Drawn with light.
Carl Blechen's Amalfi sketchbook from the collection of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin

Casa di Goethe, Rome
28.4. - 18.8.2010

After stops at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin one of the most famoust German collections of romantic drawings will be on display at Casa di Goethe from April 28 to July 18: the Amalfi Sketchbook by Carl Blechen (1798-1842) belonging to the Kunstsammlung der Berliner Akademie der Künste. It is the first presentation of the entire book in Italy, the country it was conceived in 1829.

In September 1828, landscape painter Carl Blechen (1798-1842) left for a 14-month sojourn in Italy, first to Rome and then Naples in 1829.
The following winter he returned to Berlin, bringing with him the 1000 drawings, oil sketches, watercolors and sepia drawings that would form the basis of his work for years to come. Travel conditions were poor and Blechen’s written notes scant, yet the Italian works are still considered the high point of the artist’s oeuvre.

The Amalfi sketchbook sits at the heart of this journey, an incunabulum of early realist art and one of the most famous collections of 19th century drawings. With pencil, sepia, watercolor and ink on a total 66 pages, Blechen captured his impressions along the Neapolitan and Amalfi Coasts in May 1829. While usually only the better-known sepia drawings are shown, here we see the Amalfi sketchbooks in their entirety. Lesser-known works include the light pencil drawings of Naples’ jagged Posilippo coastline. Rendered on site with perceptible speed, Blechen captures the boulders, grottos, villas and ruins along the shore. The delicate, precise pencil strokes reveal the artist’s fascination with the bright expanse of water and air, and for the transitions between boulder and architecture. The drawings also show an extraordinary feeling for composition and balance.

After Naples, Blechen made his way to Amalfi. For eight days he drew there, in nearby Mühlental and in mountain villages. The mostly sepia on graphite pages show bright houses behind trees, walls bathed in shimmering light beside deep shadows, the mill stream, bridge houses, industrial buildings and mountain landscapes. While the motifs themselves are unspectacular, their execution is extraordinarily
concise: besides the vocabulary typical of Italian pictures of the time, in Amalfi, Blechen was interested in the light in and of itself.
In the backlight, tree trunks turn to a row of rhythmically placed, dark verticals. Awash in a strong, clear sunshine, the contours of walls or riverbanks melt away, rejoining as new bodies of light with scintillating edges. The world is no longer a stabile thing but changeable – an ephemeral apparition in the artist’s perception. Half a century before the Impressionists, Blechen’s work centered on the subjectivity of the gaze and the way a landscape appeared in the light. While his contemporaries admired his approach – revolutionary for 1829 – it was also seen as a provocation.

The Akademie der Künste art collection aquired the Amalfi sketchbook from Blechen’s estate where, after a number of inventory removals and divisions, it has been stored to this day with the exception of two drawings. Carl Blechen died with no direct followers; today he is considered one of the founders of modernity in art.

Drawn with light.
Carl Blechen's Amalfi sketchbook from the collection of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin

An exhibition by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin and Casa di Goethe, Rome

Exhibitions

Hamburger Kunsthalle, 30 October 2009 – 17 January 2010
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin 29 January 2010 – 11 April 2010
Casa di Goethe, Rom 28 April 2010 – 18 July 2010

Curator
Mareike Hennig
with the Kunstsammlung der Akademie der Künste, Berlin

German catalogue
Carl Blechen. Mit Licht gezeichnet. Das Amalfi-Skizzenbuch aus der Kunstsammlung der Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Edited by Rosa von der Schulenburg on behalf of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Akademie der Künste, Archiv, Berlin 2009
66 coloured boards, 87 coloured illustrations b., 215 pages
ISBN 978-3-88331-128-9, € 36,90

For the display at Casa di Goethe an Italian catalogue will be published. Essay by Mareike Hennig and an introduction by Ursula Bongaerts and Wolfgang Trautwein
ISBN...

Opening: Tuesday 27 April 2010, 7.30 pm

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