Comment on Does Art Need to Be So Heavy?
At the above-mentioned conference at the Istituto Svedese in Rome in October 2015 I had the pleasant opportunity to meet the German art historian Alexander Kaczmarczyk who referred me to his then unpublished PhD thesis “Die” Antike und ihre Kritiker. Eine ideengeschichtliche und strukturanalytische Studie zur Kunst der Romantik. Here he proposes a reading of the work of Friedrich Nerly and his colleague Carl Blechen (1798-1840) as a critique of die Antike by means of a pictorial meta-language. Although I have not had the opportunity to familiarise myself with Kaczmarczyk’s thesis, it seems that the ideas outlined in the present paper to some extent are overlapping with his understanding of Blechen’s and Nerly’s works as meta-paintings.
Last updated 14.02.2024