Caspar Wolf—And the Aesthetic Conquest of Nature

Kunstmuseum Basel, October 19, 2014 – February 1, 2015 Curators: Bodo Brinkmann and Katharina Georgi

The Alps as magnificent spectacle of nature — a surprisingly recent opinion. It was only during the course of the 18th century that people began regarding jagged mountain ranges as “sublime” and aesthetically pleasing. The Swiss landscape painter Caspar Wolf (1735– 1783) was one of the first to discover the largely untouched Alpine highlands as subject matter for artistic treatment. In his spectacular compositions, massive boulders, thundering mountain torrents, and bizarre glacier formations impede the viewer’s path. The human being, standing in awe, is reduced to a tiny figure before expansive panoramas. With his radical visions of the Alpine landscape that leave the Baroque idyll far behind, Wolf emerges as one of the most significant precursors to European Romanticism. At the same time, his work breathes the spirit of Enlightenment.

The exhibition includes 126 works by Caspar Wolf and his contemporaries as well as a selection of recent photographs of the Alpine scenes where he painted. In conjunction with this exhibition, the Kupferstichkabinett at the Kunstmuseum Basel presents highlights from its rich holdings of drawings and graphic works by Caspar Wolf.

A fluke of history can be credited for Caspar Wolf’s ascent from impoverished childhood in the village of Muri (Canton Aargau) as carpenter’s son and moderately successful beginnings to a figure of standing in European art history: “most important pioneer of Alpine painting” and “one of the most significant precursors to European Romanticism” are the labels most frequently attributed to Caspar Wolf.

The fluke in question is Caspar Wolf’s encounter with the influential Bernese publisher Abraham Wagner (1734–1782). Wagner, one year his senior, had an ambitious project: to issue an encyclopedic publication of the Swiss Alpine landscape complete with illustrations of the highest artistic standard; more to the point, these illustrations would be worked immediately from nature. The motifs that the publisher had in mind were to be found in the rarely travelled and difficult to reach high Alpine region. Wagner’s idea was to offer viewers a new conception of the Alpine landscape in images of previously unparalleled precision and magnificence. To author the written sections of this publication, Wagner engaged the Bernese pastor and eminent natural researcher Jacob Samuel Wyttenbach. Wolf was to accompany the two men on their extensive excursions through the mountains. His task was to document and depict in paintings these unique encounters with nature.

What resulted was a comprehensive picture cycle of the Swiss Alps. Working in his studio from the nature studies completed on location, Wolf created close to 200 paintings of imposing quality that bring together spontaneous observations and highly artistic formulations. Wolf devises a captivating painterly vocabulary to depict mountain ranges and glaciers, waterfalls and caves, bridges and raging torrents, lakes and high plateaus, portraying them now in wide panoramas, now in close, claustrophobic compositions. His paintings include many prominent natural monuments, some no longer existent due to the environmental destruction of recent centuries: 

such as the famous “séracs” (ice needles) of the Lower Grindelwald Glacier, evident in two exceptionally powerful paintings by Wolf, that have long since melted away.

Wolf’s paintings can neither be grouped with the type of vedute, so popular at the time, nor can they be described as explicitly documentary images. Instead, they play on a more fundamental level: they ultimately consider the relationship between the sensual perception of the world of the mountains with a rational concept of the phenomenon of mountains.

But what was the origin for the remarkable aesthetic assurance with which the artist entered new ground in the Alpine project?

Wolf’s intense engagement with French painting while in Paris in 1770/71 proves to be of central importance, as the exhibition demonstrates with works by François Boucher, Claude-Joseph Vernet, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg the Younger, and Hubert Robert. Amazingly, Wolf drew particular inspiration from the marine painting of the day with its dramatic storms at sea and shipwrecks.

The exhibition includes 126 works by Caspar Wolf and his contemporaries as well as a selection of recent photographs of the Alpine scenes where he painted. In conjunction with this exhibition, the Kupferstichkabinett at the Kunstmuseum Basel presents highlights from its rich holdings of drawings and prints by Caspar Wolf. 

Publication

The Kunstmuseum Basel has produced an exhibition catalogue to accompany the exhibition, Caspar Wolf and the Aesthetic Conquest of Nature, with essays by Andreas Beyer, Bodo Brinkmann, Viktoria van der Brüggen, Katharina Georgi, Gilles Monney, Regula Suter-Raeber, designed by Gabriele Sabolewski. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014. German and English edition, ca. 231 pages, ca. 180 ills., 22 x 26cm, bound.