Carl von Marr

In the second half of the 19th century, Munich had risen to become one of the most fascinating art metropolises in Europe, where painters such as Wilhelm Leibl, later the painter prince Franz von Lenbach and Franz von Stuck also attracted international attention. Munich's reputation as a prosperous city of art also reached America, where it was regarded by many as "a kind of Teutonic Florence". From the 1850s until the First World War, over 400 Americans decided to study at the Munich Academy - perhaps the best known are William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck, who studied at the Academy as early as the 1870s and were strongly influenced by Leibl in their painting. In 1877, Carl Marr, who was of German descent and based in Minneapolis, came to the Munich Academy after studying in Weimar and Berlin; unlike Chase and Duveneck, he did not return to America, but quickly established himself in Munich as a genre and history painter. Marr's artistic breakthrough came with his "gigantic history painting" of the Flagellants, which depicts a procession of medieval flagellants through a northern Italian town. Marr had shown the truly monumental painting - it measures 420 x 790 cm - at the Glass Palace in 1889, where it had caused a great sensation because Marr had succeeded - as the critic Fritz von Ostini reported - in revitalising the outdated genre of history with the new means of the time, with his painterly plein air style. His unsparing naturalism overwhelmed the viewer in the face of almost life-size figures. Marr's mythological and religious subjects, to which he turned around the turn of the century, were also intended to impress - our Adoration of the Child is a large baroque staging full of light and pathos, which shows Marr's familiarity with the Old Masters and evokes memories of Dutch group paintings, such as Rembrandt. A mysterious, warm mood of light spreads across the scene, which Marr spreads out on the right-hand side: Virgin appears there in bright light, illuminated like a spotlight, kneeling before the infant Jesus, surrounded by angels who pause before the miracle but do not comprehend it. The admiring child angels arouse the viewer's empathy and are intended to evoke compassion, just like the group of women on the left who are moving towards the Christ child. Above them, an endless roundelay of angels descends from the golden-brown sky, Marr contrasts emptiness and fullness, light and dark - it is a dynamisation of the masses, in which heaven and earth are literally set in motion. And all of this is presented in a pastose, painterly, loosely arranged plein airism that is intended to overwhelm the viewer. Shortly before the turn of the century, Marr had already painted a monumental Adoration of the Infant Jesus, which is now in the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, which houses the world's largest collection of Marr's paintings. Marr took the basic composition of the Adoration from the painting there, but added Christ on the cross with a golden halo in our painting en grisaille - although he is only seen by Virgin and St Anthony of Padua, who remains in adoration. In this way, our painting already prefigures Jesus' Passion in the Nativity, giving the staging something profoundly metaphysical at a time of latent uncertainty. Dr Peter Prange