Very modestly tucked away and surrounded by art of the few remaining
neutral nations, in a small gallery adjoining Holland and Sweden,
Germany unofficially and probably even without her knowledge is
represented by a small group of pictures which after many adventures
reached the hospitable shores of California. Originally exhibited at the
last Carnegie Institute Exhibition at Pittsburgh, they found themselves
on the high seas on their return voyage at the beginning of the war,
only to be captured by an English cruiser whose captain was so painfully
struck by the undeniable evidences of German Kultur that instead of
taking them to England he returned them to the United States, to be
included eventually in our exhibition. It would be very wrong to
generalize upon the standard of German art from this small display, but
a number of these pictures can well afford to go entirely upon their own
merit.
Zügel's cattle picture is a canvas of the first order, by one of the
very important modern animal painters, a man whose fame has penetrated
into all lands where art is at all cultivated. The silvery light of a
summer morning, filtering through overhanging willow-trees upon the
backs of a few Holstein cows, is full of life and admirably loose in its
treatment. Above Zügel, Leo Putz, another Munich man, has a lady near a
pond, broadly painted, and executed in the peculiar Putz method of
square, mosaic-like paint areas which melt into a soft harmony of tender
grays and greens. Stuck's "Nocturne" is affected and unconvincing and
scarcely representative of this master's style. The many other men give
a good account of themselves, particularly Curt Agthe, whose classic
"Nude at the Spring" is of wonderful surface quality. Wenk has an
Italian marine and Benno Becker a landscape from the same country.
Göhler's "Castle Terrace" has a particularly fine sky and a true rococo
atmosphere. Hans von Volkmann's "Field of Ripe Grain" is typical of this
Karlsruhe painter, whose stone lithographs have given German art a
unique place in the art world.