필립 오토 룽에의 연작 <하루의 시간들>: 낭만적 풍경에 나타난 시간의 변증법

서지정보

ㆍ발행기관 : 한국미술연구소 ㆍ수록지정보 : 美術史論壇 / 31권
ㆍ저자명 : 이화진

영어 초록

The romantic movement in German Art began when Philipp Ottto Runge moved to Dresden after his three-years studying at the Copenhagen Academy. His The Times of Day, a series of four drawings completed in 1803 is regarded as a ‘pictorial manifesto’ of German Romanticism. From 1801 to 1803, Runge interacted with writers and philosophers of early Romanticism while staying in the ‘Florence on the Elbe’. His own painting theory had grown as Runge learned the thoughts of Novalis and Jakob Böhme while building a relationship with Ludwig Tieck.
After his failure at the Weimar contest in 1801, Runge recognized that it is historically inevitable to escape the dogma of J. J. Winckelmann and the Neoclassicism favored by J. W. von Goethe. Since then, he, who cannot be an ‘ancient Greek’ himself, decided to assist in the birth of a ‘new art for the new era’. His artistic orientations were presented not through history paintings that were hailed by the academy, but through landscape paintings that were disregarded as a lower genre of art.
However, the landscape painting which Runge pursued, is different from those that simply imitate or idealize nature. His landscape is based on the inner identity between nature and human. The human being’s inner world is projected onto nature, and nature becomes meaningful and linguistic with the ideas and emotions that humans invest in. In addition, Runge ties nature, human and God with kinship that allows man to discover God as well as himself from nature. Visualizing of such connectivity, his landscape becomes a religious painting that brings God to minds, and at the same time a history painting that presents the human activity. Thus the landscape painting of Runge deconstructs the conventional hierarchy that exists in these genres.
In The Times of Day, God talks through nature, and nature harmonizes with the human being. This kindred spirits are portrayed by the rhythmical arabesques and puzzled hieroglyphs rooted in Runge’s subjectivity. Due to his arbitrary emancipation from traditional art norm and iconography, Runge explained these drawings in numerous letters. To the viewers who can not find the common pictorial languages of the artist, arabesques and hieroglyphs are nothing but ornamental patterns and non-readable characters. Thus, many individuals have tried to decipher this cycle and have led to various interpretations about its meanings.
One of the reasons that Runge selected the structure of ‘a picture in a picture’ in The Times of Day is to reveal the dichotomy between the forevercirculating nature and the linear history of Christianity. The central pictures narrate the time span of an living organism that generates, grows, blooms and disappears, while the peripheral pictures are dominated by religious eschatology covering creation to redemption. However, the confrontation between the Night of nature and the religious Night do not contradict each other as they become the premise of a new birth. Runge considered time of nature and that of religion are in a relationship of co-existence, not struggle, and that they are two elements that build the universe. Consequently, The Times of Day embodies the epitome of ‘time’, and extends to ‘Four Seasons’, ‘Four Ages of Man’ and ‘Universe Time’ as Daniel Runge explained.
Runge was like the Richard Wagner of art as he planned to exhibit the four times with poetry and music within a gothic architectural setting. His intention of artistic Synthesis is also showed through the children playing instruments in The Times of Day, where nature, human and God are united, soundless music and two dimensional drawings come across. But the fact that Morning (large version) remained unfinished says that ‘romanticization of the world’ in German Art was an utopian dream never to be realized.

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