Can an artist who died at the age of 29 really have enriched nineteenth-century landscape painting decisively, especially since he died late in this century, in 1871, after the early and middle-late Romantic painters had already contributed everything possible to landscapes in moonlight, Fog and other physical states of the soul on the screen?
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Simply immersing Italian landscapes in the shimmering, hazy sunlight that is only available there and nevertheless implanting central ideas of Romanticism in them, that is what makes Albert Venus the “Last Romantic”, as the Dresden Print Room in the Residential Palace titled an exhibition devoted to the hitherto almost unknown .
However, the label of the late romantic would again unduly narrow Venus' abilities – his outstanding intuition and the obvious joy in capturing unusual light situations on paper, preferably in watercolour, also means that the boundaries to what then happened a year after his death should be called Impressionism after Monet's painting Impression Sunrise.
Looking back, it seems as if Venus, biographically involved in the beginnings of light painting, was in a sense a son of light herself, because only three years after his birth, in 1845, Menzel painted his sun-drenched “Balcony Room” in Berlin Schöneberger Strasse, the quintessential pre-impressionist painting of art in Germany.
With Venus' picture "Sunlit forest path near Nemi" from 1869, which measures only 36 by 26 centimeters and cannot be surpassed in terms of conflicting moods, he combines all the elements of a "luminous romanticism": Like a dark brown wall, an oak tree bars at this sunken path in Lazio scans the pictorial space on the left side, but reaches out to the other side with its branch arms in a similarly corporeal way like an almost black tree and a peeled and piebald one behind it.
Highly symbolic, the gnarled oak dissolves upwards, and the branches of the light-colored tree also end in a sfumato.
Up to this point, the picture could also have come from the black romanticist Carl Blechen or from Johan Christian Clausen Dahl.
But how Venus lets large restless patches of sunlight dance on the dry-burned ground, how he sets the root system of the trees as calligraphic ciphers in the grey-brown of the earth, how he dabs on the leaves, which have been X-rayed by the Italian light, as only Corot has done before, so that they an already more yellow lime green to the color of the sun itself - this makes this forest path an outdoor "balcony room", very likely also on site
Up to this point, the picture could also have come from the black romanticist Carl Blechen or from Johan Christian Clausen Dahl.
But how Venus lets large restless patches of sunlight dance on the dry-burned ground, how he sets the root system of the trees as calligraphic ciphers in the grey-brown of the earth, how he dabs on the leaves, which have been X-rayed by the Italian light, as only Corot has done before, so that they an already more yellow lime green to the color of the sun itself - this makes this forest path an outdoor "balcony room", very likely also on site
Up to this point, the picture could also have come from the black romanticist Carl Blechen or from Johan Christian Clausen Dahl.
But how Venus lets large restless patches of sunlight dance on the dry-burned ground, how he sets the root system of the trees as calligraphic ciphers in the grey-brown of the earth, how he dabs on the leaves, which have been X-rayed by the Italian light, as only Corot has done before, so that they an already more yellow lime green to the color of the sun itself - this makes this forest path an outdoor "balcony room", very likely also on site
painted
plein air .
An ancient mausoleum as a thick tower with trees on top
Venus had painted these lonely heights hard for herself on two trips to Italy, each lasting almost a year, in 1866 and 1869, since the title “favorite student of the great romantic Ludwig Richter” was associated with light and long shadows in equal measure.
The main goal of the two trips to Italy was thus to emancipate himself from the famous teacher, which Venus also achieved through stubborn landscape paintings, always filled with a warm light, by dipping the teabag supply of “Richter” romance, which he quickly dipped into the paintings trip to Bohemia is still very present, was able to go back step by step.
The ancient ruins of Italy, for example, do not have to bear witness to a heroic past laden with symbols, but rather are cleverly used compositional elements that lead to bizarre pictorial inventions.
On the landscape format "Torre de'Schiavi", the Roman monument on the Via Prenestina immortalized countless times by Piranesi and Reinhart up to Thomas Hotchkiss in 1865, he sets the light brick-red central building overgrown with trees as staffage so laconically towards the left pictorial element in front of an azure sky that it could also be a surreally too wide factory chimney.
The "Ruins near Rome" or the "Southern river landscape with bridge ruins", both created on the trip to Italy in 1869, incorporate the remains of antiquity more as an integral part of the landscape,