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 aesthetics 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 Cezanne--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 Duerer, 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.