Menzel personifies the typical problem of German art so perfectly, that the story of his life might almost stand for a history, not of German art but of the German artist.
—Julius Meier-Graefe
The “problem” which Julius Meier-Graefe alludes to in discussing the art of the German painter Adolph Menzel (1815–1905) may be succinctly stated as follows: owing to a sensibility that tends to be graphic rather than painterly and to an attitude toward culture that tends to favor official opinion at the expense of new ideas, German artists in the nineteenth century failed for the most part to appreciate the emerging tradition of modern painting in the work of Constable, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and Manet. They thus also failed to understand the vital relation that obtained between modern painting and the Old Masters. Writing about this double failure in the first decade of the twentieth century, Meier-Graefe rendered a sweeping judgment: “During this fruitful development of modern painting German art has remained at a standstill. And to stand still here means even more than elsewhere: to go backward.” It is a judgment for which certain partisans of German art, both in Germany and elsewhere, have never forgiven Meier-Graefe, and it is for this reason that on the occasion of the first Adolph Menzel retrospective in the United States, Meier-Graefe is cast in the villain’s role by one writer after another in the voluminous catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.[1]
It was not the case, however, that Meier-Graefe condemned Menzel’s work in its entirety. On the contrary, it was Meier-Graefe who first brought to light the little oil paintings, mostly of interiors, from the 1840s and 1850s, most of which Menzel had refused to exhibit in his lifetime and which Meier-Graefe believed to be not only the artist’s finest achievement but his only real achievement as a painter. According to Meier-Graefe,
About 1845, [Menzel] saw an exhibition of Constable’s works in Berlin; he noticed with amazement, that it was just as possible to paint naturally as to draw naturally. He produced a series of remarkable little pictures, which stand out from the German art of the period like rays of light… . Their creator painted them carelessly; he painted them for amusement, giving himself up to very different things in his more serious mood: historical pictures, for which he carried on researches, that would have given him a place of honour in a German university… . [He] thought it impossible to go too far [in the historical pictures] in the direction of minute imitation. This tendency was held in check by the genius of the artist throughout the forties and fifties; the year 1858 was, indeed, signalised by the production of his masterpiece, the Théâtre Gymnase, conceived during a fortnight’s visit to Paris in 1855, a picture that suggests Goya, Daumier, and Corot, and yet bears the stamp of the perfect independence of a bold temperament. He declined steadily after painting this picture. He lived fifty years longer and worked unceasingly. If it were possible to obliterate this larger portion of his life, he would be a greater man.[2]This, in its essentials, is the sum of the critical indictment that Meier-Graefe brought against Menzel, and except for the date of the Théâtre Gymnase, which is now believed to have been painted even earlier, in 1856, it is in my view an assessment of Menzel that is fully confirmed by the retrospective that has come to the National Gallery in Washington this fall.
What is involved in this assessment is not only an aesthetic judgment but a statement about Menzel’s character. Meier-Graefe firmly believed that Menzel had the gifts needed to change the course of German painting in his time but settled instead for the kind of painting that would bring him official honors. As Kenworth Moffett wrote in his monograph, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic (Prestel-Verlag, 1973), “Essentially Meier-Graefe felt that Menzel had sold out after 1870 to the vulgar materialism of the new Germany.”
How, then, do the organizers of the current Menzel retrospective deal with this criticism? It is, to be sure, a tribute to Meier-Graefe that nearly a century after he mounted his case against Menzel, his criticism still looms so large in the minds of the artist’s late twentieth-century champions. Unfortunately, the arguments that are made in defense of Menzel on this occasion amount to little more than a rehearsal of the familiar “postmodern” academic practice of substituting ingenious interpretation for aesthetic perception.
Thus for Claude Keisch, curator of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and one of the organizers of the current retrospective, “Meier-Graefe’s praise for the ‘young Menzel’” represents nothing but “an effort to legitimize the ‘Impressionist’ path of modern art.” What appeals to Mr. Keisch in Menzel are the very “contradictions” that Meier-Graefe deplored. Mr. Keisch prefers to see them as “ambiguities” or, better still, “disjunctions,” and offers us guidance in the way Menzel “junctures” these “disjunctions.” We are thus invited to believe that it is precisely in these “ambiguities” and “disjunctions” that the modernity of Menzel’s art is to be seen.
