German art

“ At times the successful, and the imposing array of successful works, is a picture of decay. If art is to be the pictorial edifice of mankind, then the continued deformation of the pictorial, even the most genial deformation, can only signify the disruption of mankind. In the house which should be there for all, there is a place finally for only one individual. The rest look upon it as a curiosity, as art, and move on.
The rôle of German art corresponds to the rôle of Germany. ”

“ It is a great and beautiful—one may say, an epoch-making work, which has filled us who have heard it to-day with pride, since it has inspired in us the conviction that German art has not died out, but that it begins to stir again and will thrive as gloriously as of old. ”

“ The German artists had assembled from all parts of the country, that they might, within those walls, charmed by the genius of the muses, wander through the halls in which the academy had collected the best works of German art, and take counsel upon the common interests, as they had formerly done at Bingen and Stuttgart. ”

“ Under the influence of these two classes, German music, poetry, drama and literature came into existence. The German classic art is predominantly aristocratic and ecclesiastic. The early German artists were constrained to gather in the aristocratic salons of the rich patricians. The peasant was rarely a model of early German artists, but a German Freiherr, Bürger or Handwerker has been the subject of many German dramas, operas and musical compositions, and of much painting, sculpture and dancing. ”

“ The imitation of foreigners is the dangerous blind alley into which our art has betaken itself. When I exhibited ‘Ritter Kurt’ people said, ‘It is Old German,’ and forthwith it stood condemned, as if that were a disgrace, and as if one should not rather have saluted the fact with joy, as the right thing for us Germans. The art of painting which I follow is the German, and glass-painting must be taken as its foundation. ”

“ German art had no new pronouncement to make through the medium of the antique; it followed, on the other hand, the programme of an artistically barren scholar who forgot that archæology is not art, recommended imitation as the path to perfection, and perpetually reminded the artists who followed him how widely they deviated from the correct lines of the model. ”

“ This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him an air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at an impossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can never do. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or that point seems strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy German foreheads—too German and heavy for perfect beauty. ”

“ Now, how is it in Germany? The German good-nature imitates everything of which the French set the example. It allows itself to be deceived, even to the point of finding naïveté where there is nothing but immodesty. It thinks even that it recognizes a religious character in works which do but abuse and vilify religion. The German good-nature imagines that these creators of French art have carried dramatic music to its highest perfection, whilst in reality they are merely skilful workmen, and often something much worse. ”

“ As we have said, the dominant tendency of German art since the reform is rather towards deliberate, even systematic, conception than spontaneous expression of sentiment: it is, in fact, the mortification of the eye for the intelligence. In a word, German engravers trust too much to logic and analysis, and too little to their senses. It is only natural that they should. ”

“ Germans consider an art exhibition as one of the necessities of life. Cubist art has rather gone out of date, and war art has taken its place. Such stirring pictures as these war artists have produced! Most of the best German artists have been to the front sketching, and the war productions of such artists as Fritz Erler and Walther Georgi are some of the most wonderful paintings I have ever seen. ”

“ Everyone sadly thought that the man of genius placed so high amongst living beings remained silent whilst another kind of foreign art sought to plant itself in our country, causing the productions of German art to be forgotten.... ”

“ He applied himself to his profession with the most constant and untiring industry, which, together with his great knowledge, great facility of mechanical execution, and a remarkable talent for imitation, enabled him to rise to such distinction, and to exert so powerful an influence on German art for a great length of time. He was the first artist in Germany who practiced and taught the rules of perspective, and of the proportions of the human figure, according to mathematical principles. ”

“ I was ignorant at that time of all that German art has produced, and I spoke, without knowledge of the cause, of the defects, of the coldness, of the dryness of your Dürer and your Cranach, when one day a picture seller showed me a little canvass of old Albert. ”

“ Need we assure you that at a time when all glances were hopefully turned towards you, all perceived with sorrow that the one man whom all of us are compelled to acknowledge as foremost among living men in his domain, looked on in silence as foreign art took possession of German soil, the seat of honor of the German muse, while German works gave pleasure only by echoing the favorite tunes of foreigners and, where the most excellent had lived and labored, a second childhood of taste threatens to follow the Golden Age of Art? ”

“ May she, in loyal remembrance of the time of her founding, preserve her Prussian-German character! Learning is, indeed, the common property of the whole cultural world, and her acquisitions to-day halt at no boundaries. And yet—as every nation must preserve its own manner of life if it would emphasize its independent existence and its value for the whole—may the alma mater Berolinensis remain forever conscious that she is a German university. As formerly, so may she be for all time the seat of German manners and of German art! ”

“ For the bulk of it is not primitive or mediaeval or renaissance art, but German art. At any rate it is a manifestation of national character rather than of aesthetic inspiration. Most aesthetic creation bears the mark of nationality; very few manifestations of German nationality bear a trace of aesthetic creation. The differences between the treasures of Aachen, early German architecture, fifteenth-century German sculpture, and the work produced to-day at Munich are superficial. Almost all is profoundly German, and nothing else. ”

