Nurnberg Burg

Fritz Beckert

Beckert depicts the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany (also spelled Nurnberg), illuminated by a late afternoon sun. Wafts of stove smoke rise from the chimneys of the closely assembled houses, evoking a cozy, autumnal atmosphere. Beckert achieves a woodcut-like quality in this color lithograph, with his use of texture and in the layered tones of the clouds.

In the background sits the formidable silhouette of the Nuremberg Castle, built originally around the year 1000, and added to, remodeled, and restructured in the 11th and 12th centuries as well as during and after World War II. The Nuremberg Castle, with its defensible wall, is considered one of Europe’s most effective fortifications and remains a symbol of the historical role that the Imperial City of Nurnberg played in helping to form modern day Europe.

The lithograph was published in 1906 by B.G. Teubner, Leipzig, with their chop in the lower right of the image. In the 19th century, the B.G.Teubner publishing firm offered both affordable editiones maiores (with a full critical apparatus) for scholars, and low-priced editiones minores (without critical apparatuses or with abbreviated textual appendices) for students.

Winfried Müller and assistant Michael Schmidt, writing in the preface of their treatise "Color Lithographs as Pictorial Wall Decoration in School and Home ca 1895–1918." noted about this imagery:

Since the 1890s, the colored lithograph, a technique allowing high circulations, became popular. According to the intention of the arts and crafts movement, homes and schools could be provided with ambitious and, at the same time, inexpensive, original graphic artworks….As far as motives are concerned, the colored lithographs are part of the nationalist “Heimatkunst”-movement of around 1900. They intended to be a genuine German contribution (“Deutsche Künstlersteinzeichnung”) to the history of art… Their partly considerable distribution puts them into the vicinity of mass culture. In addition, the graphic artists who worked in that genre were, without exception, representatives of styles that preceded classical modernism.

(Artists included) significant representatives of the Karlsruhe school like Gustav Kampmann, Karl Biese or Hans Richard von Volkmann, or of Munich “Jugendstil” like Walter Georgi and Angelo Jank, or Dresden artists like Fritz Beckert…. The main focus lies on the large Leipzig publishing houses B.G. Teubner and R. Voigtländer that cooperated with the Karlsruhe artists ’ association since the Dresden conference on art education in 1901.