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6. The Long History of Impressionism in Germany
Mitchell B. Frank​
Description: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
In Wilhelmine Germany (1888–1918), art historians and critics often expanded the geographical and chronological parameters of impressionism beyond the confines of late nineteenth-century France. According to this longer history propagated in German circles, impressionism could include the works of Titian, Frans Hals, and Diego Velázquez, as well as ancient Roman murals and Chinese...
Author
Mitchell B. Frank​
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.009
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20007
Chapter subject tags:Art historians--Germany--BiographyImpressionism (Art)--GermanyArt--Public opinion--Germany--19th centuryArt criticism--Germany--History--19th centuryLandscape painting, German--19th centuryNationalism--Germany--19th centuryLiebermann, Max, 1847-1935Art--Historiography--19th century
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6. The Long History of Impressionism in Germany
Mitchell B. Frank
In Wilhelmine Germany (1888–1918), art historians and critics often expanded the geographical and chronological parameters of impressionism beyond the confines of late nineteenth-century France. According to this longer history propagated in German circles, impressionism could include the works of Titian, Frans Hals, and Diego Velázquez, as well as ancient Roman murals and Chinese Song dynasty ink paintings. However odd this combination may now seem, the chronological and geographical expansion of impressionism was in fact proposed by well-established German-speaking historians and critics including Hermann Bahr and Werner Weisbach. Privileging evolutionary models of art-historical thinking, advocates of impressionism’s long history conceptualized it not as a period or style but as the latest permutation of an artistic problem about the painterly representation of perceptions, a problem that had been faced by artists in earlier times and other places. This approach to impressionism, transnational by its very nature, could displace France as the center of impressionism, but it certainly did not eliminate national or nationalist claims by German art writers. In fact, the long history of impressionism, as this essay argues, enabled some of its advocates to integrate contemporary German efforts into a history of modern painting dominated by French artistic standards.
Impressionism was a contentious topic in Germany from the time of its arrival in Berlin in the early 1880s. It was during this period that Carl and Felicie Bernstein, who had close connections to the Parisian art world, amassed their famous collection of French impressionist paintings, which included Édouard Manet’s White Lilacs in a Glass Vase and Claude Monet’s The Summer: Poppy Field (1875) (fig. 1).1 The Bernsteins were related to Charles Ephrussi, director of the Gazette des beaux-arts, who purchased paintings on their behalf. Ephrussi was an early supporter and avid collector (especially in the 1880s) of French impressionist paintings. On the Bernstein collection, see Barbara Paul, “Drei Sammlungen französischer impressionistischer Kunst im kaiserlichen Berlin,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 42, no. 3 (1988): 11–30; Sven Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich: Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsammlerkultur (Kiel: Ludwig, 2005), 221–31; Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, “‘Haben Sie wirklich Geld für den Dreck gegeben?’: Die Sammlung Carl und Felicie Bernstein,” in Aufbruch in die Moderne: Sammler, Mäzene und Kunsthändler in Berlin 1880–1933, ed. Anna-Dorothea Ludewig et al. (Cologne: Dumont, 2012), 90–103; and Martin Faass, “‘Haben Sie wirklich Geld für den Dreck gegeben?’—Wie der Impresssionismus nach Berlin kam,” in Max Liebermann und Frankreich, ed. Martin Faass (Berlin: Michael Imhof, 2013), 162–71. In October 1883 art dealer Fritz Gurlitt showed paintings from the Bernstein collection, along with twenty-three works from dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, in the first exhibition in Berlin of French impressionist paintings. At Gurlitt’s gallery, Berliners had the opportunity to see Manet’s Railway (fig. 2) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Young Woman at the Piano (1875/76) as well as paintings by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley.2 Nicolaas Teeuwisse, Vom Salon zur Secession: Berliner Kunstleben zwischen Tradition und Aufbruch zur Moderne 1871–1900 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1986), 107. But the German reception of these paintings, especially in the popular press, was not always favorable. Such was the case in a review of the Gurlitt exhibition by journalist and art critic Ludwig Pietsch. As a correspondent