The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/German Art After The War
SUPERFICIAL examination fails to reveal with us the influence of the war on the artists. And not only with us. Neither have the victors gained any jubilating fresco by their triumph. Painting goes on, and sculpture, it seems, as though nothing had happened. This phenomenon is taken for granted, and is explained in accordance with the individual temperament and manner of thinking. Sceptics fall back on a precarious Platonism: according to them, art spends its shadowy life so far from all reality that even the decay of the world could not disturb it. The socialist finds a confirmation for his legend of the time-wasting of a privileged class, and he compares the Muse to an all-night restaurant in Berlin which is never empty even in the worst periods of destitution. Idealists harp on the nonsense of the catastrophe. For them the war is simply the hypertrophy of a dirty fait divers which pure art has nothing to do with.
In reality, nothing stands out so prominently in the art of the present as the world war; and unfortunately the impossibility of determining the duration of the catastrophe makes it more difficult to uncover the correlated facts. No one knows yet when the war is over, even if he does imagine himself capable of fixing its start. For art, it did not begin on the day when some potentate or other gave the order to mobilize and the first grenade shook the air, but long before. It was not the military incidents which affected the creative faculties, nor the verdict of victory or defeat; but it was the root of the evil, the spiritual and moral confusion of Europe. In art there was nothing but the defeated; and the overthrow can be read in all its phases by the falling curve of the European graph. Even the first shocks, which escaped the notice of the unsuspecting victims or possibly looked like the accomplishments of the precious individual personality, were recorded on the graph, with the precision of a seismograph, as symptoms of disease. Every development after the mighty rise of the nineteenth century, indeed this rise itself with its wealth of heroism, pointed to the coming catastrophe. In 1912 I foretold it in a little book, Wohin Treiben Wir, and I do not think it required great wisdom. Every work of the times, the successful as well as the unsuccessful, indicates the decay. The successful, because it lifts itself above the masses, and becomes an illegible logarithm to them; the unsuccessful because it sinks in the masses. At times the successful, and the imposing array of successful works, is a picture of decay. If art is to be the pictorial edifice of mankind, then the continued deformation of the pictorial, even the most genial deformation, can only signify the disruption of mankind. In the house which should be there for all, there is a place finally for only one individual. The rest look upon it as a curiosity, as art, and move on.
The rôle of German art corresponds to the rôle of Germany. There culture had already been for a long time the matter of a few personalities: peaks with slight connexion to one another. They rise out of the desolate soil, and they seem to benefit by loneliness. In loneliness the insatiable wish grows on them to assemble mankind about them. It is the Germans who have felt the tragedy of a dehumanized art and have fought passionately against it. Either they were able to bring such an enormous clarity into the latent German mysticism that suddenly our whole forest of legend shone magically; and then the mysticism became a monument which no one can pass without being deeply affected, although its phenomenal character precludes every notion of active participation by the masses. Or the grasp of a genius usurps what is denied the masses through lack of tradition, and then a gifted man seems capable of recovering in a work the advantages of happier peoples and improving upon them. Then the threatening aberrations of the rest of the world show up through this one German. This one becomes a haven for all the efforts of the others who are dismembering the cosmos, and he offers the world the perfect order of a new cosmos. And if it were possible to make his realization, his one work, generally accessible, the virtues from such vulgarization would be forthcoming. But such accessibility can be obtained only after the overcoming of countless difficulties which, while relatively superficial, are in their totality unsurmountable. Among the thousand texts which are offered to mankind, surely one must contain the remedy. How shall they grasp the one, which came from some remote place, removed from the daily rounds of life? One could just as well turn a Central African negro into a follower of Christ.
Darkness lies over the Hesperides of our Hans von Marées. This envelops him, makes judgement difficult. The tragic is a matter of will; this darkness is inevitable. It does not simply envelop him, but is at the same time rooted in his work, a protest against the zealous conquest of light which a generation of painters in France undertook at just that moment when Europe was beginning to darken. Was this bewitching conquest only the fruits of victorious instincts; was it not also a recourse to light in order to escape the demands of a permissible past (for instance, Delacroix) which Hans von Marées rated more highly? The stride into Impressionism occasioned brilliant enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of a day when war is declared against dark enemies. This enemy must perish, to make room, to make a new structure possible. It was a very legitimate and generous enthusiasm. But the persistency of this movement, the consequence of its programme, was an admission of the weakness of the times. Rationalism took the place of enthusiasm. Even the taste and the tact of the French did not succeed in covering the gaps in this degeneration of the pictorial. There was no more mention of composition. The picture, which was to be made more brilliant, lost its reality. The world was disintegrated into a coloured film. A recipe was left. Thanks to it, Rembrandt became a dirty spot on the wall of fashion, and the plastic of the primitives became arbitrary and barbaric.
