The Biedermeier style.(biedermeier exhibitions )

The clean lines and purity of form that characterize decorative and fine arts created during the early nineteenth century in central and northern Europe, particularly in Austria and Germany, in the style known today as Biedermeier, has been an area of scholarly inquiry and collector interest for several decades. An ambitious exhibition on this style, consisting of more than four hundred objects in a wide variety of mediums, has been organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum (where it is on view until January 1, 2007), in collaboration with the Deutsches Historiches Museum in Berlin and the Albertina in Vienna. The show, which is entitled Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity, will then travel to those two institutions and also to the Musee du Louvre in Paris. The dates of those showings will be listed in Calendar.

As Hans Ottomeyer explains in the gargantuan accompanying catalogue, "In the past, there have been significant misconceptions about the origins and development of Biedermeier. The term was usually applied as a nonspecific and overarching designation for the entire period from 1815 to 1848, connoting the cliche of a new bourgeois style, embraced by a stronger middle class in a time of social and political upheaval." Today, the scholars who have contributed to the catalogue see the style as an outgrowth of the patronage of artists and craftsmen by those in the upper reaches of society--royalty, nobility, and the aristocracy. From these origins, it filtered ...