The Luring Curtain

                                               Adolph Menzel: The Balcony Room          1845

        I saw many beautiful art works in the Old National Gallery in Berlin from artists I have never heard of before like Adolph Menzel. I saw his foot he painted from his perspective, and The Supper At The Ball, which is a vivid tabloid of the gobbler high society in 1878. The Balcony Room is the one I liked the most. After I left Berlin, I could only remember the curtain of the balcony room.

      Menzel was a very successful, honored German artist. He believed in realism, and his most recognized paintings were made in a realistic style. He did not prefer Impressionism, however he has some paintings that show touch upon impressionism years before the movement even showed up in the art world. Menzel did not know, but in some way he was a precursor of Impressionism. The Balcony Room is one of these works. But he carefully hid these paintings his whole life. Like he would never let anybody see his true side.

      On his photographic portrait Menzel looks like a little limp. His gaze and lips are very mean. I do not know how the outside features match with his personality but it seems to me he was a loner. He never married and as he stated in his will; “There is a lack of any kind of self-made bond between me and the outside world.” That is what I see in The Balcony Room.

     What we see on the surface is a room: not fancy but neat, except for the white-stained wall. There are biedermeier styled chairs, which do not look too comfy. There is a nice upholstered armchair’s reflection in the mirror, but the real one is just a gray patch on the rug. The floor is smoothly polished. Actually it would be a bleak, insignificant room without the curtain hanging above the open balcony door. It is a beautiful, very white, floral curtain. That is what we see in the picture. What else is there?

      There is the artist’s soul. This interior is his inside world. Lonely but of his free will, because the world’s door is open but he instead chose to stay inside. The world lures him like the beautiful curtain, which attracts the eye yet he still stays in the room, in his inside world. The curtain is bright white, flooding from the breeze. Maybe the world’s noise is audible; horse carriages, pedestrians and street cries.

      Menzel could have looked out the street but he did not. He rather hid this painting and his soul throughout his very long life. He looked at the open balcony door behind the curtain for a while then turned away. Even if the light was emanating from there…

      Many of us are like him. We are all living in our own world, sometimes being scared of what is waiting for us outside. But believe me, it is better to open your soul and maybe getting hurt, than the big Nothing. Without taking risks life would be as empty and soulless as the balcony room without the curtain.

      Adolph Menzel’s painting is a very finely depicted metaphor of the artist’s spiritual preferences. Despite his more than 10,000 paintings and drawings and lithographs, despite his many awards, titles and decorations, his name does not sound familiar outside of his native Germany. Maybe the world today would remember Menzel if he would have pulled that white curtain aside after all.