The Reception 382 the history of 19th century painting in Dresden to be the “general theme” of his life’s work as a scholar, while lamenting the persistent “major gaps in knowledge”7 in art scholarship, which he bemoans as often being outdated. In the course of his work as curator for 19th century painting at the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister (now Albertinum), he approached this field of research from many different angles, for example by contextualising a number of Friedrich’s contemporaries in the retrospectives of the 1970s. In 1976, almost two years after the Dresden anniversary exhibition, Hans Joachim Neidhardt published Die Malerei der Romantik in Dresden through the E. A. Seemann-Verlag in Leipzig, which can be seen as both a summary of his in-depth research and an interim result of his subsequent engagement with this chapter of art history, its main proponents and their works. As he himself recalls, the book was so popular that a second edition was printed shortly after the first, for export to West Germany and later further abroad.8 In Die Malerei der Romantik in Dresden, Hans Joachim Neidhardt takes a close look at the artists who lived, worked, taught and trained in the city, even if but briefly. The author positions Dresden as a hub of various artistic networks and, by doing so, was the first to highlight the city’s central role in the artistic achievements of Romanticism besides art centres already long-associated with the Romantic movement (at least in the German-speaking cultural sphere), such as Rome and Vienna.9 While the 35 works shown in the Friedrich retrospective in Dresden in 1974–1975 were exclusively landscapes by artists who were close to Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl, the range of artists and works discussed in Die Malerei der Romantik in Dresden is considerably broader. Nevertheless, the British and East-German exhibitions of the 1970s, especially the latter, can clearly be seen as laying the groundwork for the present volume, both in terms of content and on a historical and cultural-political level. A brief excursion into the historical and cultural-political background of both exhibitions with Neidhardt’s curatorial involvement and the publication of the East-German book shows that until the 1970s the reception of Romantic art and literature in the GDR was limited and considered undesirable by the socialist state. Existing scholarship10 repeatedly cites the writings of the literary historian György Lukács as the basis for this critique, in particular his Fortschritt und Reaktion in der deutschen Literatur,11 which, while written in the 1930s, was first published in 1947. In it, Lukács sets up a dichotomy between Romanticism and Neoclassicism, which he sees as opposing poles, with the former representing a “preponderance” of “reactionary elements”12 and “a defence of the remnants of feudalism in Germany”.13 By doing so, Lukács placed Romanticism and its protagonists in a negative light in comparison to the thinkers and artists of the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism, which he saw as progressive intellectual movements. In the GDR (at least as far as the state apparatus was concerned) a highly selective cultural canon emerged, which until the early 1970s largely ignored the cultural legacy of German Romanticism in literature and art. This cultural aversion to Romanticism had much to do with the lasting intellectual reverberations of Lukács’ thesis, but also with the most recent chapter in the reception history of Caspar David Friedrich during the Nazi period and the resulting ideological appropriation and distortion of his art by such authors as Kurt Karl Eberlein – proponents of exactly the kind of nationalistic German art history that the 1 Friedrich exhibition in the Albertinum 1974–1975, exhibition room/Mosaiksaal with works by Carl Gustav Carus, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme and Johan Christian Dahl 2 Friedrich exhibition in the Albertinum 1974–1975, exhibition room/Klingersaal
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