Exhibition of Contemporary German Art

Nr. of pages: 72 [PDF page number: 131].
Holding Institution: online: archive.org

Clemen, Paul: Contemporary German Art, p. 5-33
[no author]: Notice, p. 71-72.

"CONTEMPORARY GERMAN ART
by PAUL CLEMEN, Professor at the University of Bonn.

It can be asserted confidently and without
exaggeration that the living Art of the Germany
of to-day is practically unknown to the
present day American. In former times young
Americans went over to Germany for the
purpose of completing their art education,
the older ones to Dusseldorf, the younger ones to Munich.
This generation has almost died out and, among the leading
American artists of to-day, William M. Chase, who studied at
Munich, is perhaps its sole representative. Further, up to a
quarter of a century ago, many German pictures found their
way to America annually. Plenty of opportunity existed in the
country itself to become acquainted with German Art. It
seems now, however, that the Knaus and Vautier period
was the last one regularly represented in American galleries
and collections, and that the works of painters who came
after that school are only to be found in out of the way places
and that with some exceptions, as for instance Gabriel
Max, proper representation has been lacking entirely for the
last twenty years.
Naturally, the official exhibitions at Chicago and St. Louis
comprised, more or less, representations of official art, and
the voices heard in those World fairs were too many and
too loud for the quiet and pure voice of Art to be heard. It
is only in a few distinguished private homes, principally in
several excellent modern private collections in New York and
Chicago, that German Art of to-day finds due recognition.
America, and American Art, have been learning from the
French for the last generation and have passed through the
French School. The path opened up by the three pioneers
William Morris Hunt, George Inness, and John La Farge was
followed then by hundreds. Thirty years ago it was the mission
of France more than any other country to become the
school of what is called "good painting1'. America assimilated
the best of what that School and its traditions could offer,
but has outgrown it now. American Art would form simply
a branch establishment of the Art of Paris were it not to
disencumber itself from the fetters of that School. American
Art has too many new and characteristic ideas to proclaim
and must speak its own message ultimately in its own language.
It has grown so rapidly during the last ten years and
has rushed forward at such a headlong pace that it surely
can stand on its own feet now. "The man who always goes
behind another man will never get past him1', said Michael
Angelo. American Art will only become an international
power in the moment that it ceases being international.
For America consequently, it is of great and perhaps decisive
value during this period of national purification of its
Art to investigate, at home and not at foreign exhibitions
on the other side of the ocean, the modern efforts and productions
of the most prominent countries representing Art.
And although France may possess an older and finer culture
and older technical traditions, yet the most vigorous and the
freshest forces, the most energetic vitality and the most promising
youthful generation are to be found in Germany. It
has been a matter of belief for some long time past in Ame-
rica that German Art has been resting on its historic laurels
and has fallen into a winter sleep. Scarcely any idea is entertained
in America of the vigorous regeneration that has
taken place in Germany during the last twenty years and of
the strong artistic movement which, surging through the
whole of Germany, is gaining more and more in depth and
breadth, and which would fair engross the whole of public
and domestic life.
From an age of intellect Germany, once the nation of thinkers
and dreamers, emerged and entered on a period of
natural sciences and technology and it yearns to quit this
for a new artistic age. Art as it is comprehended in Germany
should be more than a graceful ornament for mental culture
and more than an ingenious embellishment for the literary
sediment of intellectual life. Art aims at being more than a
mere ornament, a luxury or a dainty morsel for the pampered
and spoilt. It does not desire to be solely artists art, studio
art, Tart pour l'art, a dish for crafty collectors and connoisseurs.
Art is the highest and finest expression of the national
life of all countries, the national reflection of the individual
character, a language formed anew by every nation by reason
of its inward natural forces and in accordance with its
needs, its inmost and purest essence and with its political, social
and intellectual movements. It is a kind of necessary manifestation
of power and of the last and highest artistic desires
and moods as well as of the last mysterious yearning that has
never yet been comprehended and that cannot be expressed
by words. And if the Art of any period serves as a real reflection
and as an abbreviated chronicle of that period, then
the German Art of to-day offers a more complete, impressive
and comprehensive picture of modern German intentions
and capabilities than the Art of any neighbouring country.
If this great task and this extensive possibility of expression
is accorded to Art, then the theory advanced by some small
literary Trusts that there is only one international Art, born
in Paris, to which everything else has to conform, is in itself
untenable. We esteem the great capabilities, the brilliant technique
and the eminent proficiency of the French of the last
generation, but it is not that for which we are seeking and
by which we will abide. The great Frenchmen from Delacroix
to Manet, from Houdon to Rodin, were above all true
Gauls, true descendants of a Latin race. And with the same
justification Menzel and Leibl, Bocklin and Klinger, desire
above all to be true Germans. Nobody can expect our great
lyrical poets of the last generation to chant in French, that
Storm should sing like Baudelaire, or Liliencron like Verlaine;
why, therefore, have artists been expected to do so?
Further, the German artists of to-day, if they be perfectly frank
and true to themselves, only desire to express and can only
give expression to that which lies within them, to what they
are themselves. Just as the great Art of the Greeks, the great
Art of the Italian Renaissance was national, so German Art
of the future must be national; national without Chauvinism,
national without Teutonism, Art first and above Nationalism,
pure Art, Art that has its origin in ability.
