Christian Griepenkerl - Works

Works

A larger collection are Rahl's compositions which Griepenkerl carried out with the help of Eduard Bitterlich in the new municipal opera house. They worked for four years on the ceiling of the auditorium and on the drop curtain of the tragical opera. It was only after the death of Rahl in 1865 that Griepenkerl took on his own monumental assignments. The architect Hansen employed him to decorate the Palace Ephrussi and Palace Epstein, Franz Klein hired Griepenkerl for the castle of Hornstein and for the palace of Sina in Venice. There he made the ceiling fresco Poseidon's Wedding Procession, Demons of the Storm, and Protective Ghosts of the Sea, which are of noble form and very graceful, but have some insufficiencies concerning the clothing and the illumination. Of the same importance are the wall paintings in the mansion of the grand duchess of Tuscany in Gmunden and his painting The Wedding of Aphrodite and Adonis in the dining hall of the Mansion Simon near Hietzing.

Griepenkerl also made the decorative oil paintings (finished in 1878) in the stairway hall of the Augusteum in Oldenburg, on the ceiling depicting the Venus Urania as the ideal of all beauty, surrounded by four themes from the myth of Prometheus; and on three walls (similar to the hémicycle of Paul Delaroche) is depicted an ideal gathering of the all-time heroes of art in historical sequence.

It was followed by a cycle of paintings — once again employing themes from the Prometheus myth — that are distinguished by a great concept of forms and a swinging composition, in the conference hall of the new Academy of Sciences in Athens.

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