Painted with oil in 1845, the room depicted in Balkonzimmer belonged to Adolph Menzels family apartment, on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin. Credit: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jrg P AndersTypical of many of Berlins 19th-century apartment buildings is the Berliner Zimmer: a corner room that forms the meeting point between the front of the building facing the street and the perpendicular side wing. With only a single window overlooking the central courtyard, the Berliner Zimmer tends to be gloomy a dim space for passing through. If you are lucky, it may receive a brief ray of sunshine at some point during the day.On a spring day in 1845, German painter Adolph Menzel made a painting of his Berliner Zimmer at just such an auspiciously sunny moment. He had recently moved into a new apartment that overlooked the Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlins first railway station which had begun its operations seven years earlier. Another painting from the same year shows the view out of this apartment window at night, along the flank of a neighbouring building and down into the railway stations shadowy yard. Most of the picture is dark cloud-strewn sky, the railway yard and its heavy machinery are cast in gloom, while a small disc of moon glances white on the tiled roofs of the railway buildings centre left.Menzels painting of his rooms interior is just the opposite. Pale spring light breathes through thin muslin curtains which frame the open window and billow gently into the room. A bright shaft of reflection lies on the polished parquet floor in the foreground, and shimmers on the back of a mahogany chair, turned askew towards the open window. A matching chair is back-to-back, also angled, like a mirror image reflected on an invisible diagonal plane. On the wall behind the chairs is an actual mirror, tall with a carved mahogany frame, reflecting a picture we cannot make out, shown at another oblique angle. The motion in this painting is all diagonal, and all the action occurs on the right. On the left is just a spread of parquet floor, a corner of red carpet and a bare expanse of wall. Hovering on this wall is an ambiguous patch of white: a painted void, as if unfinished.When Adolph Menzel painted his room, he was not yet the foremost painter of 19th-century Germany he was to become. While he then owed his fame to depictions of the court of King Wilhelm I, he also made countless pieces that focus on peripheral details and everyday incidents in Berlin. The city was being built up rapidly around him, and these early realist works are vivid visual documents which manifest a prephotographic compulsion to bear witness. Besides the intimate oil paintings of his own accommodation, his pencil drawings and gouaches sketch daily journeys through the outskirts of the city. He would walk around with sketchbooks, pencils and watercolours stuffed into his pockets to see what the streets, rural lanes, backyards and alleyways could offer up by way of subject matter. In these areas that ambiguously straddle both urban and rural, the city seemed to lie in wait, gathering on the horizon.Menzels work thrives on contingencyMenzels work, which has been deemed a kind of embodied realism, thrives on contingency. The painting of his room, known as Balkonzimmer (balcony room), is full of such contingencies. It is less a painting of the room and more of the light that floods in and the breeze that seems to animate it; of the space within the walls, rather than the walls themselves. The painting seems to open outwards, like a curious mind filling with thought. The ambiguous mark on the wall is a flourish of self-reflexivity. That this patch of paint is the works central focus suggests that paint is being employed literally tautologically to replicate its own material state.Menzel had moved into this apartment with his mother and sisters only a few weeks earlier and described it in a letter to a friend: in front of the Anhaltische Tor in Schneberger Strae, number 18, two flights up, where I will have more space and a dedicated room to paint. It is this dedicated room to paint that is the subject of Balkonzimmer, shown not straight on but towards the corner. Each corner, as Gaston Bachelard has it, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination. In a state of solitude, Menzel paints the paint on the wall. Finally alone in a room of his own, the artist can indulge in interiority. This painting, made in the century before Berlins rapid rise and equally rapid fall, depicts a calm before the storm. It remains filled with the breath of potential.Explore the good rooms series, a collection of domestic spaces made, imagined or described by architects, curators and writers2025-01-09Reuben J BrownShare