the empirical or the ‘realistically’ verifiable, ranging from an inside look into the calligraphic caprices of Moltke’s mechanical binoculars, to the external animacy of disembodied eyes and armorial spectres, to the skeletal world of builders’ scaffolding. Just as binoculars act as instruments of seeing beyond the limits of sight, scaffolds, too, serve Menzel as a paradigm of surveying the limits of site. Rather than seeing from the typical vantage point within a structure, the view from the scaffold turns things inside-out. Menzel’s scaffolds may also lead us to reflect on their medium: drawing has so often served a kind of ‘scaffolding’ function of sorts, often as preparatory studies that remain behind the scenes in an ancillary or subsidiary role within some larger chain of artistic process. Yet for Menzel, the scaffolding both within and of drawing, took center stage for re-structuring the conditions of vision as an interplay of inside and out, support and surround. The original etymology of the word, ‘anecdote’, from Greek anekdota meaning ‘things unpublished’79 (or alternatively, ‘secret histories’80) itself seems particularly apt for Menzel’s graphic sight-experiments. Across intermedial interstices of wood engraving, painting, photography, Menzel’s graphic legacy lived on in surprising – and still unknown – ways. For example, in Das Holzschnittbuch (1921) a new kind of ‘modernist’ woodcut history by German-Jewish art critic Paul Westheim (1886–1963) which charts a course across 500 years from Gutenberg to German Expressionism, Westheim celebrated Menzel’s ability to mastermind his Frederick the Great designs despite what he calls the ‘deadening’ interference of the wood engraving process. He marvelled at the artist’s unusual ability to navigate his drawings safely through the transitional era of mechanical reproduction.81 Key to contextualizing this achievement is Menzel’s discovery, derived from drawing, that the ‘realism’ of drawn things depends in part on seeing as if our sight itself is somehow seeing in situ. Thus, Menzel’s experiments with modes of sight and situatedness return again and again to his experience making history and historicizing making itself. Deeply frustrated by the dislocations of his wood engraving histories and their mechanical mis-steps, I suggest he adhered even more staunchly to drawing for its expansive possibilities – both to navigate the myriad interstices and attachments of sight (its surround as well as support) and at the same time to mobilize a medium of eyewitness that had no necessary situatedness in a closed chain of artistic process or reproductive imperatives. It was free to materialize, re-materialize – re-animate – both object and archive, and in doing so to navigate the nineteenth-century sight of both history and modernity. Art’s history in particular owes much to anecdotes – some of its most foundational narratives are anecdotes and have shaped the nature of writing about art from its origins.82 Drawings have never been the medium of art-historical grand narratives like painting or sculpture, but, like Benjamin’s anecdotes, they have the potential to ‘interrupt’ such histories. Menzel animates the backdrop of social and technical constructions that constitute modernity’s ‘local’ life-world of flux – at the same time as he explores the structuring principles of larger historical narratives. And in many cases, as his binoculars’ leather case so nimbly displays, these are drawings that have already radically ‘written’ about themselves, encasings and all – secret histories, unpublished things, and insurrections of the street made with foresight, for future sites of seeing. Rather than simply allowing us to see through the artist’s eyes, it is as if we catch Menzel attempting to see through ours, making visible the way in which vision connects us to each other, and to art’s possibility of seeing beyond. Acknowledgements Thanks go to Hanneke Grootenboer, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Joseph Koerner, and the anonymous reviewers of Oxford Art Journal for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay. I am especially grateful to Ewa Lajer-Burcharth for her inspiring discussions about drawing and for encouraging me to delve more deeply into Menzel. Footnotes 1 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 1–2; Werner Busch, Adolph Menzel: The Quest for Reality, trans. by Carola Kleinstück-Schulman (Los Angeles, CA,: Getty Research Institute, 2017), pp. 253–4; Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Factura’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 36, no. 1, October 1999, pp. 11–4. 