Word: germanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This fascinating show deals with an area of art about which most non-Germans know next to nothing. Beethoven, of course, everyone knows. Goethe is more invoked than read. But one would be hard pressed to find much public recognition of their contemporaries in painting. There is Caspar David Friedrich, the darling of the art historians, with his cloaked and silent watchers, his chilly crags and moonstruck ships. But Philipp Otto Runge? Carl Gustav Carus? Franz Pforr and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld? Johann Overbeck? Franz Horny or Adrian Zingg? Not household names, exactly -- yet interesting and sometimes remarkable artists...
...browse through this show is to be vividly reminded of the continuities in the past two centuries of German art. Some are not altogether welcome. That gentle, scholarly neoclassicist Johann Tischbein, the friend and portraitist of Goethe, would have been aghast to see what German state culture in the 1930s got up to -- and yet the first item in this show, his elaborate drawing entitled The Power of Man, 1786, showing a hunter and his young companion on horseback dragging home the carcasses of a lion and a huge eagle, predicts many of the elements of Nazi classicism...
...From a series of billboards in Italian, English, French and German hanging on Florence's city hall...
...turnaround may not have been quite 180 degrees, but it was close enough -- and sudden enough -- to qualify as a mighty abrupt about-face. After first insisting that his government could find nothing to substantiate U.S. charges that West German companies helped the Libyans build a chemical-weapons factory in the desert outside Tripoli, Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week admitted that Washington might, after all, know what it was talking about. He changed his mind, Kohl said, after the government examined "certain documents" that had been "seized in the past few days." As prosecutors opened a criminal investigation...
...officials had no trouble understanding why Kohl would refrain from moving against a West German company until Washington backed up its charges with solid evidence. What mystified the Administration was why West German officials stoutly denied the charges when the country's own intelligence agency had offered them evidence of Imhausen-Chemie's complicity as early as last October. Whatever the reason for Bonn's foot-dragging, the U.S. welcomed the change of tune. "The objective now is to let the Germans climb down without further embarrassment," said a senior White House official. "We want to prevent further shipment...