Word: isenheim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...painter's work, a mere 38 sketches and the whole or parts of ten altarpieces, including the Washington National Gallery's Crucifixion (TIME, July 18, 1955). Quite properly, 62 of the book's 143 plates are devoted to Griine-wald's twelve-paneled Isenheim altarpiece (now in Colmar's Unterlinden Museum), a work so famous it was mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles...
...Isenheim, Griinewald (real name: Mathis Gothardt Niethardt) reached a peak in his ability to give body to the high mysticism and passionate urgency of his time. He rendered the Christ crucified as a scarred and broken figure, his lifeless head pierced with grotesque thorns. The attendant figures sustain and even amplify the sense of total horror and shock. The figure of Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross is modeled on Griinewald's ideal of Nordic beauty, with wildly flowing silky blonde hair, sumptuous, rippling salmon-pink robe and veil. Griinewald has painted beauty moved to the ultimate...
Critic Pevsner notes that "during precisely the years of the Isenheim altarpiece, Raphael painted the Sistine Madonna." He leaves no doubt that he considers one the equal of the other...
...Tillich, are "dangerously irreligious, and they are something against which everybody who understands the situation of our time has to fight." Against them he puts paintings that attempt to thrust the viewer face to face with reality, 16th century Matthias Grünewald's famed Crucifixion on the Isenheim altar ("I believe it is the greatest German picture ever painted"). Modern existentialism in art, he says, begins with Cézanne and penetrates to "the depths of reality" in pictures like Van Gogh's Starry Night...