for the Vossische Zeitung, Pietsch had traveled throughout Europe since the 1860s, reporting on political and cultural matters, including art exhibitions and international fairs in Paris and Vienna.3 Manuela Lintl, “Ludwig Pietsch und Adolph Menzel,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 41 (1999): 274. He wrote that the French impressionist paintings at the Gurlitt gallery aroused the same “annoyed astonishment and laughter” as they had in Paris. Pietsch, a supporter of realist painting, especially that of his friend Adolph Menzel, dismissed the French impressionist works as lacking “everything that makes a picture a work of art and an object of pleasure for the eyes and mind.”4 Ludwig Pietsch, “Gurlitt’s Ausstellung,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 473, October 10, 1883, quoted in Teeuwisse, Vom Salon zur Secession, 107. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. On the reception of French impressionism in the German popular press, see Beth Irwin Lewis, Art for All? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). Menzel himself, according to an often-repeated anecdote first told by fellow artist Max Liebermann, asked Felicie Bernstein whether she really had “spent money on this trash.” Menzel immediately apologized for his rudeness but then continued his insult: “It is my sincere conviction that your pictures are awful.”5 Max Liebermann, “Meine Erinnerungen an die Familie Bernstein” (1908), in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922), 123–24. Liebermann himself had a large collection of French impressionist paintings. Similar opinions were voiced in art-historical circles during the 1880s. Adolf Rosenberg, for example, claimed that the impressionists depicted nature as “seen through the eye of a simple man, unrefined in cultivation.”6 Adolf Rosenberg, Geschichte der modernen Kunst (Leipzig: Grunow, 1884), 1:338.
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Description: Carl and Felicie Bernstein's Music Room by Unknown
Fig. 1. Photograph of Carl and Felicie Bernstein’s music room with paintings on the wall by Manet, Sisley, and Pissarro.
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Description: The Railway by Manet, Edouard
Fig. 2. Édouard Manet, The Railway, 1872–73. Oil on canvas, 93.3 × 111.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W. Havemeyer.
By the 1890s such dismissive positions were becoming less and less tenable, since most German art critics and historians increasingly regarded French realism and impressionism as essential currents in modern art. At this time, German museum directors, such as Hugo von Tschudi, Alfred Lichtwark, and Gustav Pauli, began purchasing French impressionist paintings for their museums’ collections.7 Peter-Klaus Schuster and Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, eds., Manet bis van Gogh: Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne (Munich: Prestel, 1996); Michael F. Zimmermann, “A Tormented Friendship: French Impressionism in Germany,” in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002), 162–82. Tschudi was a museum director in Berlin and later Munich, Lichtwark in Hamburg, and Pauli in Bremen and later Hamburg. Another indication of changing attitudes is evidenced in a short survey of modern German painting, written for the general public and published in 1902, in which author Alfred Koeppen devoted the bulk of his text to realist and impressionist trends in Germany.8 Alfred Koeppen, Die moderne Malerei in Deutschland (Bielefeld: Velhagen und Klasing, 1902). The rest of the book examines idealist painting in Germany. Impressionism also played a significant role in a large exhibition at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, the 1906 Jahrhundertausstellung deutscher Kunst (Centennial Exhibition of German Art), which surveyed German painting from 1775 to 1875. The exhibition curators, Tschudi, Lichtwark, and Woldemar von Seidlitz, selected works not for their historical importance but according to a modern aesthetic, which made impressionism “visible as the final word [Schlußwort]” in the development of nineteenth-century art, including that in Germany.9 Angelika Wesenberg, “Impressionismus und ‘Deutsche Jahrhundert-Ausstellung Berlin 1906,’” in Schuster and von Hohenzollern, Manet bis van Gogh, 364. In the introduction to the Jahrhundertausstellung catalogue, Tschudi writes that France was “the classical ground” for nineteenth-century painting, as Italy was for the Renaissance and Holland was for the painting of the seventeenth century. See Die deutsche Jahrhundertausstellung Berlin 1906 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1906), ix. On the Jahrhundertausstellung, see also Sabine Beneke, Im Blick der Moderne: Die ‘Jahrhundertausstellung deutscher Kunst (1775–1875)’ in der Berliner Nationalgalerie 1906 (Berlin: Bostelmann und Siebenhaar, 1999).