German Impressionism is a sorry chapter. People painted away at it, substituting an obvious temperamentalism for the tact and taste of the French. At times it was wildly obvious, but sufficed, considering relative merits, to draw out some possibilities from the system which was being completely exploited in Paris, the imitation of the Dix-huitième without rococo. The world of the Germans remained outside. Not one of these facile temperaments suspected that a few generations previously the enthusiasm for light and colour had belonged also to Germany, that long before Monet, quiet landscape painters in Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin had found an Impressionism which did not, to be sure, respond to all the conditions of spectral analysis, but in revenge was free of all rationalism. Runge, Wasmann, C. D. Friedrich, Blechen, even Menzel (I mean the lyric Menzel) have remained without followers. In art we have never learned how to economize. Somewhere, in some remote place, an artist will suddenly arise for no external reason. A bare stone on a cliff covers itself with ravishing little flowers. Wasmann's landscapes from the 'thirties are tiny in size and evince no bold temperament, but they are fragrant. Germany's tenderest spirit is in them. Young Dürer, who painted landscapes in watercolour, belongs here. Suddenly the stone is bare again, and there are no more blossoms. Some corporation puts up a building there, and the flowers are recalled only by some stupid signboard. All of our predecessors, even when they had the significance of young Menzel, remained alone. There are traditions in the German graphic arts—as the development from Chodowiecki through Menzel to Liebermann and Slevogt. A line very much alive, which, since Slevogt, has divided into so many branches and twigs that it is hard to recognize the stem. On a western branch hangs the genial dandy of German graphic artists, Rudolf Grossmann. One aim holds this thriving vegetation together: illustration. For a hundred talented illustrators we have hardly one painter. Things were the same four hundred years ago. Painting without an exterior motive grows up with us accidentally and in isolated instances. Perhaps we think too highly of art; perhaps metaphysics is too much in our way for us to be capable of fashioning traditions.
The generation after Liebermann has a living artist of high calibre, Lovis Corinth. In superficial details he corresponds to the idea which unfriendly foreigners have of Germans. A man from the German wilderness. One can imagine him covered with hair. A cave man who was at the Academy in Munich. He has made many pictures of a useless brutality, of a brutality which is coarsened as much by the academic as by the nature of the subject; and he had made astonishing masterpieces. Beneath the clumsiness of the calibre there is greatness. He cannot choose, but this weakness goes with a victorious power. More important considerations than those of taste are met with surprising accuracy, so that the lacunae in the customary requirements are less noticeable. Corinth takes objects which otherwise exist only in name, religious stuffs, ancient legends, episodes from history. And in such pictures the brush stroke on the palette is by no means the important thing which enlivens the object; but it is the pictorial, and this has the power of safeguarding the object. Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism—as different as all these movements may be, they have one thing in common: the fear of the object. Flatteringly or with vehemence, the motif is removed. The opposing tendency does not make Corinth a narrator of things which are to be looked at. Rather, the object is naturalized. A crucifixion of Corinth's is no picture puzzle; but so very much a crucifixion that the observer can feel a shudder. At times the observer is crucified also. This primitive has kept the faculty for such experiences; he experiences them with the intensity of Grünewald. At times his experiences are from the immediate vicinity; then details occur which are of unbearable crudity. At times he sees from a distance; and then gripping legends are produced. The same primitive has painted the most beautiful modern landscapes outside of France They have an Impressionism of his own invention which does not admit of any formulas. They are the landscapes of an outsider. The almost scientific apparatus of our contemporary specialists breaks down before this concentrated reality.
For some years Corinth's pedestal has been growing noticeably, and even in his lifetime his position in history is foreshadowed. A German who has none, or hardly any, of the usual ready-to-hand national attributes: no simpleness nor joviality, no depth of thought—a crude maker of representations, such as Grünewald was. The epithet "metaphysical" must be brought in, since Corinth, like Grünewald, represents without any noticeably specific background. If Cézanne had the notion of repeating Poussin in nature, one could call the German a Grünewald "refait sur nature."
None of the younger men even approaches him in scope. Nearly all of them need anchoring in the deep foundations of the race; the lack of tradition makes painting restless. The influence of Maillol has made for a certain tradition in the plastic arts. It had been deepened by Lehmbruck, the only German sculptor of rank since Gottfried Schadow. He was not content with the mild static of graceful roundness which is so seldom adapted to the German genius; but he has brought in oppositional elements of Gothic origin. He had set himself a high task, worthy of a German; he was to bring these two counter elements together—an aim which Hans von Marées alone has reached so far, and which hardly any one ever thought of before in the German plastic arts. Lehmbruck seemed to be the man. His premature death took him off halfway. The other Germans, like Haller, de Fiori, Renée Sintenis, and Gaul and Kolbe of the older men, all artists of respectable level, incline towards a tasteful decoration which is quite in keeping with the properties of the spatial, but possesses no essential metaphysical possibilities. Barlach, the German George Minne, one of the few Nordic-minded sculptors, possesses such possibilities, but he carries them out too restrictedly. To approach our old masters one must, like Corinth, be laden with the present.
Most Germans believe that this necessity for the contemporary can be met by an unrestrained devotion to the current issues. The experiments of the Parisian doctrinaires were more welcome to them than any great French master. In Germany to-day Delacroix is still a vague great name; and besides Slevogt, Leo von König, and Klosowski I know of scarcely a painter who has tried to reconcile himself with him and his world. On the other hand you will find a Cubist in every German nest. Because they could not follow up the traditional, this young generation among us and everywhere else exulted that tradition had been shattered. They could only gain by such a collapse. It is no accident that Cubism in Paris was decreed by foreigners. They played here the rôle of the Jews in Bolshevism.
A special task fell to the Germans. Whenever there is something in art to write about, to think about, or to theorize on, Germany applies. Berlin became the cook-house for the formulas of the new doctrines.. The unprejudiced modernism of the metropolis was easily convinced, and many an amateur who had been too late for Manet bought the new pictures before they were dry. The revolution increased still more the calories of enthusiasm. The bourgeois would not let this comfortable opportunity slip to display his progressive-mindedness. The Impressionists hatched out as formidable supporters of capital.
This attitude has done much mischief. Hundreds of little Picassos arose. Kandinsky and Archipenko became schools. Every new notion of the Russian Dadaists with which the Russian invasion presented us was turned into German by hook or crook; and the day came when the dutiful exhibit at the Lehrter Bahnhof approached the rooms of the Paris Independents. But this tolerance also aided daring people of real ability. In any other country a Klee or a Grosz could hardly have lived out his spleen so successfully. Berlin has the right atmosphere for the art of the present. Not only for a gold-brick, but also if one may say it, for a super-gold-brick, an exaggeration, a stylization, an objectivization of the gold-brick. They take the improvised Berlin as though it were a necessary fact in nature; and they build upon this as though they were dealing with the church of God. They really build, although their material is nothing but the starting point for unhindered activity. They come to Berlin because it is large, and they live here in the hotels. The mechanism of the hotel contains springs of energy. These lead to derailings, to enormities, but they favour a rhythm of speed which modern art can now make use of. One can search in vain for the like of this in other, much more favoured cities. The wealth of the traditional art cities is a restrictive antiquity. Berlin with its energy belongs to America, but lies in the middle of Europe. As a consequence the mechanization which is taken for granted in America and is not at all an incentive there, has an enchanting and a grating effect here, and is always a stimulus. There is no mechanized hinterland, rich in its particular kind of health and power, lying night beyond the gates of Berlin. These people stream into the hotels; here they do not drop their crudenesses like the provincials in Paris, but they make themselves as motley as possible in the mosaic of the metropolis. Berlin's sensation-hunger is never appeased. Coarse food is preferred. Van Gogh was not recognized elsewhere so soon and so spontaneously, and has not had so enduring an effect in any other country. Manet and his fellows were taken up by the collectors and received all public honours; Van Gogh belonged to the family. There is hardly a contemporary painter between Liebermann and Kokoschka in North Germany who does not owe something to the Hollander. Liebermann freed himself with his help from the remains of Israel; and Kokoschka overcame by the same aid the feebleness of his early work in Vienna, and aimed at the remarkable concentration of his romanticism. What they prized in Van Gogh—it is another matter whether this got at the depths of the artist—was his bold decisiveness in making the quickest impression. They have a feeling for that in Berlin. They don't have much to say. They have tremendously little to say. But they don't linger long over this little. Brevity has activity. This is good Berlin. As it trimmed and sharpened the prose of Alfred Kerr and Sternheim, so the tempo shortened the expression of Heckel, Kirchner, Pechstein, and several others, and held them down to a strict circumstantiality. The war emphasized this tendency, and added cynical accents to the stenographic style. Of course this tendency does not belong solely to Berlin. The destructive tempo of the machine is felt in the art of all modern countries, but in Berlin the movement has found its typical home. It belongs here, as the lyricism of Renoir and Bonnard belongs to Paris.
Consequently, since it was here that Cubism took root, it was here alone that it could be overcome. In Paris the Cubists laid down a purely abstract programme and afterwards gave it up again. In the morning Picasso paints cubes, in the afternoon fountain nymphs in the style of Fontainebleau. Yet in the long run the Parisian orchestra triumphs over all the dissonances of the up-to-date. Berlin is grateful for any style which consecrates its weaknesses. Here it doesn't seem at all so addle-brained to alter painted surfaces by pasting on bits of paper or cloth. The streets and squares of Berlin are not made any differently, and the culture of most hotel guests is in much the same state. Already, naked people are dressed with one stocking. The mildest sobriety can become a starting point. Thus none of these new styles is taken in a very orthodox fashion.
The most gifted German Cubist, Franz Marc, was not hindered by an early death from indicating a way out of this tendency. His large animal pictures are experiments which are prodigal of space; but just as Signac in his water-colours kept intact a reservation against Neo-Impressionism and thereby laid the safest guaranty of his future reputation, so Marc has left coloured animal drawings of limited size, unforgettable things. These animals are not only formulas for this and that mathematic, but through some accident are also droll, animal-like, instinctively-functioning living things. And the accident which brought them to life lends them charm, gives a tastefulness to their rigidity which one could without disparagement call elegant. The elegance of a new-style Pisanello, of a Chinese stone-cutter, who knew how to handle rock-crystal and amethyst—as becoming as a Charvet cravat. There is a difference between the audacity of such searches and the patented processes of the professional stylists. In the web of a Klee a spiritual impetus spins for itself its curious cocoons, not to invent an architecture, but to shelter the spirit somehow. The housing problem is great. A puppet can become articulate, a cipher puppet from Borneo, or some scrawled junk of negro origin. And any one of the hundreds and thousands of forms which impress themselves upon the retina of the musically sensitive can join in fashioning the cocoons; also the wish to avoid making a bourgeois gold-brick; also the exaggerated hatred for all patents and repetitions; also the facile smile at the nonsense which is shattering Europe; also the caricature from the children's primer. In his book on Klee, Hausenstein describes the psyche of his hero thus: "How good that nothing exists, for now everything can be invented." This is genuine Berlin. Nowhere so much as in Germany does art have the right to hunt for beginnings. It is only as an end that Cubism is a shameless imposition. Its memento mori cannot be overlooked. It is the second or third invasion of exact speculation into art. In Germany we have experienced in our midst the invasion of the engineer into architecture, and the fear was not far off that the same locality might favour an operation on painting and the plastic arts. If the amputation leaves the sound parts intact, if it confines itself to organs which to-day, at least with us, can no longer be nourished, the invasion can be of use. We do not lack artists who are defending themselves against too extensive amputations. First of all they want to do their own cutting, and not allow themselves to undergo vivisection by some academic postulate. These voluntary surgeons—Karl Hofer and Max Beckmann, besides Kokoschka—are standing to-day in the foreground. Beckmann has gone through his Berlin. Here before the war, at the time of Berlin's most vigorous flourishing, he made sensational hits with large ingeniously painted pictures, evidences of the little chastened requirements of that Germanicism. The war turned him into a bitter singer. He had already made use of the social motifs of the demagogue. Now the rhetoric vanished, and the question of mechanization was gone into. Tormented mankind found its symbol. Nothing which painted with hand-me-down gestures the monumental sorrow of defeat: no fallen warriors, no lions riddled with bullets. Humbled mankind had no time for edification. Berlin maintained its tempo and lost its substance. The senseless idiocy of mechanization, the human absurdity of humans, animals, things which are nothing but instruments of commerce—all this formed itself, deformed itself, into pictures. The narrowness made faces crooked and legs twisted; tragi-comedies of things jammed together arose. Beckmann went straight through Berlin. Perhaps he is coming out beyond Berlin. Perhaps a Breughel. The metropolis of to-day discloses to him its barbaric mediaevalism. The horrors of the apocalypse are transformed into bursting corsets, into the horns of graphaphones, into the mugs of pimps grimacing under caps on sideways. They are brayed in a mortar.
