Inundated Ruins of a Monastery
Karl Blechen
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
With Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, who both exerted a major influence on his art, Karl Blechen can be termed one of the leading landscapists of German Romanticism. A more overtly subjective painter, he transformed his observations of nature and architecture by means of his imagination and technical experiments. The proud medieval building in this drawing—in fact hardly more than a seemingly endless wall supported by a row of arched vaults—has been overgrown by vegetation and worn away by water. The quintessentially Romantic theme of the victory of nature over man is animated by the richness of Blechen's technique: he scraped away ink to add highlights to the water and evoke the scaly surface of the stems of the trees at left. The drawing is directly related to a painting from 1824 that was unfortunately destroyed in a fire in 1931. Its nervous yet careful execution and the differences between it and the painting, in which the inundated wall is seen from within a cavern, suggest that it was intended as an independent work, an inspired repetition on paper of a celebrated canvas. The absence of the arch of the cavern in the foreground places less emphasis on the imaginary character of the subject, making the drawing all the more haunting.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.