2 See Koerner, ‘Factura’, p. 13. 3 Michael Fried also explores this feature in Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 47. 4 For a discussion of Menzel’s Study of the Binoculars of Helmut von Moltke in terms of facture and how ‘making has been made a way of knowing’, see also Koerner, ‘Factura’, pp. 11–4. 5 Monographic studies by Fried, Menzel’s Realism and more recently, Busch’s Adolph Menzel 2017 tend to deal predominately with Menzel’s painterly production in terms of its ‘realism’. There are still few synthetic considerations of the artist’s vast graphic oeuvre; perhaps the most important catalog remains Werner Hofmann (ed.), Menzel, der Beobachter (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1982). For an overview of earlier Menzel scholarship, see Hubertus Kohle, ‘Zur Menzel-Literatur der letzten 15 Jahre’, Kunstchronik, vol. 46, no. 4, April 1993, pp. 192–202. 6 Peter Paret, ‘Berlin in Menzel’s Time’, in Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher (eds), Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 74. 7 Quoted in Françoise Forster-Hahn, ‘Aspects of Berlin Realism: From the Prosaic to the Ugly’, in Gabriel Weisberg (ed.), The European Realist Tradition (Bloomington, IN,: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 125. 8 Peter-Klaus Schuster, ‘Menzel’s Modernity’, in Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher (eds), Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 137. 9 Quoted in Forster-Hahn, ‘Aspects of Berlin Realism’, p. 126. 10 Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 5. 11 C. B. With, ‘Adolph von Menzel: A Study in the Relationship between Art and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1975), p. 21. 12 Busch, Adolph Menzel, pp. 61–75. 13 Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 5. 14 Peter Paret, German Encounters with Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 36–7. 15 Peter Paret, Art as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 172. 16 Christopher S. Wood, ‘Embody Language’, Artforum International, vol. 41, no. 2, October 2002, pp. 43–4. 17 Paret, Art as History, p. 172. 18 Françoise Forster-Hahn, ‘Authenticity into Ambivalence: The Evolution of Menzel’s Drawings’, Master Drawings, vol. 16, no. 3, October 1978, p. 256. 19 Forster-Hahn, ‘Authenticity into Ambivalence’, p. 276 note 7. As Menzel writes: ‘N. B. Alles ZEICHNEN ist nützlich und ALLES zeichnen auch!’. 20 Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 46. Fried’s formulation draws in turn upon Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher’s description of Menzel’s binoculars as imbued ‘with a secret life of their own’. See Keisch and Riemann-Reyher (eds), Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, p. 350. 21 For example, see Fried’s notion of a ‘somatic tenor’, or ‘projecting ourselves as if corporeally’ into the ‘lived perspective’ of scenes such as Menzel’s pencil drawing The Schafgraben Flooded (c. 1842–3). See Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 34. 22 Recent catalogs still focus primarily on Menzel’s painterliness; for example, Bernhard Maaz (ed.), Adolph Menzel – radikal real (Munich: Hirmer, 2008); Anja Grebe, Menzel: Maler der Moderne (Berlin: Elsengold, 2014); Anne Marie Pfäfflin (ed.), Menzel: Maler auf Papier (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2019). 23 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, p. 2. Interestingly – and this is not discussed by Clark himself nor by later commentators on his text – Clark’s proposal echoes quite closely (albeit in the negative) that of nineteenth-century French critic Edmond Duranty, who described Menzel’s 1875 gouache Bricklayers on a Building Site thus: ‘Six bricklayers are at work, and they work seriously. If the future had only this drawing with which to reconstitute our art of bricklaying, including the worker’s costumes, their inflections and movements, and the special tasks pursued by each of them, it would suffice…’ Quoted in Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 129. 