9. Max Liebermann And Some Phases Of Modern German Art
I
The importance of Max Liebermann in any critical consideration of modern German art is prime. Meister Max, no longer as active as he was, for he was born in 1847, is still a name to conjure with not only in Berlin, his birthplace and present home, but in all Germany, and, for that matter, the wide world. He is intensely national. He is a Hebrew, and proud of his origin. He is also cosmopolitan. In a word, he is versatile.
Some years ago, through the enthusiasm and enterprise of the late Hugo Reisinger and several other art lovers, New York had an opportunity of enjoying a peep at German paintings in the Metropolitan Museum. It was rather a disappointing exhibition, principally because the men shown were not represented at their best. Lenbach was not, nor Boecklin, nor a dozen others, though Menzel was. That is, we admired one of Menzel's least characteristic efforts but his most brilliant of canvases, the stage of the Théâtre Gymnase, Paris. Never before nor since that pictorial performance did the wonderful Kobold of German art attain such mellowness. Just as he had been under the influence of Courbet when he painted his big iron forge picture--which, with the French theatre subject, hangs in the National Gallery, Berlin--so he felt in the latter the impact of the new Impressionistic school with its devotion to pure colour, air, and rhythm. Max Liebermann was best seen in his Flax Spinners of Laren, an early work, Dutch in spirit and execution, and not without traces of the influence of his friend Josef Israels. But of the real Liebermann, his scope, originality, versatility, America, I think, has not yet had an adequate idea.
Versatility is commonly regarded as an indication of superficiality. How, asks Mr. Worldly Wiseman, can that fellow Admirable Crichton do so many things so well when it takes all my time to do one thing badly? Therefore he must be regarded suspiciously. Now, there are no short cuts in the domain of the arts; Gradus ad Parnassum is always steep. But, given by nature a certain kind of temperament in which curiosity is doubled by mental energy, and you may achieve versatility. Versatility is often mainly an affair of energy, of prolonged industry. The majority of artists do one thing well, and for the remainder of their career repeat themselves. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary his admirers demanded a replica and were disappointed with Salammbô, with Sentimental Education, above all, with The Temptation of St. Anthony and Bouvard and Pécuchet. Being a creative genius, Flaubert taught himself to be versatile. Only through self-discipline, did he achieve his scheme, beside which the writing of the Human Comedy cannot be compared. There is more thought-stuff packed in his five masterpieces, apart from the supreme art, than in whole libraries: quality triumphing over quantity.
Greatly endowed by nature, by reason of his racial origin, and because of his liberal education, Liebermann was bound to become a versatile artist. That doesn't mean he is a perfectionist in many things, that he etches as well as he paints, that he composes as well as he draws. As a matter of fact he is not as accomplished a master of the medium as is Anders Zorn; many a smaller man, artistically speaking, handles the needle with more deftness than Liebermann. But as a general impression counts as much as technique, your little etcher is soon forgotten when you are confronted with such plates as the self-portraits, the various beer-gardens, the houses on the dunes (with a hint of the Rembrandt magic), or the bathing boys. His skill in black and white is best seen when he holds a pencil, charcoal, or pen in his hand. The lightness, swiftness, elasticity of his line, the precise effect attained and the clarity of the design prove the master at his best and unhampered by the slower technical processes of etching or lithography.
I studied Liebermann's work from Amsterdam to Vienna, and out of the variety of styles set forth I endeavoured to disentangle several leading characteristics. The son of a well-known Berlin family, his father a comfortably situated manufacturer, the young Max was brought up in an atmosphere of culture and family affection. His love for art was so pronounced that his father, like the father of Mendelssohn, let him follow his bent, and at fourteen he was placed under the tutelage of Steffeck, an old-timer, whose pictures nowadays seem a relic from some nightmare of art. Steffeck had studied under Schadow, another of the prehistoric Dinosaurs of Germany, and boasted of it. He once told Liebermann that Adolf Menzel only made caricatures, not portraits. You rub your eyes and wonder. Liebermann has said that this rigid training did him good. But he soon forgot it in actual practice. Some good angel must have protected him, for he came under the influence of Munkaczy and, luckily for him, escaped the evil paint of that overrated mediocrity. But perhaps the Hungarian helped him to build a bridge between the antique formula of Steffeck and the modern French--that is, the Impressionists. Max had to burn many bridges behind him before he formed a style of his own. Individuality is not always born, it is sometimes made, despite what the copy-books assure us to the contrary. The wit and irony of the man and painter come both from Berlin and from his Jewish ancestry. He looks like a benevolent Mephistopheles, and is kindness personified to young artists.