All European countries possessing a vigorous artistic life
have been the arenas of fierce, frequently passionate struggles
during the last twenty years. An age which hurried along
so restlessly and with such strides in all other directions,
which brought with it such a complete revolution in the
views of life, could not abide by the comfortable, uniform
pace of former times in the path of Art. There was a long,
almost too long, period of fermentation and Art in its fresh
youth in Germany seems to have passed through all the
childish ailments conceivable. The danger was imminent that
much of what was real and good in the last period would be
thrown overboard with the old and dead and above all that
the careful training in drawing would be lost entirely. There
was perhaps no age in which such a lack of reverence was displayed.
The right direction, however, was taken in time.
The new school has called itself the "modern". I should like
to hang up the fellow who coined that word. All great lights
at all times have been "modern" as compared to the generation
preceding them, and every new tendency is "modern11
as compared to an old and dying one. The Classiscists were
"modern" in Germany in comparison to the painters of the
last Rococo period, the Nazarenes as compared to the Classiscists,
the Romanticists as compared to the Nazarenes, the
school of Menzel as compared to the Romanticists, the school
of Painters as compared to the Cartoonists, Knaus and Vautier
as compared to the oldest genre painters, Leibl as compared
to Knaus, Liebermann as compared to Leibl, and Putz
as compared to Liebermann. Ail those are "modern" who
desire to establish something great, something new, or strong
in the world, or to cast a newT horoscope of their time: Washington
and Napoleon, and in the present day Wilhelm the
Second and President Roosevelt. In Art, however, it seemed
that those "modern" artists quite forgot that there wTere
"modern" artists before them. The law of development in
Art appears to be as firmly established as a natural law—as
the law of the conservation of force—and it is truly the conservation
of a natural force. It announces, namely, that as
far back as we are able to look, periods and tendencies have
succeeded each other in which either sole salvation has been
sought by an ardent clinging to Nature, or in which it was
believed that the forms won from Nature could be freely
mastered and improved upon. Times of Realism and times
of Idealism; and when this latter reaches its limit, Mannerism,
it is followed by a return to Nature as the sole regulative
and great corrective; in contact with the maternal soil Art
regains new strength like Antaus. It seems also that it is a
law of development that new Art has always made war on
old Art and was attacked by the latter in return. Those once
rebels are tyrants to-day and the revolutionaries of to-day
may be perhaps the despots of to-morrow.
The latest movement has taken root chiefly in Germany under
the name of the "Secession11 movement. This appropriate
title was adopted by a number of young Munich artists
after they had severed themselves in 1892 from their
older colleagues. It calls to memory the first secession that
took place in Rome in 494 B. C. and the exodus of the oppressed
people to the Sacred Hill. Now the name has become
typical for every similar departure of a small minority
from a compact majority by which they feel overwhelmed.
The Art secession in the beginning was a manifestation
of the strong feeling of those who did not desire to go
with the crowd, but who stroved to climb the steep heights
of Art by paths of their own with few beside them. Hermann
Grimm once in a refined and charming manner defined
the beginning of the Secession as the desire to be alone with
Nature. If this is the case, however, the term "secessionist'1
ought to exist only in the singular and in the sense that
all great artists of all times who wandered on their own paths
were secessionists before the Secession; Michael Angelo
as well as Rembrandt, Menzel as well as Manet. Ibsen said,
somewhere or other: "Time is relentless nowadays; a truth
founded on a normal basis only lives to be 12,15 or 20 years
old at the most11; and there comes a time when the truth becomes
an untruth and the benefit a plague. The great process
of purification, the impulse once given by the Secessionists
has passed away to-day. A new generation has arisen that
strives towards fresh goals, and the period that struck out
with hard words and great programmes ought to have passed.
Altogether there is no old Art and no new Art, but only good
and bad Art—either Art solely and purely, or such as does
not deserve the name. For time strides irresistibly forwards.
Only a perfectly blind person can be unaware of the fact
that from the beginning of this century we really possess in
Germany what is called a new style, a style that is no longer
what is called "gemacht" and "gewollt", but which has grown.
It is long since Germany shook off the affectation coupled
with these first attempts which aimed above all and absolutely
at being new, and l'art nouveau, as it has been christened in
France and America, hardly exists any longer.
An earnest, severe and positive style has arisen in its place.
The grand monumental Art pursues its way tranquilly to-day.
It is no longer a matter of remark: and this new Art exists
with the same right that the twentieth century exists.
Should the characteristic peculiarities of this modern tendency
in the domain of painting be enquired into to-day, three
points can be emphasised: Firstly, that the vigorous, pulsating
life by which we are surrounded, the men of our times
and life in its most humble forms, are regarded without gloss
and as the most important material for Art. Secondly, the
problem of light and air, that allows all figures to appear
as if bathed in air, and encompassed by light. Finally, the impressionistic
technique. It may be that the latter is something
more than a mere technical form. Perhaps there is more
underlying it than simply the desire to paint as our eye alone
is able to see and comprehend, in contrast to the older school
that painted everything as it knew it to be physically shaped.
"Only one thing is important, to paint at the very outset
what one sees1' said Manet the great initiator of this tendency.
Perhaps Impressionism is a characteristic of our whole
culture and at the same time the harbinger of the highest
subjectivity. It can be repeated at this point that these innovations
were not all original. The vigorous pulsating life
around us has already been painted by Peter Breughel, Murillo,
Rembrandt and Hogarth; further Velasquez, Rembrandt
and Goya worked in an impressionist manner, when they
needed such technique, only with the difference, that they
did not subordinate themselves to it unless they deemed
the occasion appropriate.
