Organized around the city centers of Paris, London, and Berlin, the exhibition will include more than 100 works—mainly prints, but also drawings, illustrated books, and small sculpture—from the Gallery's extensive collections that reveal the romantic sensibilities of the arts of privacy. Here the experience of art was a private affair, like taking a book down from the shelf for quiet enjoyment. The arts of privacy encouraged the expression of darker thoughts and moody reflections—a milieu that recruited the talents of academics, realists, impressionists, and symbolists.
Some of the artists I recognized, such as Redon. But the work of Kathe Kollwitz, who had been unfamiliar with previously, was what really grabbed ahold of my interest. There was a small series of prints taken from Zola's Germinal which were quite aresting. I've not read the book and know only that it has to do an uprising in a French mining town...so it is difficult to know exactly is meant to be going on in the pictures.
But they have a certain tautness to them; one feels that something horrible is happening or about to, even if it’s not entirely clear what. I think the elongated, horizontal dimensions of the work add to the falling into madness kind of feeling I got in viewing them. I was reminded of the early works of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (I’ve only read his first two novels—Gargoyles and The Lime Works). And now I find myself wanted to enter back into those strange lands of frightening reality, descending circles of bedlam.
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