There was a time when right-thinking modernists hardly thought about the first half of the 19th century at all. For them, pretty well everything painted or sculpted between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848 was the art from which modernism, as the phrase went, "freed itself" -- a dim if permanent background to the ongoing drama of the new.
Does anyone share this illusion of a radical break today? Not likely. Precisely because the 19th century (except for impressionism and its consequences) was once shunned, for the past 20 years it has been the curator's mother lode. This new curiosity radiates not only from grand exhibitions like those of Degas and Courbet, but also from others more modest in size, like "The Romantic Spirit: German Drawings, 1780-1850," which is on view at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City through Jan. 29.
This fascinating show deals with an area of art about which most non-Germans know next to nothing. Beethoven, of course, everyone knows. Goethe is more invoked than read. But one would be hard pressed to find much public recognition of their contemporaries in painting. There is Caspar David Friedrich, the darling of the art historians, with his cloaked and silent watchers, his chilly crags and moonstruck ships. But Philipp Otto Runge? Carl Gustav Carus? Franz Pforr and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld? Johann Overbeck? Franz Horny or Adrian Zingg? Not household names, exactly -- yet interesting and sometimes remarkable artists, all the same. Hence the Morgan's show fills a distinct gap. None of the drawings and watercolors in it have been seen in America before; they are all lent from two great collections in the German Democratic Republic, the Nationalgalerie in East Berlin and the Kupferstich- Kabinett in Dresden.
To browse through this show is to be vividly reminded of the continuities in the past two centuries of German art. Some are not altogether welcome. That gentle, scholarly neoclassicist Johann Tischbein, the friend and portraitist of Goethe, would have been aghast to see what German state culture in the 1930s got up to -- and yet the first item in this show, his elaborate drawing entitled The Power of Man, 1786, showing a hunter and his young companion on horseback dragging home the carcasses of a lion and a huge eagle, predicts many of the elements of Nazi classicism if not its overweening vulgarity. The taste for earnest, portentous and sentimental allegory, which now and then muddies the work of even the best German artists in the postwar years -- Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer -- is well and truly installed by the early 1800s in the elaborate metaphorical drawings and prints of Runge. His paeans to innocence, with their flying babies and virgins and lilies, waver close to visionary kitsch. And of course the attitudes to nature and society that permeate German expressionism were not invented in the 20th century: they are Romanticism topped up with more anxiety.