And perhaps above and beyond all this the discovery of light
and air is what remains. This is really what is new, quite new,
that the age has brought us, and in this the great art exploits
and victories of the nineteenth century can be found. The
era at the close of which Count Zeppelin and Orville Wright
have achieved the conquest of the air has also witnessed
its mastery from an artistic point of view.
Four great masters head the series of artists representing
the effective forces in the artistic life
of Germany, four great masters long numbered
with the dead. They hold this position by virtue
of being the ancestors of present day Art, as the forerunners
and, in a certain sense, the pioneers who have pointed out
the new ways. It will be seen shortly how this youngest
direction was built up on the Art of the last generation.
First of all comes ADOLF VON MENZEL. When he was called
away as a nonagenarian three years ago, he was honoured
above all other painters as the glorifier of Prussian
fame, as the great historical painter of the Friedrician period,
who knew how to resuscitate such a historical period and to
combine the greatest historical accuracy with the greatest
vitality, in a manner which none before him ever achieved
and none after him ever will achieve; but this Menzel the
First, the great historical painter, has been dead for a long
time; it is just fifty years since he painted his last picture of
the Friedrician period. Then there came Menzel the Second,
to a certain extent a Court historiographer, a conscientious
chronicler of the history surrounding him, which he lived
through and participated in, the painter of William the First.
And then there was a Menzel the Third who was only attracted
by the active pulsating life that assumed thousands
of forms around him; at Court, in Society, in the streets, in
crowds, at railway stations, in the bustle of watering places,
in the fumes of the blasting furnaces and foundries. And this
Menzel the Third was perhaps the greatest, the most mature
and the finest of all three. He was the first to visit the
people at their work, the first who sang the Psalm of Work
in his great "Eisenwalzwerk" amidst the first threatening
storm of the workmens movement, the first to discover the
artistic possibilities that lay in toiling, hammering men. At
the same time he was the first "Ausschnitts" painter who
was not rivetted by the interesting act, but by the picturesqueness
of the act, the first impressionist and the first sketchier.
The most marvellous feature of the grand and aweinspiring
appearance of this little man who strode through
the world like the king of the gnomes, was his unwavering
love of the truth, his sacred respect for nature, a respect
that was constantly growing within him so that finally he
only dared to depict nature that he thoroughly comprehended,
or, in other words, the life by which he was surrounded.
He was one of the greatest originals of all times, original
above all in the manner in which he interpreted his genius.
His genius was assiduity and painfully he mastered his art.
Like Diirer he wrung his greatness from destiny by sheer
force in a severe struggle. There are pictures by him (about
the year 1850) which depict a humble room through the
window of which the sun's warm rays shine and play, pictures
of the yards and gardens of Berlin as it was then, ideas
executed with the greatest resources of the impressionist.
He learnt, or discovered, for himself the art of painting subjects
and figures in the open air thirty years before the appearance
of the great French impressionists. Manet was
only 16 years old when Menzel painted his first picture in
accordance with this amazing technique, a picture that was
full of light. His pictorial impressiveness was quite immense
during the last decades and was constantly increasing. He
possessed an almost terrifying objectivity that did justice to
the smallest detail and that was almost suffocated by a superabundance
of material. He was once styled by Bocklin "a
great scholar'. He was the greatest exponent of what may
perhaps be called a specific Berliner's taste for Art: reflective,
realistic, conscientious, tranquil, and somewhat dispassionate.
Even in what he lacked—the transfiguring, personal
element, phantasy, and poetical inspiration—he was
a true son of that Prussian period. The French have a proverb:
"To be a master means to resemble no one"; as no
man's pupil, or successor, and with a spirit of sturdy independence
he acquired his art and his artistic skill, independently.
If the right to the title of "Father of the Impressionists"
be conferred by first discovery and conquest,
then it is Adolf von Menzel who deserves the name.
FRANZ VON LENBACH, like Menzel, started from great historical
paintings and whilst Menzel headed the Berlin School
for the last generation and was its pride, Lenbach was
the foremost of Munich painters. Lenbach is the greatest
portrait painter that Germany has produced during the 19th
century and a historical painter at the same time, for in reality
his portraits are a pictorial epic of his age. He has fixed
on canvass all the great and celebrated men of a whole generation:
the beloved, old Kaiser Wilhelm and his chivalrous
son, clever Pope Leo, Bismarck, Moltke, Wagner, Helmholtz,
Dollinger, and Gladstone. It can be said with truth that it is
just through his portraits that this great age will figure in
times to come as a specially vigorous one. A peculiar congeniality
capable of assimilating itself to all great personal
ities was necessary to comprehend all those men: the fine
thoughtful and scholarly head ofMoltke, simultaneously with
the powerful, rugged head of Bismarck. His great art lay in
grasping what was most vital in the appearance and the inmost
being of his models and in building up his whole painting
on that motive alone. In his portraits the whole inner
soul appears like lightning in the eyes as it perhaps rarely
showed itself in his sitters, or only when they were passing
through the greatest moments of their lives. Every other
detail was kept subordinate and suppressed in comparison,
even details of technique. The accessories, such as uniforms,
costumes, hands, etc., are treated purposely in a sketchy
manner in order that the gaze and interest of the spectator
should not be diverted from the heads that often appear as
if they had been illuminated by magic. In addition to this the
master, who never concerned himself much about women's
portraits, — perhaps because they lacked for him firm characteristic
expressions — created countless figures of women
of fascinating form which he shrouded with the most subtle
art at his disposal.
Lenbach perhaps remained too much a pupil of byegone
times. He copied no one but absorbed what was best in his
predecessors. Tizian and Velasquez, Rembrandt and Hals,
van Dyck and Reynolds are his ancestors alike. He borrowed
his "old master" technique from them and trained it
by means of these prototypes. Thus the ingenuousness resulting
from the direct contemplation of nature was often lost to
him, and it seems as if his wonderful brown-toned pictures
shun the intrusion of the bright and clear sun.
In this respect WILHELM LEIBL was a perfect contrast to
Lenbach. He is the embodiment of the realism of the Seventies
and Eighties and with his prodigious knowledge and
abilities dumbfounds and stupefies everyone then as now.
Descended from an old Bavarian family he was the painter
of the Bavarian peasant. And he regarded these peasants
with perfectly different eyes to former painters. He saw them
neither in the heroic light peculiar to Defregger, nor in
Vautier's sentimental manner. Leibl's peasants don't frolic,
or relate anecdotes. They are original, sober, deliberate,
robust and at the same time prosaic, hard, and hard headed.
They are scarcely ever depicted in action, but mostly sitting,
often motionless as if turned to ice, and yet full of real life.
These peasants are the true sons of their rigorous country.
The whole hearty health of the race is incorporated in them,
and they seem to be full of latent power. Leibl understood
his handiwork as no other has done. He mastered equally
well the delicacy of the miniature painter and the splendid
technique of quite broad, comprehensive and big strokes of
the brush. Although teacher to no one person the Hermit
of Aibling has become a teacher to a whole generation.
Quite a different world opens itself up to us in turning to
the fourth of these great men, namely ARNOLD BOCKLIN.
Bocklin was perhaps the most universal of all the German
painters of the 19th century; religious, historical, mythological,
phantastical paintings, portraits and landscapes, the intimate
and monumental styles, he could lay claim to all. For
decades slowly combating a strong opposition Bocklin won
the appreciation of the people, and was finally lauded by them
to the skies. The shortsighted disregard of early times changed
rapidly into loud admiration and impetuous over-estimation,
so that frequently the irregular creations of his latterday
style were accepted as happy inspirations and the Bocklin
worship threatened to become almost an obstacle to the
further artistic development of the German nation. To-day
we view Bocklin's greatness and power without detracting
from them, but also without exaggerating them. Perhaps the
soul of this universal painter is best comprehended if he is
regarded at first as a landscape painter. He belongs to the
historical, idealised school of landscape painting. Whereas
other representatives of this school idealised landscapes by
importing a medley of things into them, by cramming their
frames, Bocklin idealised nature by simplifying it. He sought
the underlying idea of a landscape, its chief lines and characteristic
points and built up his whole effect on these. He
desires to depict the working of mysterious, eternal agencies
in nature and therefore seeks what is elementary in her.
Each painting is full of tremendous solemnity, a psalm and
hymn to Beauty. Like Jehovah in the first days of the Creation
he creates his earth anew, distributes water and land and
causes trees to grow where he pleases. From the very beginning
it was not the soft tranquil beauty of German scenery
that attracted him, but he was fascinated by the imposing
loftiness in Italian scenery. For this the greatest concentration
and condensation was necessary. He himself styled composition
"the constant omission of that which was superfluous1'.
He never presents us with a definite piece of scenery but
with a translated impulse received from nature; also an impression.
Thus he never worked from direct studies, but from
thousands of impressions of nature that cause a new picture
to arise within his mind's eye. Consequently, all his paintings
possess accentuated vitality, something solemn that is full of
silent majesty, or of immense and convincing, fiery, power
and truly antique mirth. His colouring, too, was no longer
the natural colouring of nature but something slightly enhanced,
something interpreted. And he only intended to depict
the mysterious forces of nature when he animated her, or she
him. He confronts nature with the simple-mindedness of the
ancients. In the thundering surge, the howling of the storm,
in the ravines and in the rustle of the forest he hears mysterious
voices and sees the gruesome figures that produce them,
and he peoples sea, forest and rocky gorge anew with creations
of his phantasy. They are not the Olympian gods, but
a strange race of fauns and satyrs, water sprites and elves,
nymphs and forest spectres, a Hellenic-Swiss hybrid race.
These figures are not borrowed from the antique, his seamonsters
no longer belong to the Scopas race; they are to
a certain extent new figures: shaggy and unkempt, rough
and bestial, filled with wild animal life, frequently with yearnings
like the little mermaid in Andersen's fairy tale, and at
other times full of unruly antique hilarity like the great God
Pan. Bocklin himself is a poet. He never illustrated a mythological,
or heroic occurrence. He reproduces as it were
Ovid's metamorphoses in his paintings; a great visionary
and a great man. An immense power and inexhaustible health
live in his pictures, health which desires at times to have its
fling in almost barbaric strength and grotesque humour. Yet
this man was capable of the softest and deepest moods and
heard mysterious voices of nature which no other ear had
caught before him. He did not possess the harmonious and
refined classicism of the great Feuerbach (who unfortunately
is not represented at this Exhibition) and further his pictures
are not full of deep tragedy like Feuerbach's "Iphigenie,"
"das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend," but he creates
anew his ancient Greece out of his own inner consciousness.
He was the greatest natural poet. He sang poems,
rich in colour, to Nature, such poems as only Walt Whitman
has been successful in putting in words. If one desires to
gauge him he can only be measured by his own standard.
The last goal that he strove for was something monumental
and decorative, an elaboration and interpretation of natural
impressions, and he occupies quite an isolated position in
comparison to the other three masters who sought as their
highest aim "good painting".
Among the living painters shown at this Exhibition
two old and yet ever youthful men occupy the first
positions, one of whom has completed his seventieth
year this year and another who will reach
the same age next year. They are Eduard v. Gebhardt and
HansThoma, and they both serve as intermediaries between
the old and the new. EDUARD V. GEBHARDT still treads
in the path of the traditions of the great historical paintings
of the Diisseldorf School. He has located his religious paintings
in the period of our greatest religious upheaval, the
time of Diirer and Luther, but only apparently. Disinclined
towards the present and its inexpressiveness he searched for
a time of greater inwardness and expressiveness and found
it in that age. The strong and powerful expression of his
figures, however, is what makes them so imposing and
thrilling. There is no one in Germany who surpasses him
in the art of imparting to a whole group of figures such a
deep living expression. He runs up the whole scale of the
deepest emotion to passionate agitation. He never tolerates
anything weak, incomplete, or soft and every detail must be
filled with the utmost amount of inward life. In this way he
touches the heart of his contemplator, who is deeply affected.
Further, HANS THOMA, the most German of masters, a
son of the Black Forest, he too like Bocklin is a poet, a
dreamer, but also like Bocklin an epic and dramatic poet
and above all a lyric poet and master of idylls. He lacks the
highly strung rhythm and exuberant vitality of Bocklin's art;
Thoma's art is more tranquil, profound and humble. He
too starts with landscapes, but it is the charming freshness
and loving beauty of the unpretentious German scenery
that he cultivates. The magic of the plains of the Upper
Rhine, and his quiet beloved Black Forest valleys has scarcely
been depicted with such persuasion as by him. In describing
Italy he sees the land with German eyes, and when
he paints mythological pictures their scene of action is the
forest of German fairy tales. He feels quite at home in these
fairy tales and seems to believe in them ingenuously like
Moritz von Schwind. Loveable and delicate, roguish and
hearty, melancholy, and contemplative, and frequently with
a deep musical touch, he is a narrator in whose phantasy the
new and the old mingle strangely; at the same time primitive,
working in the beginning with free artistic ability, later
on with conscious limitation of artistic devices, and frequently
humdrum and commonplace. If, however, there is anything
at stake, he is capable of comprehending the soul of a landscape
even beyond its last picturesque charm, although that
may seem the last and highest aim in art. No one has grasped
the inmost being of a German landscape in the same degree,
no one has possessed such a suggestive power, and no one
has been such a herald of these unpretentious and chaste
beauties for his whole nation as has fine old Hans Thoma.
He is true from top to toe.
The realistic movement permeated the whole of
painting in Germany more than a generation
ago. Menzel and Leibl were its pioneers, MAX
LIEBERMANN was the leader of the new tendency in
the middle of the Seventies and at the same time, for Germany,
the intermediary of the French and Dutch artistic views and
technique. In Paris it was Munkacsy and in Holland Josef
Israels, who above all stimulated him. Liebermann, however,
was a far too lively spirit and far too strong a personal artistic
power to do no more than pass on these impulses as
he had received them; he established quite a new style that
only now and again had points in common with that of old
Menzel. In contrast to Leibl's motionless and severe figures
he imparted to his figures a vehement vitality and nervous
mobility. His great art lay in grasping that which was momentary
and characteristic in motion. He took over that
which was new, what the Japanese and the first French Impressionists
and what Courbet and Manet had brought to
Art and wedded it to his new style. Technique full of genius,
broad and yet delicate, imparts an astonishing freshness
to his paintings. The words of the great Dutchman,
Israels, "Mankind is always beautiful; give the people the
simple poetry of real life, for finally it overcomes the hearts
of men" he absorbed in his life. His great isolated figures
of peasants, fishermen, and seafaring men in their generalised
embodiment, he raised to a grand type. Monotonous
nature and cold air form the proper background for these
figures of toil and hardship. In this respect he offers us the
same that Millet formerly gave to France and yet his men
belong to quite a different race, to the Northern race, and
are viewed in quite a different light.
Side by side with him is WILHELM TRUBNER, most prominent
during the Seventies; an inconsiderate naturalist with
a strong feeling for nature and, especially in his earlier works,
a marvellous sense for the value of tone and large blotches.
Common to both is the absolute lack of phantasy, the almost
intentional shyness of everything that might appear a
little sentimental or literary. As aforesaid, they all search only
for "good painting".
FRITZ VON UHDE was Munich's chief representative of the
new realistic school; but only his first works were devoted
solely to the air and light problem. Uhde became by rapid
strides one of the greatest painters of the new technique, but
he discovered that the experimenting with indifferent motives
did not suffice for him. Deeply impressed by the movement for
restoring to our national and artistic feeling the pious themes
of the Christian legends he endeavoured to do what has been
done in every unsophisticated period, by the Eycks, as well as
by the Diirers and Rembrandts. He transferred the events of
the New Testam ent to his own time. His painting "Suffer the
little children to come unto me", which was created exactly
twenty-five years ago, is perhaps the most touching and
most modern religious painting of that period. Full of the
truest feeling, and painted with the full mastery of the treatment
of light, it certainly does not form an ecclesiastical picture.
Uhde has never attained again the fervency and stirring
power of these first pictures. He has only shown himself
during the last few years as the great technologist and
painter who knows how to paint. As compared to him the
other representatives of realism in Munich recede into
the background. HUGO VON HABERMANN is perhaps one of
the greatest virtuosos and perhaps one of the greatest
masters of the palette; he possesses a breadth and surety
of stroke which charms painters and which is full of feeling,
pungent and very much out of the common. He handles
the brush with absolute sovereignity and almost makes
it a point to wage war against everything commonplace.
ALBERT KELLER, compared to him, is delicate and subtle,
a man of the highest society, who endeavoured to make
ingenious application of the new technique to paintings
of modern society. GOTTHARDT KUHL, who stands quite independently
of foreign influence side by side with him,
knows how to conjure up in his technique the same
charms and effects that Monet and Pissarro produced; pictures
from his Northern home and his domicile on the strand
of the Elbe, oceans of brick buildings, houses of old men,
Rococo churches and snow-covered bridges have been depicted
by him with verve and freshness. Two of the most
fruitful artists of the Berlin Secession that appear in the
train of Liebermann are Louis CORINTH and MAX SLEVOGT.
They lack the delicacy, the spirituality of the leader of the
movement. They are coarser, more ponderous, frequently
of an unbridled barbaric power, sometimes hankering after
flesh and of a coarse sensuousness that characterised the
great Flemish painters, but more of the Jordaens' style than
that of Rubens. And quite isolated and independent stands
besides them the President of the Berlin Academy of Arts,
ARTUR KAMPF. Sprung from the historical tendency, regarded
once as the heir of Menzel the First and yet quite a modern
man, Artur Kampf has turned to the material of his time
and following more and more what was great and typical
has become the monarch of his metier and at the same time
a powerful portrait painter. Of all the many portrait painters
that Germany possesses in such large numbers, there is none
other since the death of Lenbach who can compare like
him with Sargent for power and elegance, with Whistler for
beauty of tone and discreet grace. After Lenbach's death,
FRIEDRICH AUGUST KAULBACH took the lead. Everyone went
through his atelier that could lay claim in Munich to being
elegant, rich, or beautiful. He is a man of exquisite taste and
refinement, more coloured and versatile than Lenbach, but
without the latter1 s powerful characteristic features. He is
also well-known to Americans as the portrayer of some of
their magnates: the portraits of the Rockefeller family belong
to the most brilliant performances of his last years. The
Munich School from which Kaulbach sprung has supplied
during the last ten years quite a series of fresh and powerful
individuals and fine artists. ZUGEL may be mentioned as the
most brilliant painter of animals with an astonishing tech-
nique and a wonderful freshness of colours; further JANK,
HERTERICH, HENGLER and KARL MARR, an American by birth
and one of the most sympathetic Munich painters, who frequently
calls to mind Abbott Thayer, the American, but
who possesses greater freshness and individuality—sufficient
in themselves to build up a new school.
The whole development of German Art mirrors itself in the
history of German landscape painting, so that from the image
we can, as it were, read off the different tendencies clearly
and sharply. After historical landscapes and the interesting
landscapes of large plains and wide horizons come small
fragments of landscapes; perhaps in no other field of German
Art can more brilliant performances be found associated
together. Landscape painting was the great experimenting
field in which the effects of free light, cold light, the glaring
sun, of rarefied air and wavering light could be tried. Development
in this direction proceeded on the same lines as inFrance
from Corot and Daubigny to Monet and Pissarro. Only names
can be quoted here. In Karlsruhe three of the best of these
painters are domiciled, namely, GUSTAV SCHONLEBER, Julius
Bergmann and Ludwig Dill. The first, the greatest and most
delicate reproducer of the scenery on the Upper Rhine, has
turned from Southern themes to those at home, JULIUS
BERGMANN is the creator of delightful animal paintings and
powerfully toned landscapes. LUDWIG DILL, once the leader
of the "Dachauer," fled from the town air of Munich to the
delicious country freshness of the neighbouring village Dachau.
Widely removed from realistic reproduction, he essayed
by the means of dull, delicately harmonised silver-grey shades,
such as have never been surpassed by the best of Scotch
artists, to create something that might be called a style in
landscape painting. And this is the tendency that is constantly
growing in power and importance in the landscape
painting of to-day.
Like the "Dachauer1 School, a little colony of painters of
whom perhaps Vinnen is the best known, established itself
at the village ofWorpswede near Bremen in North Germany
and formed the so-called Worpswede group, whose chief
aim is to reproduce the fresh colours of the flat and unspoilt
Northern landscape and to depict the marvellous brightness
of its moors and marshes. Among the young Dusseldorf
painters, MAX CLARENBACH attains this greatness and simplicity
of outline and among Berlin artists WALTER LEISTIKOW,
who died not long ago. It was the latter who first drew
attention to the beauty of the lakes and fir forests of Brandenburg
in art as Fontane did in literature.
The realistic movement had hardly reached its
height, before its decay set in. This relentless and
all too radical naturalism called forth, of necessity,
a counterpoise. The renunciation of everything
that was phantastic, of all poetical themes, could not be borne
for long. The demand for a more vigorous and personal art
becoming stronger and stronger caused something supernatural
to be sought for in contrast to such all-too-earthly
Art; themes with greater, richer, and truer vitality in contrast
to the stern subjects of everyday life; themes depicting stronger
passions and increased pleasure in living, and a higher
life freed from the dross of this world. Conforming to the
iron law of development, of periodical recurrence, a new
romanticism sprouted up out of this realism, a new stylisised
Art. Bocklin was the most important intermediary who,
over the heads of the whole realistic movement, built the
bridge to that historical Art from which he himself came.
And FRANZ STUCK, above all other artists, based himself
on Bocklin. He is hardly imaginable without Bocklin, but
he is severer, more architectonic in form, more irridescent
in colour, features that can be noted more especially in his
first works. Stuck is an eminent colourist with marvellous
enamel-like tones; he dumbfounded the whole of Munich
when he appeared, like a young faun in the arena, with his
pictures overflowing with power. And, standing alone like
a hermit, and yet inwardly related to Bocklin, we have MAX
KLINGER, the greatest psychologist and certainly the most
profound German painter of the present day. Sometimes,
however, Klinger philosophises too much in artistic material
instead of creating freely. More universal than any other
living artist, he has attained world-fame as an engraver; he
turned from easel pictures to monumental art and came to
look on marble as the material in which he could best express
himself. He has passed through a perfect transformation;
from the crassest naturalism to the Olympian repose
and Dionysic jollity, and nothing has remained hidden from
him, from ghastliness to grand sublimity, from the soft and
lyrical to the intensified dramatical. In his Art we perceive
the whole of the man Klinger, the sturdy wrestler, the constant
combatant, frequently struggling for the highest expression
of Art; and his melancholy and brooding, to which
creative form is often denied, is valuable to us as evidence
of his unique development.
LUDWIG YON HOFMANN seems to have proved victorious
over these struggles and all other heavy and cumbersome
toils. He did not have to strive long for the Lost Paradise;
the Garden of Eden in all its irridescent splendour and
beauty opened its gates to him from the very beginning.
His whole Art is a jubilant hymn to the beauty of his Promised
Land. His pictures pass us in review, sometimes Bacchanal
and unrestrained, sometimes filled with soft melancholy,
but always full of beautiful ardour. They are ideal
landscapes peopled with a supernatural race, full of slender
youths and delicate maidens in a pure nakedness not of this
earth, a higher race, ever young like the Olympian Gods,
and although never mythological yet far removed from this
world. And this apparently child-like unconstrained Art is
full of the highest artistic wisdom. Slowly Ludwig von Hofmann
has turned more and more to the decorative and sought
in decorative art the monumental, the great simplification,
the condensation of forms at well as grand simple tones;
this is Nature as it was found by Puvis de Chavannes during
the whole of his last great period and as it was sought for
in another way by John LaFarge. Ludwig von Hofmann must
not be gauged by the standard of pure realistic paintings;
that lies behind him. He seeks to interpret Nature, intensifying
it to the monumental.
This bent towards what is great and towards the decorative
is the "Leitmotiv" that characterises the works of the youngest
and most remarkable group of German artists, namely
the "MUNICH SCHOLLE,'1 under which title a series of powerful
and original artists congregated together a few years ago.
They desire to sing a Hymn of Praise to Mother Earth, to
their native soil, in their pictures. These are redolent of the
pungent and healthy smell of earth. The striving after what
is great is shared by the whole group alike, even down to
size and technique in their paintings. LEO PUTZ possesses
perhaps the most powerful talent for painting among them;
he is sometimes almost too tremendous in the broadness of
the strokes of his brush, but masterly in a wonderful simplification
of form and colour; at the same time enchanting
in his warm, rich, luminous and yet finely harmonised tones.
"It is not the profusion of detail, but the correctness of the
whole,said Rousseau once when characterising the conception
of perfection in painting. And "to finish,11 said the
great American William Morris Hunt, "means to leave off
somewhere outside after everything inside is quite full; to
leave off before you yourself, or the spectator, are tired."
Putz's surprising and amazing facility is shared by ADOLF
MUNZER who possesses greater grace, a strong inclination
for the decorative and quite wonderful ease in creating.
Then comes FRITZ ERLER, the most powerfully emphasised
decorative talent of the whole group. He is frequently
rough, quaint, exaggerated and sometimes almost barbaric
and wild in his Bajuvarian expressions of power, but always
full of inner grandeur and a born monumental painter.
Finally, this striving after greatness of outline, towards
new monumentality, is also characteristic
for the new movement in German 1 MASTIC ART.
Naturally at this Exposition it has been impossible
even to try to afford a view of all these efforts in Germany.
The school of REINHOLD BEGAS, brought under the notice
of the American public at former official Expositions, prospers
with all its old fertility in the North. The father of this
new and "Barock" style, Reinhold Begas, the creator of the
Berlin monuments of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck, although
more than seventy years of age, is still working.
For the younger generation, ADOLF HILDEBRAND has arisen
as a leader, and, although he is now upwards of sixty years
of age, the sculpture of the present day bears the impress
of his influence in a constantly growing degree. That, which
he has never tired of preaching as a teacher and creator,
is quietness and simplification and condensation of the
whole effect in one single view, namely, in the distant perspective.
Especially in the setting up of figures in the open
which are to be visible a long way off, the most important
consideration is to select as a "motif" of animation one which
shall be as simple and yet as effective as possible, and to
secure for the figure that silhouette which, without being
exaggerated, shall exhibit the greatest expressiveness.
This great "repose," which Ruskin held to be absolutely essential
to real art, is to be found in the sculpture of Hildebrand,
with the splendid nudity of his marble bodies built
up in calm ideality, and his wonderful busts in which the
whole intellectual content is tersely summarised and expressed
in a few boldly emphasised features. His art abstains
from all "accessories," he deliberately neglects all that is subsidiary.
Indeed this neo-classical Munich School is the diametrical
opposite of the naturalistic-historic school with its
theory of the faithful reproduction of the model.
Of the Berlin artists, it is LEDERER, the creator of the wonderful
Bismarck monument at Hamburg, who shows the
greatest psychic affinity to Hildebrand. His great masterpiece
looms up gigantic like a mediaeval Roland statue and
the figure, built up on huge blocks, towers over the city and
the Elbe. In all Germany there is no monument which has
been better conceived and carried out than this Hamburg
"Denkmal11 in which the powerful personality of the founder
of the German Empire has been immortalised in stone. Side
by side with Lederer stands TUAILLON, the creator of the
lovely "Amazon11, calm and resolute in her maiden chastity.
Her pose is absolutely simple and natural, but expressive of
the utmost condensation of strength, and, mounted before
the National Gallery in Berlin on her neighing steed with
its outstretched head, she seems a fit personification of
the youthful energy of the German Art of to-day with its
buoyant confidence in the future.
In this confined and limited Exhibition the growth
of German Art during the last few years, its
capabilities and its desires, can only be shown in
a restricted and limited degree. In these days of
hurry and haste artistic tendencies die out far too rapidly.
Appearances that only create amazement are lost sight of
with amazing rapidity. To-day, German Art has brought
over with it into the twentieth century the best of the traditions
of the nineteenth century. And above all, it reflects
an abundance of great power and everlasting youth. This
Art exhales the breath of internal health. And truly German
Art of to-day is a faithful mirror of the German nation,
and of its impetuous haste. The bright colour and variety
shown in this mirror is likewise a simile of the differentiated
culture of to-day. When, at a future period, whole races enter
into pacific competition, the victory will not be gained by
the nation possessing the oldest and most refined culture,
but by the nation whose culture displays the greatest health
and youth. And, it may well be assumed, the American
Culture of to-day, which teaches us to regard both health
and youth as the highest virtues of a people, ought to be
best qualified to understand and appreciate this fresh, powerful
and deep Art."

"NOTICE
For a long time past the idea has been entertained of exhibiting
in New York to the General Public a small and select
collection of works representing German contemporary Art.
The great difficulty that lays in the way of the execution of the
idea was the finding of a suitable place for such an Exhibition.
When, therefore, in response to an application made by
Mr.Buenz, Imperial Consul General, to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art the management was kind enough to consent to a
series of rooms in the new building of the Museum being used
for this purpose, the idea was welcomed in German official
and Art circles with lively satisfaction and sympathy, and
active preparations were begun for a German Art Exhibition
in NewYork. Mr. Hugo Reisinger ofNewYork, a connoisseur
and warm patron of German Art, as well as the owner of an
excellent collection of German ArtWorks, offered to defray
the expenses connected with the Exhibition and to use his
influence in German Art circles to induce an active participation
in the same. The idea was warmly supported by the
Imperial Government,which called upon two wellknown German
Artists, Professor Arthur Kampf in Berlin, the President
of the Royal Academy of Art, and Professor Carl Marr at
Munich in conjunction with Mr. Reisinger to arrange for a
selection of the Art works to be exhibited. His Majesty the
German Emperor most graciously gave his sanction to
the loan of many valuable works from the Royal National
Gallery in Berlin, including some by Bocklin, Leibl, Lenbach
and Menzel for the purposes of the Exhibition. The governments
of various Federal States, as well as the proprietors of
private Galleries likewise consented to place works of Art
at the disposal of the Exhibition management. The setting
up of the Exhibition in Germany was entrusted to a Commission
comprising Dr.Wilhelm Bode, the Director-General
of the Royal Museums in Berlin, Herr Goetsch of the Foreign
Office, Dr. Theodore Lewald, Privy Councillor, formerly
Commissioner General of Germany to the Universal
Exhibition at St. Louis 1904 and Dr. Friedrich Schmidt, the
chief of the department for Science and Art in the Prussian
Ministry of Education. The publication of the Catalogue has
been effected by Dr. Lewald in conjunction with the above
mentioned gentlemen.
Complying with a wish expressed, the collection will also
be exhibited in Boston in the Building of the Copley Society
and in Chicago at the Art Institute."

"Contemporary German Art", p. 5-33
"Pictures", [cat. no. 1-177], p. 35-65
"Sculpture", [cat. no. 178-206], p. 66-70
"Notice", 71-72

Catalogue Structure altered
Other Mediums listed
Participant Addresses listed

Catalogue is not numbered
Biographies of artists provided in catalogue.