24 Translated by Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, in Keisch and Riemann-Reyher (eds), Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, no. 133. 25 James Robert Brown and Yiftach Fehige, ‘Thought Experiments’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 edn) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/thought-experiment/>. 26 David C. Gooding, ‘What is Experimental about Thought Experiments?’ PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992, no. 2, pp. 280–90. 27 Keisch and Riemann-Reyher (eds), Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, p. 350. 28 Françoise Forster-Hahn, ‘“No Day without a Line”: Menzel’s Construction of Authenticity’, Drawing, vol. 13, no. 3, September, 1991, p. 49, and Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 10. For the original German, see Paul Meyerheim, Adolf von Menzel: Erinnerungen (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1906), p. 133: ‘Er nannte das, einen Gegenstand “durchraisonnieren”.’ All translations are my own otherwise noted. 29 Claude Keisch, So Malerisch!: Menzel und Friedrich der Zweite (Leipzig: Berlin: E.A. Seemann; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2012); Hubertus Kohle, Adolph Menzels Friedrich-Bilder: Theorie und Praxis der Geschichtsmalerei im Berlin der 1850er Jahre (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2001). 30 Busch, Adolph Menzel, pp. 61–2. 31 Busch, Adolph Menzel, p. 62. 32 Paret, Art as History, pp. 50–2. 33 Busch, Adolph Menzel, pp. 62–3. 34 Kathrin Maurer, ‘Visualizing the Past: The Power of the Image in Franz Kugler and Adolph Menzel’s Illustrated History Book Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen (1842)’, Germanic Review, vol. 87, no. 2, April 2012, pp. 103–22. 35 Busch, Adolph Menzel, pp. 77–82. 36 Busch, Adolph Menzel, p. 84. 37 Letter to Wilhelm Puhlmann, 22 October 1840. Reproduced in Adolph Menzel, Briefe, Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher (eds) (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), vol. 1, pp. 144–5. 38 Menzel, Briefe, vol. 1, p. 110: ‘Ich sitze noch tief im Studienzeichnen, das damaliche Kostüm ist ein undendliches Feld … so will ich sie auch aus dem Grunde benutzen, meinen Arbeiten hiebei die größtmöglichste Authenticität zu geben…’. 39 Keisch and Riemann-Reyher (eds), Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, p. 225. 40 As recently as 2017, Werner Busch wrote of Menzel’s appearance: ‘Menzel was, in a way, defenceless, and capturing what he saw was his way of resistance.’ See Busch, Adolph Menzel, p. 51. 41 Keisch and Riemann-Reyher (eds), Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, p. 84. 42 On this drawing, see Stephan Wolohojian (ed.), A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University, 2003), no. 138, and Samuel Ewing, ‘Blindness and Vision’, in (eds), Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2017), pp. 157–61. 43 Wolohojian (ed.), A Private Passion, p. 326. 44 Menzel, Briefe, vol. 1, p. 157: ‘Daß nur auf den mitfolgenden Zeichnungen durchweg die Köpfe aufs Höchste in Acht genommen werden! An denen liegt das Meiste.’ 45 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 214–5. 46 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 215. 47 Wilhelm Henke, Zeichnen und Sehen (Berlin: C.G. Lüderitz, 1871). 48 Wilhelm Henke, Das Auge und der Blick; Vortrag gehalten in Schwerin 1869 (Rostock: Kuhn, 1871). 49 Jörg Probst, Adolf von Menzel, die Skizzenbücher: Sehen und Wissen im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2005), pp. 20–2. 50 Probst, Adolf von Menzel, pp. 20–2. 51 Henke, Das Auge, p. 32. 52 Françoise Forster-Hahn, ‘Adolph Menzel’s “Daguerrotypical” Image of Frederick the Great: A Liberal Bourgeois Interpretation of German History’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 59, no. 2, June 1977, pp. 242–61. 53 Henke, Das Auge, p. 16. 54 John Hannavy (ed.), ‘Retouching’, in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography (New York: Routledge), 1:1180–91. 