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 Kuenstlerbund. 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 Roesler, 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. Erbsloeh 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!--Truebner, Hodler, Zuegel, 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, Marees, 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 Kuenstlerhaus. 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 Kurfuerstdam 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.
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