While there were many champions of impressionist painting in Germany at the turn of the century, there were many others who, with the support of Emperor Wilhelm II and members of the cultivated German middle class, continued to champion a national German style. This was defined in terms of an imaginative tradition, as exemplified by Arnold Böcklin’s classically inspired landscapes such as his Island of Life (fig. 3).10 Thomas W. Gaehtgens, “Le Cas Böcklin de Julius Meier-Graefe et les débats sur l’art moderne dans l’Empire allemand,” in De L’Allemagne: De Friedrich à Beckmann, ed. Sébastien Allard and Danièle Cohn (Paris: Hazan, 2013), 210–21. In 1905 University of Heidelberg art history professor Henry Thode defended the paintings of Böcklin, who created “from memory and from imagination,” by contrast with the impressionists, who “go outside with palette and brush to present what is fleeting in the appearance of light, without fixing anything else on the canvas and taking that for a work of art.”11 Henry Thode, Böcklin und Thoma: Acht Vorträge über neudeutsche Malerei (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1905), 138: “Daß sie [Böcklin and Thoma] nicht, wie die Impressionisten, hinausgehen mit Palette und Pinsel, um das, was flüchtig in Lichterscheinungen sich dem Auge darbietet, ohne Weiteres auf die Leinwand zu fixiren, und das so Entstandene für ein Kunstwerk halten, sondern daß sie aus dem Gedächtniß und aus der Phantasie schaffen.” Thode’s lectures were in response to Meier-Graefe’s condemnation of Böcklin in his Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1905).
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Description: The Island of Life by Böcklin, Arnold
Fig. 3. Arnold Böcklin, The Island of Life, 1882. Oil on canvas, 140 × 94 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel.
Cultural debates in Wilhelmine Germany are sometimes characterized as a conflict between liberal progressives, who treated painting as a formal language that crossed national borders, and staunch conservatives, who related it more closely to national identity, history, and memory.12 Eckhart Gillen, “German Art—National Expression or World Language? Two Visual Essays,” in Haxthausen, Two Art Histories, 97. But, as historian Carolyn Kay remarks, modernism was not “linked inexorably with the left” nor “traditional art with conservatism and nationalism.”13 Carolyn Kay, Art and the German Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and Modern Painting in Hamburg, 1886–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 25. Such alignments of cultural and political positions tend to stress a German hostility to modern art and the general resistance to liberalism in the Wilhelmine era. A more subtle reading of this period complicates the view that all supporters of avant-garde art were liberals and all detractors nationalist conservatives. The long history of impressionism also suggests a more complex narrative about the reception of modern painting in Germany. Many advocates of the long history considered modern German artists to be important contributors both to progressive artistic developments and to German nationhood.