The psychological significance of the episodes removes the question as to their aesthetic value. One doesn't ask a man being led to the scaffold what sort of hair tonic he uses. Therefore the suspicion can arise that Beckmann's pictures are purely phenomena of content. Let us recall that our northern primitive knew no other phenomena. They stood under the spell of a necessity which left room for sensory considerations only after the consummation of very unequivocal creeds. And, as is well known, the sensory was confined to the absolutely necessary. Form arose only from the depth of the emotion. Could it not be the same with Beckmann? Courbet, when asked what was the impetus for his pictures, was not embarrassed in declaring, Je suis ému." Beckmann could say the same of himself with less fear of making himself ridiculous. To be sure, the dangers of such emotion are close at hand. One can entangle himself in barbarism, in idées fixes; and many pictures of Beckmann's show signs of entanglement. Relentlessly, he says what is there, and he adds nothing, not even the baroque twist which permitted a Rubens to tear his Saint's tongue from his throat with the tongs in such a manner that our mouth waters with raptures over the texture. Also graphaphones, wooden legs, signboards, would be adapted to still lifes. He opposes himself to such adaptation. Occasionally he devotes himself to a fair. It is the only concession he allows himself. So we can imagine that things go that way only at a fair. Pious people who happen to stumble in on it. A bitter singer.
If we had only Beckmann, it would be enough to indicate the blow which the European explosion dealt to art; but it would not be fair to refer to him in this way. The facts which he summons do not contain the discipline with which they are placed crudely before us, the fanaticism of this circus-director, as he has named himself in one of his graphic series. After an art which devoted itself to conquering the object, in our days a method of presentation must be used which lets us be conquered through an m51ght into the frightful meaning of our objects.
Karl Hofer's good disposition and easy manners are more European. He is not for this reason less German, but of the other sort. We have always had Grünewalds and Maréeses. Beckmann is helped and endangered by his one-sidedness, Hofer by the German humanists' ideal of assembling every beautiful element in other cultures and adorning the northern content of our ideas with southern vegetation. In harsh words: the ideal of an artist, attempted hundreds of times before Marées and almost always without success; a very significant ideal to-day when every Tom, Dick, and Harry is puffed up with individualism and every notion is right if it has never been held before. Nothing is less eclectic than the art of this humanist. In spite of its many evident relationships to many tendencies of the times. None of these tendencies weakens him. After every fecundation he is left richer or more collected than before. Whoever surveys Hofer's already extensive development cannot fail to recognize its logical organism, and will marvel most of all at the discipline of his searches. In general effectiveness Hofer's discipline stands higher than that of Beckmann. Richer possibilities hold him back from all impasses. It remains for the future to show whether he can summon Beckmann's intensity in dealing with a definite content. Up to a certain degree he has moved the other way from Beckmann, beginning in specifically German channels, in the vicinity of Böcklin, and arriving with the help of Marées from the narrow into the open. Beckmann was in Paris a few months and was able to get very little from this outer sphere; and I believe he would have fared badly had he not sealed himself up so thoroughly. There are such people; there must be. Hofer was in Rome and Paris for several years, led an industrious hermit’s life throughout, but kept his eyes open. From his post as lonely observer he joined in all the attempts to extend Impressionism, and made the most highly personal contributions to the turn towards the decorative. It was the direction between Cézanne tapestries and El Greco flowing figures, rich in grace, spontaneity, taste, and borne by a passionate baroque. In this fertile period also he was still restlessly searching. Two trips to India enriched his material, but did not bring him to any objective variations. Every experience has been utilized to attain a shorter method of expression. The surface of his paintings was simplified. This idyll was broken into by the war. Hofer sat for several years in a German prison camp. Here there was no incentive to luxurious pictures, but rather to puzzlings over the problems of form. He went off into the bleak world of abstraction. Form lost its flesh, the stroke was sharp and angular, the colour ornamental. Strangely enough, the result was not devoid of a certain hyper-modern elegance. After his release he remained for a time in Switzerland and then settled in Berlin. His ornamental surfaces brought him close to the fresco, which had already tempted him in Rome along the line of Marées' reconstructions. Perhaps it was his good fortune that the times were unfavourable to such commissions. They compelled him to exert more effort. His skill placed itself at the service of vision. In this way the artist in him was outdone by the human with its struggle for symbols, and a contemporary tactics which can only be named German was the result. Nor has Berlin left this painter with an attitude free of bitterness, but this turn does not leave the rest of Europe out of account and allows the up-to-date-ness of the object to operate only to a very limited degree. The forced lyricism of earlier years has given way to the sustained and sharply concentrated rhythm of the epic. If Hofer had to paint frescos to-day, the problems of form would not be the only thing to interest him.
At least, the earnestness of these days has not done harm to German art. After the parroting of the last generation, it is trying to get into its own sphere. The road there leads through labyrinths. Discipline—a too facile concept with us Germans—is not an absolute protection. Success depends upon more elementary conditions. We shall gain an art if we succeed in rescuing our humanity from the ruins of Europe.