Suchergebnisse

Milan-based socially engaged artist, Biancoshock (a pseudonym the artist prefers to use), was kind enough to take time out of his schedule to answer some questions for SAH Journal. We wanted to know more about his diverse, and often provocative urban art projects; as well his time spent travelling and creating in different parts of the world. So far in his career, Biancoshock has realised more than 800 "interventions" on the streets of Italy, Albania, Belgium, Croatia, France, England, Malaysia, Malta, Norway and Singapore, to name but a few. While he exhibits widely, he has also participated in numerous urban art festivals (Citileaks, Memorie Urbane, Stencibility). In 2014, he presented his work at TEDx Oporto, Portugal.1Biancoshock places social activism high on his list of priorities, using art as the mediator for a worthwhile and necessary conversation between each individual who encounters it. By choosing unconventional sites for the creation of his art, and involving those spaces in intimate and challenging critiques, Biancoshock infers his questioning more seriously towards society and the centrally politicised - perhaps overly polished - contemporary art world. The full array of Bianoshock's projects can be found at biancoshock.com

In January 2016, following extensive restoration work, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin introduced Caspar David Friedrich's painting 'The Monk by the Sea' to the public. The infrared reflectogram had brought a further overpainted ship to light in the work, in which hitherto only two overpainted ships were known. The third vessel is a brig, which, along with the ship placed to its left, corresponds to the composition of the study 'Seashore with Sailing Ships' ascribed to the period around 1835/37. A comparison of the newly discovered ship with the lost pen-and-ink drawing of a brig dating from 1789 suggests that Friedrich used the mirror image of the brig in this drawing for 'The Monk by the Sea.'

On the basis of the few tobacco containers in the German Maritime Museum and through comparison with several receptacles from other collections, it was possible to determine how, in the fourth quarter of the seventeenth century, a Netherlandish manufacturer made the transition from the manufacture of wooden splint boxes to the serial production of brass tobacco tins. As a way of deliberately influencing their distribution, he marketed the boxes for specific previously defined target groups by decorating them with engraved pictorial representations. The most elaborately designed specimens were intended to appeal to courtly cavaliers who, however, soon came to prefer more sophisticated alternatives. The sailors, helmsmen, and gunners on military and large merchant vessels each made up a target group of their own, and were lured to purchase boxes with depictions related specifically to themselves, as was also the case with small-time maritime merchants. When one of these persons purchased a container of this sort, he came to possess not only a practical item for everyday use but also - for the first time in a private context - a prestige object of his specific class. In accordance with guild customs, the members ranking below the masters and skippers otherwise owned no private prestige objects, but only the objects belonging jointly to their groups. The owners of serially produced brass tins were clearly distinguished from the wealthy merchants, the skippers of voyages to the East Indies, and even the naval officers on warships through the production of individual tobacco receptacles from more precious materials and with more individualized pictorial representations to indicate their elevated standing. With its handful of serially and individually produced tobacco containers, the German Maritime Museum offers an exemplary overview of the entire spectrum of these prestige objects designed for the seafarers of the eighteenth century.

In 1998, the German Maritime Museum acquired a group of twelve studies - painted on paper
with blue watercolours - for the production of Dutch faience plates with scenes of herring fish-
ery. The backs of these studies still exhibit more or less conspicuous traces of the pricked transfer stencils evidently stored along with them. As already concluded by scholarship (note 8), the corresponding series of plates was produced by the Delft manufactory "het bijltje" in the second half of the eighteenth century after a sixteen-part series of etchings by A. van der Laan, of which the German Maritime Museum likewise has a copy in its possession. The museum's acquisition of two of the respective plates in 2008, made it possible to retrace the exact working process from the etchings to the finished plate series for the first time. The manufactory had commissioned a skilled designer to choose twelve of the etchings for the plates, and to translate the motifs onto the studies in such a way that "het bijltje"''s faience painters could paint them quickly within the context of serial production. The designer then made one pricked stencil for each of the studies to facilitate the transfer of the watercolour image to the bisque-fired plates. In order to guarantee the speedy painting of the images, the designer granted the painter certain liberties. Due to the fact that the process of pressing them onto the plate form takes its toll on the stencils, they were regularly reproduced - not by the highly paid designer, however, but by one of the manufactory painters. In the process, they were slightly simplified so that at some point new watercolour versions were needed. The watercolour studies in the German Maritime Museum collection, like the two plates, belong to the final series, produced towards the end of the eighteenth century. A few surviving stencils and a larger number of extant watercolour studies provide evidence hat the
same procedure was employed for the serial production of tiles and tile tableaux.