Subjecting himself to the influence of Courbet, Millet, Rousseau, Corot, Troyon, he went to Holland, and there fell captive to the genius of Rembrandt. The mystic in Liebermann is less pronounced than one might expect. His clear picture of the visible world holds few secret, haunted spots. I do not altogether believe in his biblical subjects, in the Samson and Delilah, in the youthful Christ and the Doctors of the Law--the latter is of more interest than the former--they strike one as academic exercises. Nevertheless, the lion's paw of Rembrandt left its impress upon his art. The profounder note which the French painters sometimes miss is not missing in Liebermann. He has avoided both the pomp and rhetoric of the academic school and the sentimentality of the latter-day Germans. Liebermann is never sentimental, though pity for the suffering of life is easily detected in his canvases, particularly in his Old Men's Home, The Orphans, The Widower, and a dozen masterpieces of the sort.
In Frans Hals Liebermann found a congenial spirit and made many copies of his pictures to train his hand and eye. His portraits reveal the broad brush work of Hals. They are also psychological documents. Associated with Josef Israels, he was in sympathy with him, but never as sentimental as the Dutchman. Both reverenced Rembrandt and interpreted him, each after his own temperament. When Liebermann first knew Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Degas (particularly Degas) he had experimented in every key. Master of his materials, master of himself, a cultured man of the world and a sincere artist, the French group showed him the way to liberty, to a deliverance from the ruddy tones of Munich, from the dulness of Düsseldorf, from the bitter angularities of German draughtsmanship and its naïveté which is supposed to stand for innocence of spirit--really the reverse, a complete poverty of spirit--and with it all the romantic mythology of German art, the bloated fighting fauns, leering satyrs, frogmen, fishwomen, monkeys, and fairies, imps, dryads, and nymphs. Liebermann discovered the glories of light, of spacing, of pure colour, and comprehended the various combinations by which tonalities could be dissociated and synthesised anew. He went back to Germany a painter of the first rank and an ardent colourist, and he must have felt lonely there--there were no others like him. Menzel was a master draughtsman, Leibl an admirable delineator of character, and to name these three is to name all. Henceforward, Liebermann's life task was to correlate his cosmopolitan art with German spirit, and he has nobly succeeded. To-day he is still the commanding figure in German art. No one can compete with him in maestria, in range, or as a colourist. And at last I have reached the goal of my discourse.
II
A visit to the National Gallery of Berlin makes me gnash my teeth. The sight of so much misspent labour, of the acres of canvases deluged with dirty, bad paint, raises my bile. We know that all things are relative, and because Germany has produced few painters worthy of the name that after all it doesn't much matter--there is Italy and Holland to fall back on; not to mention the Spain of El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, and the great Frenchmen. But there is something singularly exasperating in German painting, whether old or new, that sets us to wondering whether such museums as the National Gallery, Berlin; the new Pinakothek, Munich, and other repositories of ugly colour and absurd mythologies do not cause a deterioration in public taste. It is almost pathetic to see not only the general visitor but also students gazing admiringly at the monstrous art of Kaulbach, Schadow, Cornelius (the Nazarene school), or at the puerilities of the Swiss, Arnold Boecklin and his follower, Franz von Stuck, of Munich, who has simply brutalised the eternal Boecklin themes. It is all very well to say that these galleries, like the modern collection upstairs in the Dresden gallery (with its wonderful Rembrandts and Vermeers down-stairs) serve to preserve the historical art chain. But bad art should have no significance, history or no history--let such history appeal to the professors of æsthetics and other twaddlers. Furthermore, the evil example of Boecklin and the rest, shows in German contemporary painting. I don't mean the Cubists and other freaks, but in current art, the art that sells, that receives respectful critical treatment. We are continually forced to look at the menagerie, mermaids, and frogs, and fauns, painted in imitation of the hard, violent tones of Boecklin, himself a scene-painter, but not a great painter.
The critics in Germany don't bother themselves over paint quality, beautiful surfaces, or handling, but with books about the philosophy of the painter, his "weltanschauung," his ethics; you all the while wondering why he uses such muddy paints, why he is blind to the loveliness of atmosphere, pure colours, and sheer pictorial quality. Style and quality are, I believe, suspected in Germany as evidences of superficiality, of a desire to add ornament where plain speech should suffice. Like German prose and German singing--oh, how acrid is the Teutonic tone-production, a lemon in the larynx!--German painting limps heavily. Nietzsche is right; in certain matters the Germans are the Chinese of Europe; they refuse to see the light of modern discoveries in art.
Here is a violent instance: On the top floor of the National Gallery, Berlin, there is a room with fourteen masterpieces on its walls. Nothing in the galleries below--not even Zorn's Maja--nothing in all Berlin, excepting the old masters in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, can be mentioned in the same breath with these beautiful compositions, condemned to perpetual twilight. They were secured by the late and lamented Von Tschudi, who left the National Gallery after their purchase and retired to Munich, where he bought a great example of El Greco for the old Pinakothek, the Laocoon, a service, I fancy, not quite appreciated by the burghers of Munich. The masters who have thus fallen under the ban of official displeasure are Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Cézanne--the latter represented by two of the most veracious fruit-pieces I ever saw. The Manet is the famous Hothouse, and in the semi-darkness (not a ray of artificial light is permitted) I noted that the canvas had mellowed with the years. The Monets are of rare quality. Altogether a magnificent object-lesson for young Germany, in which tender colour, an exquisite vision (poetic without being sloppy-sentimental) of the animate and inanimate world. What a lesson for those rough daubers who growl at the dandyism of the Frenchmen, whose landscapes look like diagrams, surveyors' maps, or what-not; painters who, if they were told that they are not knee-high to a grasshopper when their pictures are set side by side with American landscapists, would roar as if at a good joke; and a lesson that will never be learned by the present generation, which believes that Max Klinger is a great etcher, a great sculptor (only think of that terrifying Beethoven statue in Leipsic), that Boecklin is a great poet as well as a marvellous painter, that--oh, what's the use! The nation that produced such world masters as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, and the German Primitives has seemingly lost its lien in sound art.
Remember, I am not arguing with you, as Jemmy Whistler puts it, I'm just telling you; these things are not a matter of taste, but a matter of fact, of rotten bad paint. What Royal Cortissoz wrote of the German Exhibition and of the Scandinavians when in New York fits into this space with appositeness: "... an insensitiveness to the genius of their medium. They do not love paint and caress it with a sensuous instinct for its exquisite potentialities. They know nothing of the beauty of surface. Nor, by the same token, have they awakened to the lesson which Manet so admirably enforced of the magic that lies in pure colour for those who really know how to use it." I can hear our German friend discoursing on the subject of surface beauty! For him the underlying philosophic "idea," whatever that has to do with paint, is his shibboleth, and behold the result. Moreover, the German has not naturally a colour sense. It is only such a man as Reinhardt, with the Oriental feeling for sumptuous hues, that has succeeded in emancipating the German theatre from its garish taste. Some day the Richard Wagner music-drama will be renovated on the scenic side--Roller in Vienna has made a decided step in the right direction--and the old Munich travesties, which Wagner thought he wanted, will be relegated to the limbo of meretricious art.
III
Fancying, perhaps, that I had not been quite fair to modern German painters--later I may consider the ghastly sculpture which, like that cemetery of stone dolls and idols, the Siegesallee in the Berlin Tiergarten, has paralysed plastic art in that country--I determined early in the autumn of 1912 to visit again the principal cities, going as far down as Vienna and Budapest. I do not mind confessing that the thought of the glorious Jan Vermeer in the National Museum in the Magyar capital greatly tempted me. And to get an abiding pictorial flavour in my mind I began visiting The Hague, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. Any one who can admire modern German art after a course of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Josef Israels, and the brothers Maris (all three melting colourists), must have the powerful if somewhat uncritical stomach of an ostrich.
Leaving Holland, I found myself in London, and there, to add further to my distraction, I spent weeks at the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection. So I was ripe for revolt when I began at Stuttgart. While still in the rich tonal meshes of the Richard Strauss music, I wandered one grey afternoon into an exhibition of the Stuttgarter Künstlerbund. There were plenty of new names, but, alas! no new talent, only a sea of muddy paint, without nuance, clumsy drawing, harsh flesh-tints, and landscapes of chemical greens. Why mention names? Not even mediocrity was attained, though the next day I read in the papers that Professor This and Professor That were exhibiting masterpieces full of profound ideas. Ah! these paint professors, these philosophy-soaked critics, and that profound idea! Not, however, a word about the pictorial image.