55 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 147. 56 Frida-Marie Grigull and Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg, Blinde Blicke: Sehen und Nicht-Sehen bei Adolph Menzel: Gouachen, Pastelle, Bleistiftzeichnungen und Lithographien aus dem Kupferstichkabinett – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2015), p. 44. 57 Axel Delmar, ‘Die Kleine Exzellenz’, in Gisold Lammel (ed.), Exzellenz Lassen Bitten: Erinnerungen an Adolph Menzel (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), p. 104. 58 Delmar, ‘Die Kleine Exzellenz’, p. 107. ‘Sehen Sie, dieses schlaffe feiste Gesicht und die erzwungen straffe Haltung zeigen den gealterten König. Damit bin ich zufrieden. Nur diese Augen kann ich nicht mehr billigen. So vermag kein alter Mann gucken.’ 59 Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 165. 60 Quoted in Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 42. As Alina Payne has argued, in 1888 ‘Ẅlfflin went even further and argued that the feeling for form is revealed in all objects that the body surrounds itself with—whether artistic or not—from architecture, furniture, books, cars, objects (fork, knife, plates etc.) to clothing, in other words, in the anonymous, secondary, unselfconscious part of object making.’ Alina Payne, ‘Wölfflin, Architecture and the Problem of Stilwandlung’, Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 7, December 2012, pp. 1–20. 61 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), pp. 220–1. 62 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 151. 63 Schuster, ‘Menzel’s Modernity’, p. 145. 64 From Menzel’s testament, ‘Notizen für meine Hinterbliebenen’, in Gustav Kirstein (ed.), Das Leben von Adolph Menzel (Leipzig: E.A. Seeman, 1919), p. 97. Quoted in Forster-Hahn, ‘No Day Without a Line’, p. 49. 65 Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 150. 66 Paul Meyerheim, ‘Adolf von Menzel: Erinnerungen’, in Lammel (ed.), Exzellenz Lassen Bitten, p. 223. 67 Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 208. 68 Joel Fineman, ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’, in H. A. Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 56. 69 Fineman, ‘History of the Anecdote’, p. 56. 70 Paul Fleming, ‘The Perfect Story: Anecdote and Exemplarity in Linnaeus and Blumenberg’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 104, no. 1. March 2011, p. 75. 71 Fineman, ‘History of the Anecdote’, p. 61. 72 Probst, Skizzenbücher, p. 26. 73 Christian Weikop, ‘Culture Wars: The Enemy Within’, Art History, vol. 24, no. 5, November 2001, pp. 762–7. 74 Quoted in Alice Murphy, ‘Thought Experiments and the Scientific Imagination’ (PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2020), p. 70. 75 Werner Hofmann, Wie Deutsch ist die Deutsche Kunst?: Eine Streitschrift (Leipzig: Seemann, 1999), p. 83. Quoted and translated in Paret, German Encounters with Modernism, pp. 32–3. 76 Fleming, ‘The Perfect Story’, pp. 83–4, note 6. 77 Fried, Menzel’s Realism, p. 257. 78 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 20. 79 Roland Greene et al. (eds), Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 51. 80 By the eighteenth century, in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ‘secret histories’ becomes the first meaning given: ‘secret histories of what has gone on in the inner counsels of Princes and in the mysteries of their politics’. See Lionel Gossman, ‘Anecdote and History’, History and Theory, vol. 42, no. 2, May 2003, pp. 151–2. 81 Paul Westheim, Das Holzschnittbuch: Mit 144 Abbildungen nach Holzschnitten des vierzehnten bis zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1921), p. 138. 82 Mark Ledbury, ‘Anecdotes and the Life of Art History’, in Mark Ledbury (ed.), Fictions of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 173–86. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Adolph Menzel and the Site of Seeing in Nineteenth-Century Drawing
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcab045
DA - 2022-04-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/adolph-menzel-and-the-site-of-seeing-in-nineteenth-century-drawing-4bHcsTGsQZ
SP - 1
EP - 27
VL - 45
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -