Findingson the tempera painting of the individual artists Artists motivationIn thecourse of the 1890s, tempera painting in Munich gradually developed from amarginal phenomenon to a trend that more and more artists joined. ArnoldBöcklin was certainly an important initiator of the trend of tempera paintingthrough his innovative use of tempera and his emphatically individual paintingtechnique, which can be observed in Munich painting in the last quarter of the19th century. However, unlike Ernst Berger and Max Doerner, he was certainlynot the one who rediscovered painting with aqueous binder systems (Doerner 1984, Berger, E., Bocklin, A., 1906, Beltinger, Nadolny 2016).
Böcklin’spainting technique developed in the copies and portraits probably had an effecton the surrounding, historical artist circle such as the symbolist and ArtNouveau artist Franz von Stuck and the historicist painter Franz von Lenbach. However, his idea of the technique of painting of the Old Masters, which he haddeveloped in the context of his copies, may have had an effect on thecontemporary conceptions of the painting technique of the Old Masters: A strikingsimilarity exists, for example, between Lenbach’s painting technique of thecopies in the 1860s and the ideas of the painting technique of the Old Mastersformulated by Max Doerner and Ernst Berger towards the end of the 19th and atthe beginning of the 20th century: Both Doerner and Berger advocated a layeredpainting in which tempera and oil paint layers alternated, so that amulti-layered image structure could be the result (Kinseher 2012). Berger has emphasized the practical reasons for using temperapaints. Artists counted on tempera to have better colour stability over oilpaints, streamline the work process with shorter drying times and luminous colours(Berger, E., Bocklin, A., 1906 cited in, Kinseher 2012). In addition to these well-known reasons, artistic reasons were likely to vary depending on artists’ aims: For example, temperapaints appeared to Böcklin and Franz von Stuck particularly suitable for therepresentation of a “ spirit world”, while oil paints in theirtypical, contemporary application in the sense of naturalistic modellingremained a means of depicting reality (Kinseher2012, Beltinger 2016, Beltinger, Nadolny 2016).
Franz von Lenbach usedtempera paints with the aim of getting as close as possible to the imageeffects he admired and the technique of painting of the Old Masters, which hecopied between 1863 and 1868 in Rome and Florence. He also sought with theirhelp a rational execution of the copies and later his portraits, the relativelyshort drying times of the tempera colours in the background were of greatadvantage. Igor Grabar, Ernst Friedlein and Wassily Kandinsky’s use of temperapaints promised vivid colour effects and colour-fast paint in comparison to oilpainting. It could be shown that this also remained important to Kandinsky inthe transition to abstract painting: because colours are an important means ofexpression for them, durable colours were of central importance for thepreservation of the image effect and thus of the image content.
Anothermotivation for the use of tempera paints was probably also the enrichment of thempainting-technical means of expression (Beltinger 2016, Kinseher 2012, Reinkowski-Häfner 2016a, Friedlein1906).