The Städel Museum in Frankfurt is presenting a major retrospective of Austrian still life painter Carl Schuch, showcasing 70 of his paintings alongside 50 significant works by French artists including Cézanne, Manet, and Monet. The exhibition demonstrates Schuch's unique ability to make objects appear almost human in their arrangement, establishing him as one of the most important still life painters of the late 19th century.
Schuch's artistic approach was shaped by profound personal tragedy. Both of his parents died when he was still a young child, and as a young adult, he lost his beloved sister, which caused him to become seriously ill. Although his wealthy father left him a substantial inheritance that allowed him to paint without financial worries throughout his life, Schuch would likely have given up this wealth to bring his loved ones back to life.
Gottfried Boehm, a professional art critic who has spent decades questioning the status of images, perhaps found the most fitting words for Schuch in 1986. He described the Austrian still life and landscape painter as undertaking careful investigations of the range and scope of artistic means for the sake of exploring the visible world. This hesitancy and almost overly meticulous and suspicious questioning of all things as representatives of a world likely stems from his early losses.
Unlike pure impressionists, Schuch never allowed the 'what' to dominate over the 'how' in his work - often the technique actually creates the subject. This connects Schuch much more closely with Cézanne, perhaps the most scrupulous controller of reality in painting, than with the surface explorations of pure impressionists or even with Courbet, who loaded his paintings more heavily with symbolism. While Schuch appreciated Courbet's colors, he completely rejected his political attitude, which he felt infected even the still lifes.
Schuch maintained connections with the Barbizon plein air painter Daubigny, but the colleagues always considered most influential - Wilhelm Leibl and Wilhelm Trübner, as well as Karl Hagemeister (with whom he spent the winter of 1873 in Amsterdam and important months in Ferch and Kähnsdorf in Brandenburg) - should not be seen as slavishly imitated models. Schuch never wanted to be an imitator and transformed every inspiration he encountered into something distinctly his own.
With his meticulous exploration of the world in oil paint, he remained a loner without group affiliation. However, he was socially embedded in an artist network in Paris, where he lived and worked for twelve formative years starting in 1882. There he saw exhibitions by the local impressionists and realists, as the Städel's grand autumn exhibition now brilliantly demonstrates with its comparison of his work to major French artists.
No German-speaking painter created more still lifes with apples than Schuch, making him particularly comparable to Cézanne in this regard. The exhibition's aesthetic opulence and the perpetual question mark inscribed in Schuch's still lifes - 'How did he manage to make this color or this apple glow so brilliantly?' - makes this show difficult to surpass in terms of visual impact.
Art critic Karl Scheffler's enormous praise in 1912 - 'Leibl is revered, Trübner is highly esteemed, but Schuch is loved' - came too late. The painter had already died in 1903 at only fifty-six years old, mentally deteriorated from the effects of syphilis. Like Van Gogh, he remained largely unknown to the general public throughout his lifetime and was honored with only a few exhibitions. Critics likely celebrated him posthumously out of guilt for having overlooked him, only to forget him again soon after.
Giorgio Morandi, a generation later, massively benefited from Schuch's almost uncanny sense for arranging objects in paintings like people - the transformation of object into subject. Some of the most beautiful comparisons in this stunning exhibition bring together Chardin's still lifes with Schuch's very similar tonalities.
The term 'tonality' doesn't sound like music by coincidence. For each of his still lifes, Schuch establishes a new rhythm through colors based on tonal values. Often working against deep black like the old Dutch masters and Rembrandt, he makes the flaming orange of his autumn pumpkins glow, not without acupuncturing them with his brush like Vermeer, by placing seemingly abstract dot-like dabs on the surfaces of objects that are not light reflections.
Rembrandt and Vermeer, alongside Frans Hals, are the most frequently mentioned and beloved old masters in Schuch's notes. Through the constantly recombined components of color and object world in his experimental arrangements - especially his repeatedly rebuilt and scraped pewter jug and a matte-shimmering ginger pot made of stoneware - infinite possibilities emerge. Yet the fundamental tone of his still lifes is completely different each time.
Schuch himself calls this 'coloristic action,' as if costumed actors or singers were emerging from holes in the stage floor and being lit differently. Unlike the impressionists, he always sees shadow in light - brightness for him is necessarily colored with honest darkness. This shows particularly clearly in one of the craziest rooms the Städel has ever set up, which could also be called the 'Asparagus Room.'
A good dozen paintings with asparagus bundles as a French national dish and favorite vegetable of impressionism and Schuch hang on the walls. In comparing Manet's asparagus bundle with the Austrian's 'Asparagus Bundle, Glass and Clay Casserole,' the difference is immediately apparent. With Manet, light plays in the form of cream white and bluish tips on the root vegetable and the slightly blue-gray tinted tablecloth. With Schuch, the asparagus changes wildly between yellow, aubergine red, and green on an equally bluish-gleaming damask cloth.
Both artists equally draw from the scientific discoveries about color effect and perception of their time's optics, especially Hermann Helmholtz's research. However, the convincing comparison also shows how Schuch wants to avoid Manet's virtuosity of accurately portrayed asparagus stalks at all costs, turning just short of perfection into the summarily sketched. This strategy of avoiding too much similarity with French impressionism can be found in another masterfully curated room with the famous, relatively large-format apple still lifes.
Hung in sequence, they provide not only a narrative scenic progression in the different positioning of apples, porcelain bowls, and other accessories. Newly created micro X-ray fluorescence analyses also show how Schuch simply painted over a typically French overturned basket with apples falling out on the table, instead leaving the apples existentially lost and thrown into the world without showing the overturned basket as the reason for their being thrown.
With the Städel exhibition, the artist is rescued from oblivion for a second time, after the first wave of praise following his death subsided. May Schuch now remain anchored in the canon as the great color magician and different painter, as particularly shown by the breathtaking final image of the exhibition, 'Forest Interior near Saut du Doubs.' In it, he makes the surroundings of a waterfall glow impressionistically, but only these surroundings, without painting the namesake natural sensation itself.
The exhibition 'Carl Schuch and France' runs at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt until February 1, 2026, with a catalog available for 45 euros.
