Cloud images.
The Discovery of Heaven September 24, 2004 - January 30, 2005
Alte Nationalgalerie

“To the fairytale view, the cloud is not only a castle or an icy mountain, it is also an island in the sea of ​​heaven or a ship, and the blue sky in which it sails reflects the ocean.”
Ernst Bloch

The material clouds are made of has a lot in common with that of dreams.
Because of their weightlessness and impermanence, clouds have stimulated the imagination of countless artists. The exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie, which was created in close cooperation with the Bucerius Kunstforum in Hamburg, explores this extremely rich and exciting topic. In the Baroque period, images of clouds permeate the architecture and lift gods and saints into the sky.
Apotheosis, the overcoming of earthly life and the absorption into transcendent space, is one of the guiding themes of the Baroque. The clouds visualize the distant sky and add clarity to this abstract theme by serving as a seat for the figures. At the same time, the painterly potential in the clouds was discovered at this time; the endless possibilities of color were tested in sketches and implemented in huge ceiling paintings. The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin describes this interest: “As soon as the line is devalued as a boundary, the painterly possibilities begin. Then it is as if every corner comes to life with a mysterious movement.”

The Dutch landscape painting of Jacob van Ruisdael, for example, shifted the emphasis in the 17th century: the painters separated themselves from the religious scenes and the natural landscape took the main role. However, the horizon line is set very low, only a narrow strip of the landscape can be seen; instead, the sky takes up about two thirds of the picture. The cloudy sky refers to infinite space. The cloud phenomena are presented in a variety of variations and show a wide variety of weather phenomena.

As a result, the artists' sensitivity to natural phenomena grows. Around 1800, artists like Pierre-Henri Valenciennes tried to capture the lighting atmosphere of fleeting clouds passing by. At this time, Rome is an international meeting place for artists. But not only ancient sites are studied, but also the landscape. The bright light and vibrant colors encourage artists to go out into the great outdoors and devote themselves to their study in sketches. By looking at the sky with its diverse cloud formations, they break away from the conventions that established academy painting still dictates: “The pure or cloudy sky is in a certain way nature's tuning fork for color, and is determined by this color "He creates the basic tone of a picture," said Valenciennes in a treatise on landscape painting. He recommends that aspiring painters practice observing the continuously changing light conditions. The forerunners of plein air painting, painting in the open air, can be found in Italy.

In a time of exact science, clouds gained increasing scientific interest, and classification systems for clouds emerged that still play a major role in meteorology today. In 1802, the pharmacist Luke Howard presented himself in his famous lecture on the “Modifications of the clouds” the problem of systematizing the cloud formations. For the first time he names three types of clouds, cirrus, cumulus and stratus and their mixed forms. His subsequently published book had an immense impact.

The English painter John Constable in particular is dedicated to a “natural history of the sky”. He studies clouds with particular intensity and systematicity. As meteorological evidence, he marks his sketches with the location, date and time on the back. Through the seriality of the sketches, he adopts a scientific methodology: “Painting should be understood as a science and should be pursued as an investigation into the laws of nature.”

The spark quickly spread to the continent, and the painters there also studied the clouds extensively. Johann Wolfgang Goethe is so impressed by Howard's research that he even dedicates a poem to him in which he describes the eternal cycle from clouds to rain. Goethe repeatedly made cloud sketches himself, but he also commissioned artists to draw and paint the clouds according to the criteria found by Howard.

Caspar David Friedrich immediately rejects this order to “slavishly force the light, free clouds into an order”. Such an approach seems too banal to him; for him, studying clouds is a kind of “church service” and the sky is a symbol of the transcendent. He looks for the metaphysical dimension behind the manifestations and subjects them to an aesthetic order.

William Turner, on the other hand, is more interested in the dynamic properties of clouds, their change, movement and dissolution. Turner's dematerialized landscapes are an expression of his fascination with clouds. In small sketches, the clouds become pure light and color impressions. The captivating outline is omitted in order to bring movement into the picture. The watercolor technique is particularly suitable for depicting the flowing movement of clouds. The picture only becomes complete in the eye of the beholder. Turner's depictions visualize, as it were, the dynamic principles of natural processes discovered through natural science.

In both science and art, this time is about how to find a form for something that is characterized by formlessness.
The images now also show pure representations of the sky without any landscape information. They are characterized by their detail-like nature, which almost anticipates the photographic gaze. When landscape and architecture are still depicted at all, they are pushed very close to the edge of the picture, as with Johan Christian Dahl - their smallness stands in extreme contrast to the infinity of the sky. The human back figures in Friedrich's and Dahl's pictures are only tiny decorations to make the size of the sky visible. The sky plays the main role in all of these images. The romantic painter Carl Blechen goes so far that only a line of cloud can be seen. The fleetingness of the clouds is staged almost abstractly and the sketches only capture a moment in their seriality. In the small formats, which are often panoramic and wide, and the informality of the motif, the artists find an opportunity to escape the strict guidelines of the academies. Cloud painting soon spread to painters from Scandinavia to France - it literally became fashionable.

The abstract potential of cloud phenomena was later exploited in classical modernism by artists such as Emil Nolde and August Strindberg, Ferdinand Hodler and Piet Mondrian. While the cloud pictures had previously remained confined to small formats, they are now being ennobled in large formats. August Strindberg and Emil Nolde present expressive “landscapes of the soul” with thickly applied paint and rough brushstrokes to show the animated and “chaotic structure” of nature. A counterpart to this is the symbolist abstraction of Piet Mondrian and Ferdinand Hodler. In his search for “essential structures,” Hodler develops a “physiognomy of the landscape,” from which he derives a “rhythm of forms” based on sequence, parallelism, and symmetry. Like Mondrian's early paintings, the idea is based on a theosophical philosophy.

The exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie demonstrates these diverse aspects in the area of ​​tension between natural science and art.