Exhibit of German Drawings, Watercolors at Sackler Through June 7

The traveling exhibition "Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe" will be on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum fromthrough June 7.

Organized by the Busch-Reisinger Museum, "Fuseli to Menzel" consists of 80 German drawings from the years 1750 to 1850. The works have been selected from one of the world's premiere private collections of drawings from this period, assembled by the Munich lawyer Alfred Winterstein (1898-1976). Exceedingly rare in the private and public collections of the United States, these drawings and watercolors will afford the viewer an opportunity to study major works from one of the greatest periods of German art. The exhibition curator and author of the accompanying catalogue is Hinrich Sieveking, curator of the Winterstein Collection. The organizers of the exhibition at the Harvard University Art Museums are William W. Robinson, curator of drawings, and Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator, Busch-Reisinger Museum. The Sackler Museum is located at 485 Broadway.

Goethe's life (1749-1832) spanned an era of intellectual, social, economic, and political transformation. The turn of the century marked the transition from a fragmented political landscape composed of innumerable princely courts to a world in which the middle class bid for its share of power and Prussia emerged as the state that would eventually take the lead in German unification. Goethe lived through the Enlightenment and secularization, absolutism and constitutional monarchy, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic occupation and the Wars of Liberation, Restoration, Sturm und Drang, romanticism, and Biedermeier. The changes in the lives and consciousness of the people of his time found expression in a multitude of artistic trends that narrow stylistic terms such as rococo, neoclassicism, and realism cannot begin to define.

The period's outstanding cultural achievements came in the areas of music, philosophy, and literature. The affinity between the visual and literary arts in Germany around 1800 has often been noted. That historians refer to the entire era as the Age of Goethe, after its preeminent writer, attests to the literary foundation of its culture, and a literary iconography and sensibility inform much of the visual art of the period. Drawing was the essential medium of artistic expression in Germany in the Age of Goethe. Many artists are known primarily as draftsmen. To an unprecedented degree, drawing assumed an autonomous role, as an end in itself, and many sheets in the exhibition were produced and collected as independent works of art.

Goethe's artist contemporaries belonged to several different generations, from Daniel Chodowiecki (born 1726) to Adolph Menzel (died 1905). They stand, respectively, at the beginning and the end of this epoch in the German-speaking lands, and are included in this exhibition with representative works. Consummate draftsmen like Caspar David Friedrich, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and Johann Georg von Dillis, will also be represented, as will scissor cut-outs by Philipp Otto Runge and architectural studies by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Leo von Klenze.

"Fuseli to Menzel" has been made possible by the generous support of Merck, Finck & Co., Privatbankiers, a member of the Barclays group, with additional support from The Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum). The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5; $4 for senior citizens; $3 for students; free under 18 and on Saturday mornings. For special tour reservations, please call 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June. The Fogg tour is at 11 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2 p.m.