National identity and cultural matters were inextricably linked in Wilhelmine Germany, which was marked by the pursuit of a Weltpolitik, a course to turn the nation into a world power on the political as well as the cultural stage. During the Imperial period (1871–1914), the issue of German identity, as historian Celia Applegate aptly put it, “intruded itself into every discussion about a building, a concert, or an exhibition, every production of a new opera or play.”14 Celia Applegate, “Culture and the Arts,” in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918, ed. James Retallack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 107. The writing of art history was no exception. Julius Meier-Graefe, an important and influential figure in the introduction of impressionism into Germany, began his 1907 book Impressionisten with the statement: “French art is called eo ipso the opposite of German, and there is no lack of patriots who take the supporter of this art as an enemy of the country.”15 Julius Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten: Guys, Manet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Cézanne (Munich: R. Piper, 1907), 11: “Man nennt französische Kunst eo ipso das, was der deutschen entgegengesetzt ist, und es fehlt nicht an Patrioten, die den Anhänger dieser Kunst für einen Feind des Landes halten.” While works such as Menzel’s Balcony Room and Liebermann’s Old Men’s Home in Amsterdam were seen in the light of realist and impressionist trends, German art in general continued to be classified as idealist and imaginative, as suggested in the quotation above from Thode (figs. 4, 5). In fact, it became a commonplace in turn-of-the-century German art criticism to contrast the immediacy of French painting (whether it be in terms of the object in realism or the sense perception in impressionism) with the distant and mediated art of Germany. In other words, French perceptual and German conceptual art became a key binary opposition in discussions of modern German painting. In 1911 art critic and journalist Karl Scheffler, a keen observer of contemporary artistic currents, categorized painting according to these two poles: perception (Anschauung), or “the sensual feeling for the world,” and conception (Begriff), which “reflects on the appearance and produces the idea.” The main difference between the two was that “perception paints and conception draws.”16 Karl Scheffler, Deutsche Maler und Zeichner im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Insel, 1911), 3: “Anschauung ist das sinnliche Empfinden der Welt . . . ; der Begriff aber denkt über die Erscheinung und produziert die Idee. . . . die Anschauung malt, der Begriff zeichnet.” For Scheffler, these lines of demarcation represented national differences (even if painterly and linear styles could be found in various nations at different times). “The German,” he claimed, “is by birth a man of ideas,” and German artists were correspondingly makers of a conceptual and linear “thought-art” (Gedankenkunst).17 Scheffler, Deutsche Maler und Zeichner, 7.
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Description: Reproduction of Adolph Menzel's "Balcony Room" by Unknown
Fig. 4. Adolph Menzel, Balcony Room, 1845. Oil on cardboard, 58 × 47 cm. Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Reproduced in Werner Weisbach, Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit (Berlin: G. Grote’sche, 1910–11), 2:251.
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Description: Reproduction of Max Liebermann's "Old Men's Home in Amsterdam" by Unknown
Fig. 5. Max Liebermann, Old Men’s Home in Amsterdam, 1881. Oil on canvas, 55 × 75 cm. Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt. Reproduced in Werner Weisbach, Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit (Berlin: G. Grote’sche, 1910–11), 2:268.
Even when contemporary writers made claims to transnational artistic developments such as impressionism, they tended to maintain national divisions. In a 1907 essay on the impressionist painter Liebermann, Wilhelm Bode, general director of the Prussian art collections in Berlin, wrote, “There is admittedly no longer today a national art in the sense of older times; the easy and close traffic between nations brings them together in cultural relations, in their artistic activity, and so the modern French art form, impressionism, today rules the entire art world.”18 Wilhelm Bode, “Max Liebermann zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag,” Kunst und Künstler 5 (1907): 382: “Eine nationale Kunst in dem Sinne wie in alter Zeit giebt es freilich heute nicht mehr; der leichte und enge Verkehr der Nationen unter einander nähert sie auch in geistiger Beziehung, in ihrer künstlerischen Bethätigung, und so ist die moderne französische Kunstform, der Impressionismus, heute die herrschende über die ganze Kunstwelt.” Yet Liebermann was still, for Bode, a “true German artist” in that he was “primarily a draftsman, a black-and-white artist.”19 Bode, “Max Liebermann,” 390. Discussions of Liebermann’s contribution to modern and German painting were highly charged due to the fact that he was Jewish, but they also highlighted the various claims about national characteristics that permeated the reception of impressionism in Wilhelmine Germany.20 Liebermann’s Judaism and issues of German anti-Semitism are discussed in almost every monograph on the painter. For especially insightful discussions of the issues, see Barbara Gilbert, ed., Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Peter Paret, “‘The Enemy Within’—Max Liebermann as President of the Prussian Academy of Arts,” in German Encounters with Modernism, 1840–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185–201.