In an essay on “Menzel’s Universality,” the art historian Werner Hofmann also does battle with Meier-Graefe’s criticism. “If he is to be believed,” writes Mr. Hofmann, “the real and authentic Menzel is the one who got lost along the way.” To oppose that view Mr. Hofmann offers us an interpretation of Menzel’s “bifocality” and “diastolic” style. “I propose to re-establish Menzel as a single entity, albeit equipped with a penetrating bifocal eye,” he writes, claiming that “this is the hallmark of [Menzel’s] universality.”
What Claude Keisch called Menzel’s “ambiguities” and what Werner Hofmann dubs his “bifocality” and “universality” is suddenly claimed to be evidence of Menzel’s “modernity” in the essay by Peter-Klaus Schuster, the director of the Alte Nationalgalerie and another of the exhibition’s organizers. Mr. Schuster does at least acknowledge that Menzel became “the favorite painter of a conservative political elite, almost the emperor’s official painter,” yet what he describes as “the disturbing diversity of Menzel’s work” is also to be taken as evidence of the artist’s “modernity.” And so it goes, not only in the essays but in many of the entries on individual paintings—the need to refute Meier-Graefe’s fundamental criticism and thereby redeem the honor of German painting, while at the same time remaining curiously dependent on Meier-Graefe for the terms within which Menzel can be seriously discussed.
Given the role that Meier-Graefe’s criticism has been accorded on this occasion, it is a pity that in a catalogue running to nearly five hundred pages, it was not thought appropriate to devote an essay specifically to Meier-Graefe’s detailed analysis of Menzel in the book he published about the artist in 1906. That, at least, might have promised the possibility of a more open discussion of the real issue that is under debate in all this talk of “ambiguity,” “bifocality,” and so on—the “postmodern” rehabilitation of nineteenth-century academic painting and the accompanying attempt to minimize the profound aesthetic differences between modernist painting and its contemporaneous academic counterfeit.
If not for the revival of nineteenth-century academic painting that has been in progress now for more than a generation— a revival that has succeeded in disinterring a good many of the corpses that lay buried in the graveyard of reputations to which the modern movement consigned them—there would be no Adolph Menzel retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington in 1996. In this respect, the title that has been given this retrospective—“Adolph Menzel 1815–1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism”—is entirely misleading. For Menzel doesn’t really belong to the Romantic movement, and even in those delightfully spontaneous paintings of the 1840s and 1850s he was never an Impressionist. In his best pictures he was a painterly realist, and at his worst a somewhat fatuous academic artist all too eager to accommodate the official tastes of the Bismarck era. To package Menzel for the purposes of this exhibition as a precursor of Impressionism is particularly dishonest when so many of the arguments put forth in the catalogue are themselves concerned to refute this notion.
In the exhibition itself, Meier-Graefe’s strictures on Menzel are fully supported, I think. To move from pictures like Balcony Room (1845) and the Théâtre Gymnase to the gruesome accretion of detail in The Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci (1850–52) and the pomposity of the Departure of King William I for the Army, 31 July 1870 (1871) is to understand what Meier-Graefe meant when he lamented the loss to German painting of an artist who, at his best, conjured up a comparison with “Goya, Daumier, and Corot.”
“What separated the Impressionists, as they were disparagingly called,” wrote Meier-Graefe, citing the Impressionists as representatives of the modernism he championed, “from their most vehement opponents was something more intellectual and moral than artistic in the strictest sense of the word… . [For] in an artist we value the ethics that enable him to sacrifice everything for his art and the intellect that knows how to obtain as much beauty as his talent is capable of.”
About Menzel in this regard, Meier-Graefe also wrote: “Bismarck taught the German people to relinquish a fruitless struggle for an ostensible political ideal… . Menzel taught us the same in art. It is no accident that both are Prussian.”
What we now need, even more than a Menzel retrospective, is a comprehensive collection of Julius Meier-Graefe’s writings that will do justice to his achievement.
Notes
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Hilton Kramer is the founding editor of The New Criterion, which he started with the late Samuel Lipman in 1982
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 15 October 1996, on page 51
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