But hurry! Six exhibitions that end this week

Caspar David Friedrich in his anniversary year for the last time: Weimar adds a grand finale to the series of exhibitions: with the view of the classical city on the romantic.

"The show shows everything that Weimar has by Friedrich today (three paintings, eight drawings, a sketchbook, five prints, two autographs)," writes Andreas Platthaus , "it perfectly complements the exhibition's idea of ​​the connection between classicism and romanticism when two early Friedrich watercolors come from the Berlin Print Room, with which he illustrated two scenes from Schiller's 'The Robbers' in 1799. The master romantic loved the Weimar classics; his Weimar painting, which has been missing since 1945, was also created as an implementation of a Goethe poem, 'Shepherd's Lament' from 1803, which Friedrich set in the familiar scenery of the island of Rügen. Goethe must have been very charmed. How much he valued Friedrich's skills is made clear by another discovery: the previously unknown drawing of a piece of meadow that Friedrich made on January 1, 1807 and must have sent to Goethe. It lay unrecognized under Goethe's own botanical drawings until the exhibition was prepared."

Fast ships, correctly foreshortened corpses and Christ children destroying books: Vittore Carpaccio was the most original painter of the early Renaissance in Venice, as Stuttgart's State Gallery impressively demonstrates.

"After the myriad religious devotional images in the centuries before, such breaks with the deadly serious history of salvation were in great demand, as the parallel phenomenon of the fooling around angels and Madonnas with parrots in Hans Baldung Grien's paintings north of the Alps shows," writes art critic Stefan Trinks: "Rarely does an exhibition on the early Renaissance provide as much pleasure as viewing as much interpretive interest as this intellectual with a brush does."

Did Hofrat Behrens suffer from burnout? And how did Clawdia Chauchat rob Hans Castorp of his mind? These and other questions are answered at an exhibition in Lübeck on Thomas Mann's century-long novel "The Magic Mountain".

"The Magic Mountain exhibition is not huge, but it offers cleverly chosen objects that provide access to a novel that is probably no longer easily accessible to younger people today," writes our literary critic Jan Wiele: "It first approaches the medical aspects of the book objectively (tuberculosis, X-rays, bed cures), and then shows its dreamlike and fairytale-like character. How do you illustrate and soundtrack a novel? Of course, a video installation on the hallucinations of the snow chapter is a must. But some of the props that are intended to lead into the book as a vehicle for the imagination are also impressive: for example, a sleeveless dress that could look like the one in which Clawdia Chauchat finally drives Hans Castorp mad in the chapter 'Walpurgis Night'. Or the model of a stinkhorn, the type of mushroom that can be considered the most obvious of the many phallic symbols in the novel, and which, with its smell of decay, also refers to its theme of decay and death."

It is the brush that gives sculptures life: the Prado in Madrid is showing in an exhibition how painters and sculptors worked hand in hand to create them.

"The semi-darkness in Madrid's Prado is reminiscent of a stage. Spotlights highlight the baroque figures: praying, suffering, bleeding. Some with ivory teeth, horn fingernails and glass eyes," writes Europe correspondent Paul Ingendaay: "But it is not these accessories, but the colors that breathe deceptively real life into the wooden sculptures in a disturbing way. For the first time in Madrid, sculptors and painters stand side by side on equal terms: they worked hand in hand."

Where Stalin and Freud lie on the canvas sofa: Vienna's Albertina shows Adrian Ghenie's shadow paintings inspired by Egon Schiele .

"In his works, Adrian Ghenie deals intensively with the aftermath of Stalinist terror. His paintings are therefore also imprints of a poisoned atmosphere. This is also evident in this cycle of works, with the boundaries between reality and abstraction blurring. They seem to be more like reflections of a distorted reality than shadow images," writes our exhibition critic Karoline Heinzl. Today, only black-and-white photographs of many of Schiele's works exist. "In total, the missing and destroyed pictures are estimated to be a quarter of Schiele's paintings." Although Ghenie "brings Schiele's originals back to life with his paintings and gives them new color, this is by no means an uncritical reconstruction. Rather, the echo of the 21st century is very loud and reverberates clearly across Schiele's works. Nevertheless, references to Schiele's time and the apocalyptic mood of the fin de siècle at the turn of the century can also be recognized."

Small beginnings, great persistence: An exhibition in the Hamburg State and University Library shows the history of the Rowohlt publishing house with its most important books.

"Curated by Michael Töteberg, Uwe Naumann and Martin Setzke, flat display cases and a glass bookcase show stages of the publishing house's history in chronological order," writes literary critic Tilman Spreckelsen about the exhibition: "It should not be missed, if only because of the dignified form with which the contours of a publishing house's history are resolutely shown here, without forcing this interpretation on the visitor."