From time to time, there is a key development in art that is a leap forward - see, for example, the art of J.M.W. Turner (and I love the movie MR TURNER, with Timothy Spall, 2014). As amazing as The Fighting Temeraire is, I find its year incredible - 1839. And as Turner was breaking the box with this and other paintings, he was in his 60s himself.
Here's a leap forward from an unusual quarter.
The Beuron Style of Art
A few weeks ago, I took a weekend course on "Modern Benedictine Thought" at St. Andrew's Abbey, in the north desert outside Los Angeles. (Mini video here.) The course focused on the period 1750-1900.
One great highlight for me was something I'd never heard of before. Beuron Abbey was founded in 1863 near the south edge of Germany, and soon became known throughout Europe for its style of art - Beuroner Stil. The art was influenced by art of the 1800s - they understood the culture around them - but deeply worked to bring in features from both Egyptian art and medieval art. The monks provided commissioned art for many churches throughout Europe. For me, the resulting style of work strongly heralds the art of Arts & Crafts, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Klimt, and what I take as Art Deco. But all of these are associated with the 1890s or indeed the 1900-1925 era, not the 1870s. (Wiki here).
From Beuron Abbey, see pages on art & culture here. (For me, Google offered to autotranslate in English using the browser Chrome). I picked up a book on Beuron Art (Beuron Stil) from Amazon: 1998, Krins, Die Kunst der Beuroner Schule (Art of the Beuron School). (I can read this in German, but a lot slower than English).
For the illustrations see a few pages from the Krins book in PDF in the cloud, here.
See a pre printed English translation of an Arts page from the Bueron Abbey in PDF here.
Look for more on your own with "Beuron" or "Beuron Art" or "Beuroner Stil" as keywords on Google (or YouTube). (For a Google-selected art display, try this).
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Beuron and Carmina Burana
A few weeks after writing this, I heard a passage of Carmina Burana in a TV commercial, and I wondered suddenly if "Burana" might be an adjective form of "Beuron."
Close but no cigar. But there are some interesting tangents. Beuron is on the French border, but there is another abbey, Benediktbeurn, in the alps south of Munich. Benediktbeurn was secularized in 1803, which led to the public rediscovery of the medieval songs that became Carmina Burana. The composer of this hour-long orchestral and choir concert staple was Carl Orff, who worked on it in 1935/36 based on poems published in 1847 from the Benediktbeurn abbey archives. (Benediktbeurn was secularized for over a century but is a Silesian abbey today). In another tangent, Carmina Burana was very popular in Germany in the mid Nazi years 1937-8, tying together the medieval German heritage with the modern concert arts.
Find Carmina Burana at YouTube here. Find Carl Orff at Wikipedia here. Find a book on "8 Nazi Composers" by Kater, 2002, at Amazon here.
See NPR on Carmina Burana 2009 here and at more length in 2006 here as Scott Simon interviews Marin Alsop. See a 2021 autobiographical article by Carolyn Brown on Carmina-during-COVID, here. A short but not too short musicologist's view, 2008, here. Wikipedia for Carmina as poetry, here. Wikipedia on Carmina as music by Orff, here.
