Erwin Panofsky’s memoirs on “Three Decades of Art History in the United States” contain a story of how Walter Cook, then director of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, described the process by which the NYU art-history faculty suddenly became the most prestigious in the world: Hitler “shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” When one considers the equally impressive displacement of German artists and architects, including Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius—who managed to effect a sea change in American architectural education by the mid-1950s—it becomes evident that the American experience with the visual arts since the early-1930s contains a rich and vibrant Teutonic strain. Needless to say, most intellectuals concerned with the arts today would be loathe to explore the consequences of this historical fact.

Over the course of the last two decades I have become increasingly fascinated by the similarity of the American dilemma with so-called postmodernism and the German dilemma with modernism before the advent of Hitler. My fascination never evolved into a systematic investigation partly because I suspected that the American dilemma, though reflecting Germanic sensibilities and concerns, exhibits nowhere near the conceptual sophistication, visual nuance, and critical subtlety of the German experience. The book under review has convinced me of many things, the first of which is that my initial suspicion was right: the German debate on the advance of the visual arts in the early years of this century was far more compelling, engaging, and, in the final analysis, more important than our current concerns. The prime reason for this is the ubiquity of the political in today’s discourse on the fine arts, a corrosive and degrading aspect of our culture that distorts and diminishes everything it touches.

Frederic J. Schwartz, lecturer in art history at University College, London, has targeted the German debate on artistic value sponsored by the German Werkbund in the decade preceding the First World War. To appreciate fully the magnitude of this author’s achievement, it must be understood that Imperial Germany possessed an expansive, if loosely woven, cultural apparatus dedicated to the visual arts, ranging from the world’s most highly developed university system to a broad array of academies, ateliers, and museums; each constellation articulated its values and interests in a cluster of periodicals. Overlaps were common, and, as it is now, the fine arts constituted a small world. Unlike virtually any previous epoch, the historian of this period faces a daunting task in digesting the sheer bulk of the published primary sources alone. By completely mastering a bibliography of this complexity and size, Schwartz far surpasses any single author in presenting a comprehensive picture of the theoretical dimension of the Werkbund’s activities, an astonishing feat in and of itself.

But beyond simply mastering a reading list, the author has composed a book that I consider easily the most thought-provoking book I have read in a year. Imagine the following subject, treated with enviable finesse and genuine insight, as simply one part of a far larger enterprise: the impact of intellectual property law between 1906 and 1916 on the discussion of appropriate forms for mass-produced consumer goods. The author’s stated intention is to explain why “the artists and thinkers of the time sought to understand relations of ‘form’ to ‘economy.’” In allowing the original terms of the debate to be fleshed out and retroactively explored in the neighboring disciplines, Schwartz ambitiously and successfully charts a period of fascinating transition into a world where formal abstraction was, if not entirely desirable, then at least fully conceivable. Because we live in a world in which the debate between abstraction and representation is still alive, and because we often express ourselves in the semantic and conceptual garb of Imperial Germany, this book is vitally important for any advanced thinking on today’s topics in the visual arts. Our indigenous Kulturkritik would be significantly enriched if we understood the trajectory of related previous episodes.

Of greatest interest for me is the way Schwartz explains the imprint of German sociology and the Historical School of political economy on the debate. Tönnies, Simmel, and Sombart are presented with a clarity that would probably enlighten most practicing social scientists. Perhaps it requires someone who can still believe that capitalism is a cultural construct to fully articulate the romantic anticapitalism of the German academic mandarinate circa 1910. Thus, the epilogue’s directionless discussion of the Frankfurt School and the periodic lapse into a kind of solipsistic jargon that only a semiotician can create (or understand) are the only weaknesses that concern me. I would also have appreciated a sidelight cast on the difference between German and Austrian views; here there are very significant differences to be noted, both philosophically and aesthetically. All told, this book enables us to skip a generation in our understanding of the Werkbund and, if read with an eye to the current arts scene, offers exciting perspectives on today’s debates—although I suspect that the author would be ideologically disposed to condemn the most important of these perspectives. Apples don’t fall far from the tree.