Context: Studio Wall ( 1872 ) is an oil painting by the German artist Adolph Menzel , now in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle . It is considered one of the `` masterpieces of Menzel 's maturity '' , and the artist deemed it his best painting . The painting depicts a red colored wall of the artist 's studio at night , upon which are hung a series of plaster casts illuminated from below . The casts include portrait busts , death masks and life masks of friends of the artist , children , classical personae such as Dante , Schiller , and possibly Goethe or Wagner , a dog , and male and female torsos ; art historian Werner Hofmann saw this assemblage as a conscious blurring of `` the dividing line between fame and anonymity . '' Numerous commentators have noted that the array of dramatically lit casts `` convey an uncanny impression of quasi-animateness . '' Studio Wall was preceded by a work of the same title painted in 1852 , an oil on paper now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin . That painting features casts of two arms and a separate hand , the arms arranged so as to suggest a relationship to a body from which they have been removed . Studio Wall is also seen as related to Menzel 's larger painting Iron Rolling Mill ( 1872 -- 1875 ) , for which it may have served as a study in dramatic lighting , yet it has greater import than that of a merely preparatory exercise , and may have functioned as a kind of memorial : the central death mask is that of the artist 's friend Friedrich Eggers , the first critic sympathetic to Menzel 's work . Eggers died in August 1872 , and the painting is dated from October of that year . A contemplation on the transience of life , Studio Wall is also a bravura piece of alla prima painting . Interpretations of the work vary greatly . For art historian Julius Meier - Graefe , Studio Wall was a harmonious example of pictorial unity ; to the contrary , Hofmann saw the painting as a `` coded manifesto '' , a rejection by Menzel of academic canons in favor of an aesthetic that celebrated the fragmentary and disjointed , and symbolic of the triumph of painting over sculpture . Fried rejects Hofman 's view of fragmentariness and anti-academicism , seeing the picture as a structured composition of objects arranged in successive rows . For Fried the likeliest allegorical meaning would be the sublimation of tangible existence to that of `` phantasmagorias '' , a world inhabited by ghosts in the form of plaster casts ., Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. Commonly used drying oils include linseed oil, poppy seed oil, walnut oil, and safflower oil. The choice of oil imparts a range of properties to the oil paint, such as the amount of yellowing or drying time. Certain differences, depending on the oil, are also visible in the sheen of the paints. An artist might use several different oils in the same painting depending on specific pigments and effects desired. The paints themselves also develop a particular consistency depending on the medium. The oil may be boiled with a resin, such as pine resin or frankincense, to create a varnish prized for its body and gloss., Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (December 8, 1815February 9, 1905) was a German Realist artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings. Along with Caspar David Friedrich, he is considered one of the two most prominent German artists of the 19th century, and was the most successful artist of his era in Germany. First known as Adolph Menzel, he was knighted in 1898 and changed his name to Adolph von Menzel., Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil, commonly linseed oil. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit, and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the dried oil paint film. Oil paints have been used in Europe since the 12th century for simple decoration, but were not widely adopted as an artistic medium until the early 15th century. Common modern applications of oil paint are in finishing and protection of wood in buildings and exposed metal structures such as ships and bridges. Its hard-wearing properties and luminous colors make it desirable for both interior and exterior use on wood and metal. Due to its slow-drying properties, it has recently been used in paint-on-glass animation. Thickness of coat has considerable bearing on time required for drying: thin coats of oil paint dry relatively quickly., Subject: studio wall, Relation: country_of_origin, Options: (A) europe (B) germany
Output: germany