Talk:Adolph Menzel

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Dcoetzee 04:44, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Errors?

Judging from the German version, the English one may contain some factual errors or misinterpretations:

• WRT the pre-impressionistic work: "Adolph Menzel considered these paintings clearly as private, unofficial work and exhibited them very late for the first time; some of them remained unknown to the public until after his death. The "vorimpressionistisch" called early work, which fell completely out of the context of the familiar Menzel, was enthusiastically received by the audience." English version: "Such genre paintings evidence associations with French and English art, and would have been politically unacceptable in Wilhelmine Germany; they were not exhibited in Menzel's lifetime." Maybe two errors: Some of them were exhibited, and the so-called Wilhelmine Germany did not only accept them, but enthusiastically so. (At least something to think about.)
• WRT the depictions of Frederick the Great: "Different than usual at his time, Menzel depicted the king not in a glorifying pose of a ruler. [...] Menzel avoided consistently every pathos or mere solemnity. In the painting "concert flute", we see on the left side a man who looks bored to the ceiling. The "Round Table" is not dominated by the king; rather, several gentlemen are absorbed in private conversations in the foreground." English version: "Menzel's depictions of Frederick the Great were nearly cinematic in their reportage and attention to detail, glorifying a suppressive government in a pseudo-documentary style; in these qualities as well as for their re-creation of earlier events of nationalistic pride, the paintings are very similar in effect to the Napoleonic heroics chronicled by Ernest Meissonnier (1815-1891)." The two paintings mentioned might be the most famous of Menzel's depictions of Frederick the great. One might want to include them in the article, so the reader can ponder whether they are "glorifiying a suppressive government" (which perhaps is not a reliable characterisation of Frederick's government either).
• WRT an appropriation "for use as electoral posters by Adolf Hitler": This might be true (I am a little skeptical, because this seems to be based on the same source as the statements cited above), but one may ask what this tells us about Menzel himself. German history may be "some footnotes to Hitler", but you can exaggerate everything.

91.55.141.153 (talk) 12:07, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

I doubt that the statement "after his death they were appropriated for use as electoral posters by Adolf Hitler[2]" is factual correct. Though Hilter admired Menzel, and later had pictures by Menzel in his chancelory, there is apparently no mentioning in the literature of any electoral poster with a motif of Menzel's for Hitler's party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or for himself, apart from the book mentioned in this Wikipedia-article. What I could e.g. find is:

• [1], which is not a poster but a 1933 postcard, depicting Frederick II, Bismarck, Hindenburg and Hitler. I guess this comes closest to what the source in the Wikipedia-article may have had in mind, however the Frederick motif is probably taken from a painting File:Friedrich Zweite Alt.jpg by Anton Graff, plus the hat; and the Bismarck motif looks much like one of the many pictures by Franz von Lenbach, e.g. File:Franz von Lenbach - Bildnis Otto von Bismarck (1870).jpg
• [2], an electoral poster showing Frederick II, probably taken from Graff's portrait again, plus hat and stick, but for a different party, the German National People's Party
• [3], showing Frederick II, probably after the drawing [4] by Menzel; however a poster not for an election but from 1936 for the Winterhilfswerk collection

Rosenkohl (talk) 20:50, 8 December 2015 (UTC)