Herrmann Zschoche: Johan Christian Dahl. The sky over Dresden

Description

"There is a special secret in the art of the nineteenth century
and that is the Dresden skies"

Johan Christian Dahl came from Norway. After studying landscape painting in Copenhagen, he went traveling. In the fall of 1818, he met Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden, his first companion in a city that was still foreign to him. "He has roughly the same view of art as I do: a work of art should above all have an effect on everyone, even if they are not connoisseurs."
In 1821, he brought back a series of oil sketches from Italy, about which a contemporary wrote that he "could not get enough of them". Until the last years of his life, he created these often hand-sized wonders of color alongside the great Norwegian landscapes in the sweeping rhythm of the brushstroke.

Dahl lived and worked in Dresden for over 40 years, where he finally died in 1857. The city of Dresden provided the painter with a recurring motif that could always be reinterpreted. We encounter the city and its surroundings at all times of day: in the morning mist and in the moonlight. Above all, however, Dahl is interested in the fleeting clouds. They move calmly across the high sky, often indicating an impending thunderstorm. At sunset, they glow fiery red. We also accompany Dahl on his picturesque hikes to Meissen,
Pillnitz and Saxon Switzerland. His studies from there are accurate. Photographs prove this, but always lose out to Dahl's vital visual sensuality. His Dresden landscapes, however, have changed so fundamentally since then due to urban growth that no one can imagine them here today. He bears witness to an irretrievable past.

Herrmann Zschoche (*1934 in Dresden) devoted himself to writing about the art of German Romanticism in addition to his work as a director of feature films for DEFA. As the editor of Caspar David Friedrich's correspondence and the author of several works on this German Romantic, Zschoche also dealt with the artists Carl Gustav Carus, Carl Oesterley, Johann Carl Baehr and Georg Heinrich Crola.