Carl Schuch
(1846 - Vienna - 1903)
A Weir in Prags, South Tyrol
summer 1877
Oil on canvas
67 x 82 cm
Bearing the stamped signature in black lower right: CSchuch
Stamped with an identical signature in red on the verso, with black stencilled number: 79
Provenance:
Karl Haberstock, Berlin (before 1927);
Frankfurt am Main, Rudolf Bangel, auction sale 1093, 29-30 March 1927, lot 1972;
Galerie Fritz Zickel, Munich;
Munich, Hugo Helbing, auction sale, 26.11.1927, lot 170; 28.01.1933, lot 140; 03.10.1933, lot 142; 27.03.1935, lot 227;
Friedrich Kaltreuther, Mannheim, Germany;
Private Collection, Mannheim (with the same family from 1937 to 2009)
Literature:
The work is listed under no. CK.B48 in the catalogue raisonné compiled by Dr. Roland Dorn.
Rudolf Migacz, Carl Schuch als Landschaftsmaler, Diss., University of Vienna, 1973, fig. 96
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 Munich and Mannheim 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'.
In May 1877 Schuch set out from Venice on what he described as an 'inspection trip' to the Alps, in search of fresh landscape motifs. He spent the summer in the Puster Valley near Prags. Roland Dorn ascribes a small group of only half a dozen paintings, of which this is one, to this visit. The present landscape is undoubtedly one of Schuch's much important works in this genre, comparable in quality to the painting titled Alpine View. This is now in the collection of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich (inv. no. 8714).[4] Raimer Joachims dates the Munich painting to the year 1877.
We are grateful to Roland Dorn, Zurich, who has confirmed Schuch's authorship after examining the painting in the original. He will be including it in the forthcoming Schuch catalogue raisonné.
[1] G. Boehm, R. Dorn, and F.A. Morat (eds.), Carl Schuch. 1846-1903, exhib. cat., Mannheim, Städtische Kunsthalle and Munich, Lenbachhaus, Freiburg 1986.
[2] Brigitte Buberl (ed.), Cézanne, Manet, Schuch, drei Wege zur autonomen Kunst, exhib. cat., Dortmund, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Munich 2000.
[3] Id., Carl Schuch. 1846-1903, p.20.
[4] Id., op. cit., no. 72, p.13f.