“ Another would have taken for this pedagogic lever, instead of the drawing-pen, the fiddle-bow or the piano-key; but not so the Genius; the feeling for painting develops itself, like the taste, very late, and needs, therefore, the help of education. It deserves the earliest unfolding, because it takes away the grating which sunders us from Nature, because it drives the phantasying soul out again among external things, and because it turns the German eye to the difficult art of apprehending beautiful forms. ”

“ Heinrich Conried, who has for many years labored to exhibit to the American public, in perfect form, one phase of German art, the drama, and who has most liberally provided for us here, as many of you will recall with delight, several performances of classic German plays, the proceeds of which have considerably increased the museum fund.
When enough had been accomplished to show that those in charge of the project were in earnest, endeavors were made to enlist the aid of prominent persons abroad. ”

“ The effect of German philosophy has been to develop intense intellectual activity. The habit of searching into the hidden mysteries of being has inclined the German mind to what is deepest, and sometimes to what is most obscure in thought; and the tendency to rise to the absolute, which is characteristic of this philosophy, manifests its influence not only in the blending of poetry and metaphysics, but in every department of science, literature, and art. ”

“ Here, if ever, there was created in the German language and spirit, and in brief compass, a work of art of German prose. If ever the gods blessed a man to create, consciously or unconsciously, on the soil of the people and their needs, a perfect work of popular art in the spirit of the people and in the terms of their speech, to the weal of the people and their youth throughout the centuries, it was here. The explanation of the Second Article is one of the chief creations of the home art of German poetry. ”

“ The artist who lives amidst unpropitious, formless surroundings, and consequently ignores these surroundings in his art, runs the risk of altogether losing touch with the tangible, of becoming abstract, or, if his mind is not of a robust type, fantastic; if, on the other hand, he keeps to the world of reality, he is apt to be too real, and, if he has little imagination, to copy slavishly and vulgarly. These words indicate, as it were, the watershed which divides the German literature of this period. ”

“ On the other hand, the pictorial treatment of antique literature, a world so suggestive of beautiful forms, was so little comprehended by the German mind that they only sought to express it through the medium of those fantastic ideas with very childish and even tasteless results. We must also remember that that average education of the various classes of society which the fine arts require for their protection stood on a very low footing in Germany. In Italy the favour with which works of art was regarded was far more widely extended. ”

“ What in our country is only done for worship is done also in Germany for poetry and music. Voices blend together; art shares the privilege of religion. It is a trait which is neither French nor English, nor, I think, Italian. The spirit of artistic devotion, of impersonal combination, of common, harmonious, disinterested action, is specially German; it makes a welcome balance to certain clumsy and prosaic elements in the race.
Later.—Perhaps the craving for independence of thought—the tendency to go back to first principles—is really proper to the Germanic mind only. ”

“ I have placed the task before you and limited it in a general way, but for the rest I have given you absolute freedom, not only freedom in the combination and composition but precisely that freedom to put into it a certain amount of yourselves—a thing that every artist must do in order to put his own stamp upon his work; for every work of art contains within it a kernel of the artist’s own character. I believe that this experiment, if I may call it so, through which the Siegesallee was completed, dare be looked upon as a success. ”

“ The Danish Romantic authors have, generally speaking, been the superiors of the Germans as regards art, their inferiors as regards intellect. As a rule, every production of the German author, however small, though it be formless, weak, nay, actually a failure, yet expresses a whole philosophy of life, and that no fanciful philosophy, but one evolved and matured by personal experience, and stamped with the whole astonishingly many-sided culture which distinguishes the educated German. ”

“ The crudities of such tales of adventure were softened and eliminated by the culturing influence of formal classicism and by a newly won admiration for the everyday element in life, contemporaneous with and dependent upon the gradual appreciation of middle-class worth. At this point the English novel stepped in as a guide, and the gradual shaping of the German novel in the direction of an art-form is due primarily to the prevailing admiration of English models. ”

“ Real German culture in all its manifestations—scientific, artistic, philosophical,viii musical, commercial, and military—accepts and champions the new principle and the fresh ideas which are to regenerate the effete social organisms of to-day. According to the theory underlying this grandiose national enterprise, the forces of Christianity are spent. New ichor for the dry veins of decrepit Europe is stored up in German philosophy and poetry. Mediæval art has exhausted the traditional forms, but Teutonism is ready to furnish it with new ones. Music is almost a creation of German genius. ”

“ But although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben—a partial alienation from its own limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces. ”

“ In Germany engraving finds a ready welcome among other manifestations of an art essentially of the town, of the burgher, while the art of the Italian quattrocento celebrates its great triumphs in the erection or adornment of sumptuous edifices, under the fostering care of princes and prelates. The German naïvely depicts, with minute precision, the scenes and38 environments of his homely sphere; all subjects, whatever their time or country, are shifted into the familiar setting of his own time and his own surroundings. ”

“ The perception of the height at which beauty begins to shed its charm even over Germans, raises German artists to the height, to the supreme height, and to the extravagances of passion: they have an actual, profound longing, therefore, to get beyond, or at least to look beyond the ugliness and awkwardness—into a better, easier, more southern, more sunny world. ”