Schweinfurt, Germany.- The Museum Georg Schäfer is proud to present “Magic Nocturnal Moments: Carl Spitzweg and Artists From the Collection”, on view at the museum through February 19th 2012. The exhibition features more than 60 works from the museum’s collection, showing how the German Romantic painters and their contemporaries illustrated night during the nineteenth century. Carl Spitzweg features frominently in the exhibition, with works including “Der Blasturm in Schwandorf”, “Nachtwächter in einer alten Stadt (Nightwatchman in an Old Town)”, “Der Stern von Bethlehem (The Star of Bethlehem)”, “Geigender Eremit in Felsenklause Nächtliches Stelldichein”, “Hexenritt (Witches Ride)”, “Ein Ständchen vom Boot aus Der Astrologe (Sternengucker) (The Astrologer – Stargazing)” and many others. Schäfer’s work is set in the context of the time by including a number of works by other famouse German artists and artistic schools.
Other schools are represented with night pictures of the German Romanticism school by Caspar David Friedrich and Gustav Carus taking on contemplation and a timeless sense of foundation in the sense of a penetrating pantheism. In addition there are Frederick Carus , Oehme , Lessing , Schwind , Lier , Schleich the Elder , Lichtenheld , Adolph Menzel , Diez , Johann Peter Hasenclever and others. Nocturnal drinking scenes, moonlit landscapes, liaisons, fantasy and religious scenes are illustrated by moonlight, fires and candles and the then new-fangled gas lamps.
Carl Spitzweg (February 5, 1808 – September 23, 1885) was a German romanticist painter and poet. He is considered to be one of the most important artists of the Biedermeier era. He was born in Unterpfaffenhofen as the second of three sons of Franziska and Simon Spitzweg. His father, a wealthy merchant, had Carl trained as a pharmacist. He attained his qualification from the University of Munich, but while recovering from an illness he also took up painting. Spitzweg was self-taught as an artist, and began by copying the works of Flemish masters. He contributed his first work to satiric magazines. Upon receiving an inheritance in 1833, he was able to dedicate himself to painting. Later, Spitzweg visited European art centers, studying the works of various artists and refining his technique and style; he visited Prague, Venice, Paris, London, and Belgium. His later paintings and drawings are often humorous genre works. Many of his paintings depict sharply characterized eccentrics, for example “The Bookworm” (1850) and “The Hypochondriac” (c. 1865, in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich). His paintings inspired the musical comedy Das kleine Hofkonzert by Edmund Nick. He is buried in the Alter Südfriedhof in Munich.
The Museum Georg Schäfer presents the most important private art collection of the German speaking world, with its focus on the 19th Century. With paintings and works on paper from the laste 18th until the beginning of the 20th Century, it offers panoramic views of the various art movements of the time – from late rococo, the classicists and romantics to the Impressionists and Secessionists. Among the oldest paintings in the collection is Januarius Zicks ‘Rural Idyll’ from around 1760, the youngest Max Liebermann’s wife ‘Martha Liebermann’, created in 1930. The quality of the collection is based on a combination of top-class works with individual groups of works of major artists and new discoveries of paintings by lesser-known masters. Thus, the Georg Schäfer Museum stands in line with the collection of English art at the Tate Gallery, London, or the collections of German art in the National Gallery , Berlin, and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. A characteristic of the collection is that it contains extensive porfolios, showing the individual artists in a comprehensive overview of their development work.
The museum contains the largest collection of Carl Spitzweg’s works with 160 paintings and 110 drawings. But, the museum also has more than 100 paintings, gouaches and drawings by Adolph Menzel, and significant collections of works by Caspar David Friedrich, Georg Ferdinand Waldmüller , Wilhelm Leibl and his friends Johann Sperl and Carl Schuch , Hans Thoma , Josef Wenglein Wopfner , Max Liebermann and Max Slevogt . Georg Schäfer (1896-1975) began actively collecting paintings in the 1950s, and architect Erich Schelling drew up plans for a museum to house the collection. A later design by Mies van der Rohe was rejected when the Schweinfurt city council declined to assume the cost of maintaining the museum. The plans were later adapted for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The city of Schweinfurt and the Schäfer family first came to terms on housing the collection in a museum in 1988, but those plans were delayed by a financial crisis in the FAG Kugelfischer company, which led Schäfer’s heirs to mortgage the art collection. By the end of 1997 the family had regained control of much of the collection and established a foundation to protect it. City officials meanwhile secured resources for the museum, and in February 1997 Volker Staab won the commission to design the museum. The museum is sited next to the city hall (Rathaus) at the southern entry to downtown Schweinfurt. The museum opened to the public on 23 September 2000. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.museumgeorgschaefer.de