Reinhard Wegner: Poetry of the Line. Albert Venus and Victor Paul Mohn in Rome

Description

Poetry of the line

With an introduction by Florian Illies

In Dresden, the ideas of Romanticism remained alive well into the 19th century. The heirs of Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, Carl Gustav Carus and Adrian Ludwig Richter adapted the bold pictorial concepts of their masters, but they also broke new ground in modernism. The conflict between tradition and avant-garde is played out with elementary forms of visual art, with the presence of line, surface and color. In this context, the drawn line is of outstanding importance and has great impact. This volume uses the works of Ludwig Richter's two students to show their foundations and at the same time the hopes associated with them in the emerging classical modernism.

Franz Albert Venus (1842 - 1871) & Victor Paul Mohn (1842 - 1911)

The two artists undertook two trips to Italy between 1866 and 1869. In Rome and the surrounding area
they joined the painters staying there. They drew and painted the Italian landscape and followed in the footsteps of their teacher and many earlier artists to the Roman Campagna, Naples and Capri. They paid particular attention to the numerous collections of important works in the museums and churches of Rome and Florence. They described their experiences in detail to Ludwig Richter.
The correspondence between Richter, Mohn and Venus, published here for the first time, brings the stages of their journey to life. Between soberly reported lines, one reads anecdotes of the artists' life in the 'Eternal City'. The reader can also follow their search for new forms of expression in landscape art.

Prof. Dr. Reinhard Wegner (*1953 in Speyer) studied German and art history in Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1982. In 1991, he habilitated at the TH Darmstadt with the thesis "Nach Albions Stränden. The significance of England for the architecture of Classicism and Romanticism in Prussia". From 1995 to 1999, he was a university lecturer at the University of Stuttgart. From 2000 to 2019, he was Professor of Modern Art History in Jena. From 2010 to 2019, he headed the "European Romanticism" research center.