No description available.

No description available.

In September 2014 whilst standing in front of Albrecht Durer’s Adam and Eve, my heart stirred, this painting from the 16th Century actually provoked a physical reaction in me. This was not the first time I had seen this painting but this time I was touched. I was not drawn to the Christian subject matter but I was drawn to Durer’s oil painting. The painting(s) are of a man and a woman, both nude. Their bodies appear oddly shaped, with their pale lit bodies against a dark background. They are removed from an earthly setting, they stand on a lunar-like ground. Adam’s feet are on tiptoe, Eve stands on one foot, the other coquettishly resting behind the front foot. Is this a strange dance? Celestial darkness frames the couple. The green fauna covering their genitals, like 8 emerald highlights, is exquisite yet almost comic in the exacting delicacy. The frames of the panels stop Adam and Eve touching; the frame is a barrier between them. They do not meet each other’s gaze. His mouth is open, hers is closed. Both hold an apple in anticipation of taking the forbidden bite. Leaning in to each other the vulnerable gesture of Adam’s right hand takes the viewers eyes on diagonal journey via the foliage up to the apple. This diagonal line is replicated with Eve’s hands. It is Adam that holds my gaze. His golden curls remind me of Durer’s self-portraits. I am drawn to his parted lips, their cherry redness inviting, wanting to be kissed. His body is young and old, gnarly and hairless. At the time of painting he would have been 36, an age I have been whilst studying for the Doctorate - no longer young.1 Being intrigued by the man who painted this painting, led me to find propositions that Durer may have been homosexual or bisexual. ‘Meanwhile, in private letters, he rhapsodized over "handsome" soldiers. He was particularly fond of one of his apprentices.’ (Cohen,2012) Like me, his amorous or indeed narcissistic gaze rests on Adam and those red lips. Slowly I understood that Adam and Eve was a touchstone for my practice. The painting holds the key ingredients to my work: a man and a woman, intimate yet distant. My photographs use a similar jewel-like lighting set against darkness. There is unexpected desire in the image. I left the painting thinking of the light against the darkness, love and death; the beginning of a journey.

This study examines the British reception of early German painting in the nineteenth century through the case study of the Krüger acquisition for the National Gallery in 1854. It provides new information about why this collection of predominantly religious fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings from Cologne and Westphalia was acquired and how it was evaluated, displayed and distributed in British public and private collections, against a backdrop of midcentury developments in British public displays of art, art-historical literature, private collecting and the art market. In light of long-held perceptions that the acquisition was a mistake and that the paintings were inferior to early works from Italy and the Netherlands, this study offers an alternative perspective that it was an enterprising attempt to implement new models of historical display in national collections, and to rationalise how supposedly inferior paintings could have value in public and private collections. By looking at the way these rediscovered German paintings were evaluated, this study advances understanding of how Romantic, scholarly and formal models for reexamining early paintings overlapped, conflicted and changed in the nineteenth century. The Krüger acquisition and distribution successfully established a place for early German painting in the core collections of the National Galleries in London, Dublin and Edinburgh at early stages in their development, but it did little to redress established prejudice against the school in Britain. Decisions taken about how these pictures were presented to the public shed new light on the significance of key individuals for shaping long-term perceptions of early German paintings in Britain. Beyond the question of German art, those decisions reveal how practical and tactical considerations could be just as important as art-historical ones in choosing what belonged in a national collection of paintings.

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During the past decade one of the bestsellers in the American art market was a group of figurative-representational paintings from post-Unification Germany. Dubbed “New German Painting”, this body of work included artists with explicit East German affiliations, such as the so-called “New Leipzig School”, as well as artists who trained at academies in former West Germany. While the American art critical discourse predominantly promoted the art as a new kind of German history painting, which confronted the country’s recent past of division and reunification, the reception amongst German art critics was more negative by far. The latter did not see a serious engagement with recent German history in the new body of art, and dismissed the painting as catering to a growing post-socialist nostalgia industry. Moreover, the traditional figurative style of painting, which was adopted in particular by artists trained at academies in post-Wende East Germany, was often criticized as an aesthetically and politically reactionary artistic position. In spite of the obvious social and political connotations of the art critical discourse on the “New German Painting”, art historical scholarship has barely examined this new body of art in light of underlying interactions between the painting’s aesthetic content and the social-political context of post-Unification Germany. This is a surprising omission, considering that scholars of modern German art are traditionally deeply concerned with the interplay between aesthetic and political continuities and discontinuities. A possible explanation for this gap in the literature is that art history lacks a framework to capture the intersecting aesthetic and social-political notions that have emerged in the discourse on the painting. This thesis aims to overcome this shortcoming by examining the phenomenon “New German Painting” from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines sociological with art historical approaches. The theoretical perspective builds on innovations in the sociology of art, which complement established concerns with social structure with a sensibility for aesthetic specificity. In the empirical parts of the thesis this perspective is used to trace continuities between the new painting and its reception with earlier moments in German post-World War II art history; as well as to examine the social context and historical moment in which the painting emerged. Particular attention is paid to affinities between the discussion of the “New German Painting” and current crossdisciplinary academic literature on nostalgia in post-Wende Germany. Overall, the thesis argues that this more encompassing approach is better suited for revealing how the phenomenon “New German Painting” sits at the centre of debates about collective memory and cultural identity in post-1989 Germany, including the complex relations between the former East and West that characterise these debates.