Frankfurt (Germany). Born in Austria, but often considered a German painter, Carl Schuch (1846-1903) is still virtually unknown in France where he lived from November 1882 to March 1894. Across the Rhine, he is present in museum collections, but the name of the one that the art historian Erica Tietze-Conrat qualified in 1929, in an article by Living Art on Austrian creation, “the richest talent of the second half of the century” is still confidential there, although it was very famous from 1913 to 1945.
Dedicated to the way in which the painter was nourished by contemporary French art, the route conceals at its heart a wall presenting the important moments of his discovery of our artists. From the exhibition of works from the Barbizon school from the collection of Adolf J. Bösch, in December 1868 in Vienna, to the ten paintings by Claude Monet contemplated at the International Painting Exhibition inaugurated at the Georges Petit gallery on May 15, 1885 in Paris, 24 stages of this journey are identified thanks to the notes and letters of Carl Schuch. We thus learn that he noticed Théodule Ribot during an exhibition in which he himself participated, in April-May 1869 in Vienna and Gustave Courbet at the Universal Exhibition of 1873, in the same capital. Mainly a painter of landscapes and still lifes, Schuch retained a deep attachment to these two artists.
A chrono-thematic route
The curators, Alexander Eiling, Juliane Betz and Neela Struck, have brought together 70 works by the Austrian painter linked to 50 works by French artists in a chrono-thematic presentation. His artistic entourage is also summoned, notably through paintings by his master Ludwig Halauska and two painters from the Munich school met in 1871, Wilhelm Trübner, who became a close friend, and Wilhelm Leibl. Friend of Courbet, who had stayed and exhibited in Munich in 1869, Leibl was a fervent defender of realism in which he reinforced Schuch. According to Alexander Eiling, the members of what was called “Leibl’s circle” “were opposed to academicism, focused on doing, more interested in the how than the what”. They represented everyday life, painting “alla prima” and leaving the brush strokes visible: a technique with which Schuch fully identified.
Heir to a wealthy family, the Austrian had no need to sell and only exhibited at the very beginning of his career. He was obsessed with technique and worked tirelessly on variations of touch and color inspired by the strokes of genius of other artists. In Venice, where he lived from 1876 to 1882, he locked himself in his sumptuous studio to study the paintings of his friends, Trübner and Hans Thoma, which he had brought there. He visited dealers and exhibitions to observe the virtuosity of Manet, the light of Monet, the simplicity of Chardin who had just been rediscovered. But it is a painter totally unknown to the Germans and very few to the French who returns most often in his notebooks, Antoine Vollon, whose landscapes and still lifes fascinated him.
Schuch never imitated, he followed his own path. “ At the same period […], writes Alexander Eiling in the catalog, Cézanne was also looking for an answer to Impressionism – and found it in his own system of brushstrokes which aimed not to reproduce nature, but to create a “harmony parallel to nature”. […] In 1959, Eberhard Ruhmer asserted that “in Schuch we have nothing less […] than the German Cézanne.” Hence the Cézannes present in the course, even though there is no proof that one knew or saw the work of the other. There is only one pitfall in this high-quality exhibition: in the juxtaposition of the works of the Austrian and the French painters, we should not look for in one the brilliance or radicality of the others. Presented to one’s family, a bouquet by Manet or apples by Cézanne can dazzle the viewer to the detriment of the beautiful, discreet painter that is Schuch.