Martin Franz Glüsing was a marine painter of Hamburg who had been a seafarer for several
years before devoting himself to painting. A self-taught artist who signed his paintings "Fräncis-
Glüsing", he attained initial success in the mid 1920s when one of his compositions appeared in a representative book published by Felix Graf Luckner. Glüsing portrayed primarily large-scale sailing ships and fishing vessels. To this day, his renown has remained limited to Hamburg and the surrounding area. His paintings are regularly offered for sale on the art market.

The marine painter Geo Wolters (1866-1943) was a native of Hamburg. He did not enjoy an academic education as an artist, but trained privately with the marine painters Hermann Rudolf Hardorff and Friedrich Wilhelm Schwinge. He was not only a painter, but also a very successful racing sailor who won a considerable number of international prizes. He is the only German marine painter to have possessed a license "auf kleiner Fahrt" (i.e. for navigation in the North and Baltic Seas up to 61° north and in the English Channel). Artistically, he was interested primarily in small ship navigation on the Lower Elbe. This is also the subject of a portfolio containing twenty etchings of the year 1925 - undoubtedly the most important work to have come out of Wolters's studio. Yet he also devoted his attention to small ship navigation and the small harbours on the Lower Elbe in his numerous oil paintings. Wolters is known above all in Hamburg and on the Lower Elbe, where his paintings are often also traded on the art market. He did not leave behind a catalogue of his oeuvre.

Before the advent of modern whaling in the 1860s, few professional, academically trained artists had the opportunity to witness whaling operations themselves. Jean-Baptiste-Henri Durand-Brager (1814-79) is one of them. Besides pursuing a maritime career he was schooled by renowned French marine painters. This article presents the entire whaling-related oeuvre by Durand-Brager hitherto known, viz. three lithographs, one drawing and one oil painting, all produced in the years 1844 and 1845. In the Bruhn Whaling Collection in the German Maritime Museum is a remarkable crayon and charcoal drawing by this artist, signed and dated 1844. It shows a whaling ship with the carcass of a right whale alongside, while cutting-in operations are about to begin and a whaling boat in the foreground is waiting for another whale to resurface. A long sea swell and an approaching rain front impart an atmosphere of terse action set on a vast ocean. The drawing is correct in every detail, be it the representation of ship handling, ship architecture, rigging, whale anatomy, the seascape and the weather. Durand-Brager created a very similar version of this scene which was the basis for a lithograph published in 1844 or 1845. This is a print which Herman Melville, the author of Moby- Dick, who himself had gathered extensive whaling experience in 1841-1843, commended above all other prints of whaling available at his time for its painstakingly correct representation of whaling as he had witnessed it. A second, matching print by Durand-Brager of whale ships in a calm in a tropical roadstead received similar praise by Melville. The article further presents an oil painting that varies the whaling scene, and finally a lithograph of whalers after the end of the whaling season in the roadstead off a high cliff. In both the oil painting and the third lithograph a critical viewer familiar with historical whaling practise, naval architecture and ship handling finds a few details which seem slightly inconsistent with current knowledge of historical practise in both whaling and ships' architecture. But given the extreme accuracy displayed in other works of Durand-Barger's whaling art, which corresponds exactly to what is known from other contemporary sources, one may do well to interpret these unusual details provisionally as hypothetical findings, which may in due course be corroborated by other sources.

With its two turbine-driven express steamers BREMEN and EUROPA, launched in 1929 and 1930 respectively, the Norddeutscher Lloyd set new standards in terms of both external appearance and interior furnishings. Six architects were commissioned to provide artistic drafts for the firstclass- section interior of the BREMEN. The main rooms in First Class were designed by Düsseldorf architect Fritz August Breuhaus. Breuhaus was also the designer of the children's playroom. He commissioned the artist Walter Trier, a caricaturist and illustrator of children's books, to decorate the playroom with frescoes. The year 1929 also marked the publication of the first edition of Erich Kästner's famous children's book Emil and the Detectives, containing the illustrations by Walter Trier; they can still be found in today's editions of the work, which continues to delight young and old alike. Walter Trier avoided persecution by the Nazis by emigrating to Canada via England. Kästner personally witnessed the burning of his books in May 1933. Even though he stayed on in Germany he was forbidden to publish any more of his work. Neither the children's playroom nor the BREMEN itself survived the war: The ship was destroyed by fire in 1941.