Each time I look again, the over-glossed wooden floor in Adolph Menzel’s painting The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse (1851) makes me think of a horse’s spine (a red bay, a chestnut), how the ridge that runs along a horse’s back always somehow seems to glisten and fasten the available light. And each time I look again, I think that this particular green of the room’s three walls is an honest green of rolled-out fields under a sulking German sky, a hops green.
Adolph Menzel (German, 1815–1905). The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse, 1851. Oil on cardboard, 12 5/8 x 10 5/8 in. (32.1 x 27 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Funds, Leonora Brenauer Bequest, in memory of her father, Joseph B. Brenauer, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, and Paul L. and Marlene A. Herring and John D. Herring Gift, 2009 (2009.64)
The room is an interior portrait composed with the weave and cast of a landscape. Something about Menzel’s sitting room feels oxidized.
Each time I look again, my eyes seem to drag me straight to the curtains, which take only a gentle toll on the peaky daylight that comes through them—the fabric’s pattern, its out-of-handness, off-handedness, the reds and the whites like a carnation tree coral.
What’s in the room? A desk, two chairs (one big, one small), an armoire, (the suggestion of) a bust, a small rug. The painting is oil on cardboard. It has an air of rehearsal and the strain of charm that only something not intended to be seen can have—composed in wisps, uncareful yet exacting. The novelist and critic Louis Edmond Duranty said that Menzel had the neurosis of truthfulness; he was known to measure the exact distance between buttons on a coat.
It has an air of rehearsal and the strain of charm that only something not intended to be seen can have—composed in wisps, uncareful yet exacting.
Menzel moved into this Berlin apartment in what’s now Kreuzberg when he was thirty-two. The painting feels like it was painted from memory, though this is almost definitely not the case. Perhaps because it is clear that the room was caught fast in Menzel’s net, in definitive sibylline strokes. Perhaps in translating a place one knows intimately, it's impossible not to translate what is already known. Here is a room looked at with gentleness, a quiet place. In looking, I think of the rooms of Bonnard and Vuillard in texture, in memory-feeling, which this room preceded by half a century.
Menzel’s The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse (detail), 1851
While the Intimists often showed a figure in the room, a domestic scene, someone tending to their day, or at least a suggestion of life just beyond the frame, Menzel’s room seems to suggest no such presence other than his own. Menzel never made a family. In his will, he wrote: “There is a lack of any kind of self-made bond between me and the outside world.” Apparently, he never fell in love.
I watched the movie Muriel (1962), directed by Alain Resnais and starring Delphine Seyrig. It’s a psychological chamber drama set in Boulogne and revolves around a widow and her grown son who live in an apartment that doubles as their antique shop. It’s autumn in the film, and the whole picture has this caramel feeling to it.
Still from the film Muriel (1963). Image courtesy of Argos Films
Fifteen minutes in, there is a long, wide shot of the widow, her son, her ex-lover, and an unexpected guest taking their seats around the dining table in the antique shop. A sense of resemblance pricked me. I could not immediately place it, but when I paused the film and looked at the frame again, I realized it was like The Artist’s Sitting Room––the red-and-cream curtains, the tint of the walls, the browns of the wood. My memory of Menzel's sitting room had re-formed itself inside this lovelorn antique dealer’s home. When I placed the film still side-by-side with Menzel’s painting, I confirmed the coincidental likeness. And I thought, I’ve visited Menzel’s sitting room so many times that, if I could really paint, I could paint this room from memory.