In Munich, beside the standard galleries, I visited the Secession Gallery, and there I saw pictures by Becker-Gundhal, Louis Corinth, Paul Crodel, Josef Damberger, Julius Diez, Eichfeld, Von Habermann (a portraitist of distinction), Herterich (with much decorative ability), Von Heyden (deceased, and a capital delineator of chickens), Von Keller, Landenberger, Arthur Langhammer (deceased), Pietzsch, Bruno Piglhein (also deceased, I am sorry to say, for he had genuine ability), Leo Samberger (an interesting portraitist, monotonous in his colour-gamut), Schramm-Zitau, the inevitable Von Stuck (whose productions look like melodramatic posters), the late Fritz von Uhde, W. Volz, and others, mostly dead, and but recently. The portrait of Conrad Ansorge, a former Liszt pupil, by Louis Corinth, was not without character, the tempo slow, as is the tempo of Ansorge himself. Corinth, like Von Uhde, Leopold von Kalckreuth, O. H. Engel, Skarbina, Bantzer, Slevogt, Waldemar Rösler, is a follower of Max Liebermann, whose influence is easily discernible in the work of these younger men. To be sure, there are no landscapists in Germany, such as Davies, Ernest Lawson, Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, Metcalf--I mention a few at random--but the younger chaps are getting away from the sentimental panoramas of Hans Thoma and other "idealists" who ought to be writing verse or music, not painting, as too many ideas, like too many cooks, spoil the pictorial broth. Grant the Germans fertility of fancy, invention, science in building up a figure, force, humour, sentiment, philosophy, and artistic ability generally, yet they have a deficiency in the colour sense and an absence of a marked personal style. An exhibition of new art on the Odeonplatz, Munich, did not give me much hope. There were some pictures so bad as to be humorous; a dancer by the Holland-Parisian, Kees van Dongen, had the merit at least of sincerity. Erbslöh has joined the extremists, Kirchner, Guimi, Kanoldt, Kandinsky, Utrello--a good street effect; Werefkin and several Frenchmen were in evidence. The modelling was both grotesque and indecent. The human figure as an arabesque is well within the comprehension of the average observer, but obscenity is not art--great art is never obscene. The blacks and whites that I saw in Munich at this particular show were not clever, only bestial. I only wish that German art of the last decade had not gone over, bag and baggage, to the side of vulgar license. Certainly Matthew Arnold could say of it, as he once said of Paris, that the great goddess Lubricity reigned in state.
In the Moderne Galerie--I am still in Munich--I was reassured; I saw Israels, Gauguin, Van Gogh--what masters!--Trübner, Hodler, Zügel, Von Uhde, Max Slevogt--a fine view of Frankfort--and some children at the seashore by my favourite, Max Liebermann. Then there were Langhammer and Reumaini, the clever Max Mayrshofer, Bechler of the snow scenes, Obwald, Tooby, Leibl, Marées, and a very strongly conceived and soundly modelled nude by the Munich artist, Ernest Liebermann, one of the most gifted of the younger men and no relation of Meister Max of the same name. Local art in Vienna did not give me a thrill. I attended a retrospective exhibition of two half-forgotten mediocrities, Carl Rahl and Josef Hasslwander, and also the autumn exhibition in the Künstlerhaus. There, amid miles of glittering, shiny, hot paint, I found the best manipulator of paint to be a man bearing the slightly American name of John Quincy Adams, whose residence is given in the catalogue as Vienna. He has studied John Sargent to advantage and knows how to handle his medium, knows values, an unknown art in Germany and Austria except to a few painters. The glory of Vienna art is in her museums and in the private collections of Prince Liechtenstein and Count Czernin.
Despite his patchwork of colour, Ignacio Zuloaga's exhibition at Dresden (on the Pragerstrasse) gave me the modern thrill I missed both at Vienna and Prague (though in the Bohemian city I saw some remarkable engravings by the native engraver Wencelaus Hollar). Several of the Zuloagas have been seen in New York when Archer M. Huntington invited the Spanish artist to exhibit at the Hispanic Museum. Not, however, his Lassitude, two half-nudes, nor his powerful but unpleasant Bleeding Christ. What a giant Zuloaga seems when matched against the insipidity and coarseness of modern German art. The recent art of Arthur Kampf, who is a painter of more force than distinction, a one-man show in Unter den Linden, Berlin, did not impress me; nor did the third jury-free art show in Rudolph Lepkes's new galleries in the Potsdamerstrasse, except that it was much less objectionable than the one in 1911, then held across the street.
Therefore I don't think I exaggerate the claims of Max Liebermann, who is, for me, the most important of living German artists, and one of the few great painters of to-day in any land. His boys bathing, his peaceful Holland interiors, his sympathetic presentment of poor folk, superannuated survivals awaiting death, his spirited horses and horsemen, polo pony players, race-course, his vivid transcription of Berlin out-of-door life, the concert gardens, the Zoo, the crowded streets, his children, his portraits, his sonorous, sparkling colour, his etchings and drawings--the list is large; all these various aspects of the world he has recorded with a fresh, unfailing touch. His horses are not as rhythmic as those of Degas, his landscapes are not as sun-flooded as those of Monet, nor are his Holland bits so charged with homely sentiment as those of Josef Israels. But Liebermann is Liebermann, with a supple, flowing, pregnant line, his condensed style a versatile conception, a cynical, at times, outlook upon the life about him; enfin--a colourist.
My admiration for Liebermann's draughtsmanship shown in the Berlin Secession Gallery in the Kurfürstdam was reproved by a German friend, who remarked that Anselm Feuerbach was a "sounder" draughtsman. No doubt, but I prefer Liebermann's more nervous graphic line, also more eloquent, for Feuerbach, who is still called a master in Munich--he made grey cartoons--is as frigid and academic as a painted nude in a blizzard.