Public Concerns – Private Longings: Adolph Menzel’s Studio Wall (1872)

While this paper focuses on The Studio Wall (1872), one of the most intriguing paintings by Adolph Menzel, the critical analysis of this one image serves as a window onto central issues of modernity: the disjunction – even rupture – between the public and private spheres in an artist’s life and work, the fragmentation of, and ambiguity concerning, traditional aesthetic paradigms, and the reciprocal relation of nationalism to the ever‐shifting critical reception of art. Rather than insist on one fixed reading, I shall concentrate on the dynamic processes at work which have alternatively concealed or exposed specific layers of meaning.