Perspective: Adolph Menzel’s gorgeous interior was one of five paintings of dark, empty rooms that were private experiments
Menzel moved to Ritterstrasse, in the area of Berlin now known as Kreuzberg, in 1847. He painted “The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse” four years later. It remained unpublished and basically unknown until 15 years after his death.
It shows a room that by then Menzel must have known well, with slivers of late afternoon light coming in through drawn shades. It is a little dark, and parts of the room are hard to make out. But I find it dazzling. I love the nonchalant economy with which Menzel has brushed in the ceiling and walls, and the deftness with which he has captured the stripes of light that gleam off the floor, alternating with the soft shadows of the table legs.
Remarkable, too, is the extreme frugality of the blotchy brushstrokes describing the sculptural bust perched high on the cupboard at the rear of the room. The real thing, presumably, would have been smooth and neoclassical; this resembles more a bust byBut most beautiful of all are those curtains. How pleasurable it must have been to brush in those wristy, delinquent red marks, trusting that somehow, in the mind’s eye, they would amount to an ordered pattern.
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