Realism as Aesthetic Education in the Work of Adolph Menzel

This dissertation develops a new approach to nineteenth-century Realism through an archaeology of forgotten works by an artist central to the movement: Adolph Menzel (1815-1905). Examining Menzel's turn from history painting toward Realism in the decade prior to German Unification (1871), and the works he created thereafter, I argue that Menzel's "realism" was entirely different from Realism as conceived by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) in France. His was no "concrete art," representing only "real and existing things." Rather, Menzel's artworks remade "reality," not as it really was, but into a relational construct and collaborative undertaking among artist, artwork, and audience. My argument proceeds from a set of drawings that, until now, have remained relatively unknown: Menzel's rebuses and picture puzzles. Although largely overlooked as oddities in his oeuvre, these polysemous drawings fundamentally complicate our understanding of Menzel's work and, in particular, his "realism." Taking his rebuses and picture puzzles as a hermeneutic framework, I cast doubt on the seeming mimetic straightforwardness of Menzel's imagery, revealing an aesthetic challenge -a demand to interpret- that reappears throughout his entire body of work. To demonstrate this challenge, another largely overlooked artwork in Menzel's oeuvre becomes key: his title page for the multi-volume publication, Das Werk Adolph Menzels (The Work of Adolph Menzel), 1890. Approaching this page as a rebus, my first chapter shows that Menzel's realist artworks are designed, like a rebus, to communicate the work of art, to transmit the spark of aesthetic creation from artist to audience. It shows Menzel's realism to be an inclusive, collective process of aesthetic communication involving artist, artwork, and audience in equal measure. Subsequent chapters not only demonstrate how this tripartite collaboration informs a variety of Menzel's works, including the famous Iron-Rolling Mill (1872-1875), but also connect this relational model of aesthetic communication to the artist's cultural, historical, and sociopolitical context. Situating Menzel and his work within late nineteenth-century Berlin, this dissertation tells a previously untold story about a culturally engaged yet self-described "un-political being" ("unpolitisches Wesen"), whose artworks speak to the politically charged, culturally influential ideals associated with the educated class of the German Burger. Menzel's artworks, I argue, demonstrate their artist's self-identification with the outwardly apolitical class of German Burger, who -guided by Friedrich Schiller's (1759-1805) aesthetic humanism and writings on aesthetic education- nevertheless advocated for gradual sociopolitical progress by means of Bildung (education), Sitte (tradition), Wissenschaft (science), and Kultur (culture). Taking the relational aesthetic and social philosophies of Friedrich Schiller and the Berlin-based Jewish philosopher Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) -a close friend of the artist- as theoretical framework, this dissertation approaches Menzel's "realism" as a strategic cultural program of aesthetic education with formidable social and political implications. It argues that Menzel's "realism" was a future-oriented pedagogical project that invited viewers, through their own self-directed aesthetic efforts, to help shape what "reality" was, and might become, around the time of German political Unification (1871). Although tied to the artist's late nineteenth-century Berlin context, Menzel's "realism," I argue, is ultimately ours as well. The implications of his inclusive, collective practice are as relevant today as they were for the artist's original nineteenth-century viewers. We, Menzel's twenty-first-century audience, need only realize that we too have a part to play in his work.