In the preface to his classic study of Albrecht Dürer, Erwin Panofsky referred to high- and postmedieval European art as a grand fugue that, as it was most often played, lacked a distinctively Germanic voice. In contrast to that of their more celebrated peers in France, the reputation of German artists in subsequent eras does not appear to have risen much higher. This is complicated by the irony that Germany’s notoriously chauvinistic art-historical establishment deprecated her uniquely important contributions to the evolution of post-Enlightenment architecture, its pedagogy, and its theory. Whether seen from a classic or romantic point of view, many of the enduring features of twentieth-century architecture and theory reflect specifically Teutonic concerns that were either later attributed to the French (by Siegfried Giedion), to the English (first by Hermann Muthesius then a generation later by Nikolaus Pevsner), or seen as an aesthetic dead end....

 

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