Catalogue 2010 - daxer & marschall

TWO LANDSCAPES BY CARL SCHuCH
Only in the last twenty years has Carl Schuch’s œuvre become known to a broader public, despite the fact that his paintings are held in many
important public collections in Austria and Germany. This increased awareness of his work is attributable firstly to the catalogue raisonné
compiled by Claus Korte and continued by Roland Dorn and, secondly, to the major retrospective staged in Mannheim and Munich in 1986. 1
The 2000 exhibition titled Cézanne, Manet, Schuch, drei Wege zur autonomen Kunst staged in Dortmund strongly emphasized the importance
of the role he played in the development of European painting. 2 The two exhibitions did much to resolve the marked discrepancy between
art-historical neglect of his work and the remarkable impact his work had on both German and European painting in the second half of the
nineteenth century. However the discrepancy was not entirely successfully resolved.
In his lifetime his work was completely unknown to the art world. He showed at an exhibition on only one occasion and throughout
his career sold only one painting. His paintings were known only to – and collected by – his fellow painters. Plagued by a gnawing perception
of his artistic inadequacies and failings, he denied himself all opportunities to exhibit.
He lived and worked in Paris from 1882 to 1894. Like other artists from the German-speaking world he studied French avant-garde
painters very closely but unlike his compatriots, as an equal, not as a student. His sensitive response to the work of Courbet, Manet und Cézanne
sets him apart from the backward-looking, imitative interpretations painted by so many of his contemporaries. His financial independence
meant that, like Courbet, his artistic career was unfettered by considerations of popularity and the motivation to sell.
He studied in Vienna, later travelling incessantly from city to city and country to country. His peregrinations centred on Munich –
where he came under the influence of Trübner and the artists of the Leibl circle – then on Venice, and then on Paris. He spent the last ten years
of his life in ill health and died in an asylum in a state of dementia in 1903.
Today, his still lifes are almost as highly regarded as his landscapes. But this contradicts his radical attempt to reverse traditional genre
hierarchies in contrast with the majority of his contemporaries. For him, landscape painting took pride of place over history painting. In his
hierarchy of genres – ranked from ‘inferior to superior’ – figure painting was at the lowest rung, then still life painting, architectural painting,
landscape studies and landscape painting. 3 He regarded competence in architectural and still life painting purely as stages in an artist’s
development, the peak of artistic achievement being the ability to paint an ‘ideal landscape’.
1. Gottfried Boehm, Roland Dom and Franz A. Morat (eds.),
57