Julius Meier-Graefe

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”