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Art in Slovenia

Biedermeier and Romanticism

Anton Karinger

(Ljubljana, 1829–1870)

Mojstrana and Vrata Valley
1865, oil, canvas, 37,4 x 55,7 cm

NG S 1564, National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana
The painting shows the stream of the Triglavska Bistrica meandering from the village of Mojstrana to the glacial valley of Vrata which leads to the Northern Face of Mt Triglav. In the picture we still see the glacier that has since almost disappeared.  The landscape (of decent size) still hardly manifests the Biedermaier attitude, the only tribute to the past remains the panoramic balcony with a plot of red soil, a rock and the almost Baroque tree composition. 

The painting can be divided into six spatial planes. The first four are linked by a uniformly rendered trees or greenery in dark green colour, while the mountains and the sky share white-blue of the atmosphere, clouds and snow. Karinger also played with the depth that colour layers create; neoclassical painters in the end “enlivened” their polished paintings with a thin layer of more frivolous colour emphases and contours, while in Karinger’s painting our attention is directed to the trees, fields, and screes, rendered with simple strokes or dots. Karinger most likely transposed the approach to the canvas from the drawing. For example, in his Motif with Trees and Spring (NG G 163) he accentuates water, rocks and the branch with dark hatching or dots which have a distinctly two-dimensional effect and differ from the hatching in the remaining part of the drawing.

Karinger's modernist studies predate those by Austrian landscapists, among others the examples by Anton Romako, the precursor of Viennese Expressionism. Karinger’s relaxed and experimental manner can be ascribed to frequent study trips, familiarity with the developments in German cultural centres, and material independence.



Biedermeier and Romanticism
Heavily censored public life between the Congress of Vienna and the Spring of Nations in 1848, weakened Church patronage, and the ascending middle class marked the era when life focused on the privacy of the family circle, individual dignity and the sense of belonging; this is expressed in the Central European art as the style of Biedermeier which coexisted with a Romantic view of nature. 

Portraiture was the genre of painting that saw its heyday in this era. Matevž Langus, Jožef Tominc, Mihael Stroj and Anton Karinger established themselves as individually formed portraitists who demonstrated their self-confidence as artists also through their self-portraits. The painters initially relied on formal characteristics of Neoclassicism. Stroj’s late portraits and particularly those by Karinger abandoned the Biedermeier manner and adopted a more realistic approach. 

Interest in landscape first appeared as the background of portraits; towards the mid-century first autonomous city vedute emerged. The Biedermaier landscape is idyllic, descriptive, and furnished with staffage figures. Painters were attracted by tourist destinations and locations that were related to homeland identity: Mt. Triglav, Lake Bohinj, Bled. Anton Karinger and Marko Pernhart established themselves as explicit landscapists. The latter became famous for his multi-part panoramas from mountain peaks. 

Still lifes became an attractive decoration of a middle-class home, and they also found favour with amateur women painters, one of whom was Countess Maria Auersperg Attems.