As Bode makes clear, German art writers at the turn of the twentieth century faced the challenge of integrating modern German painting into a field that was dominated by French impressionism. One approach to the problem was simply to keep national divisions alive. In an essay on Liebermann’s drawings, Scheffler, following Bode’s lead, argued that the spiritual and linear quality of Liebermann’s draftsmanship “distinguishes the whole of German impressionism to a certain extent from the French.”21 Karl Scheffler, “Liebermann als Zeichner,” Kunst und Künstler 10 (1912): 345. Richard Hamann similarly set German efforts apart in his Der Impressionismus in Kunst und Leben (Impressionism in art and life), which expanded the limits of impressionism to encompass all cultural activity (painting, sculpture, music, philosophy) that reflected the fast-paced and transitory quality of contemporary life.22 Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Kunst und Leben (Cologne: M. Dumon-Schaubergschen Buchhandlung, 1907). On Hamann’s treatment of impressionism as “a diagnostic category of reflection on the period as a whole,” see Lothar Müller, “The Beauty of the Metropolis: Toward an Aesthetic Urbanism in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin,” in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43. Max Picard similarly described impressionism as “the expressive form of a time that believes nothing.” See Max Picard, Das Ende der Impressionismus (Munich: Piper, 1916), 12. He claimed that unlike French impressionists, German painters like Liebermann and Walter Leistikow “always want the expression, not only the impression.” He also declared that all forms of German contemporary culture are rooted in a Romantic past. “Romanticism,” he stated, “is Germany’s impressionism.”23 Hamann, Der Impressionismus, 317–18.
Another way to bring German art into the modernist fold was to downplay the division between French realism and German idealism by treating the binaries in relational terms, rather than as polar opposites. Liebermann, in his text Die Phantasie in der Malerei (Imagination in painting), claimed that painters such as Böcklin and Eugène Delacroix, who “never painted after nature,” were not so different from painters such as Wilhelm Leibl and Manet, who “painted every stroke after nature.” They all, he wrote, “painted from memory,” albeit in “different ways.”24 Max Liebermann, Die Phantasie in der Malerei (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916), 32: “Aber Delacroix oder Böcklin, die . . . nie nach der Natur gemalt haben, ebenso wie Manet und Leibl, die jeden Strich nach der Natur malten, haben aus dem Gedächtnis gemalt. Nur prozedierten sie auf verschiedene Weise.” Liebermann’s claims to perception and memory, as well as his pairings of French and German artists, demonstrate his support for an international modernism.25 Liebermann tended to position himself as both “cosmopolitan Weltbürger” and German patriot. See Françoise Forster-Hahn, “Max Liebermann, the Outsider as Impresario of Modernism in the Empire,” in Gilbert, Max Liebermann, 181, 191. For an important assessment of Liebermann’s cultural contributions on German and international fronts, see Marion F. Deschmukh, Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany (New York: Ashgate, 2015).
The long history of impressionism was also an approach that enabled art historians and critics to position modern German painting on the world stage. From January to February 1903, the Vienna Secession held its sixteenth exhibition, entitled Entwicklung des Impressionismus in Malerei und Plastik (The development of impressionism in painting and sculpture). The exhibition comprised precursors to the movement (from Tintoretto and Vermeer to Honoré Daumier and Adolphe Monticelli), impressionist paintings from France and other European nations (including England and Germany), Japanese prints, and post-impressionist developments (Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, and others).26Entwicklung des Impressionismus in Malerei u. Plastik. XVI. Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession Wien (Vienna: Secession, 1903). The title of the exhibition echoes Julius Meier-Graefe’s Entwicklungsgeschichte der moderne Kunst, which appeared the following year. According to Kenworth Moffett, the Secessionist exhibition shows the “guiding hand of Meier-Graefe,” who was one of the exhibition’s advisors, according to the catalogue. See Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel, 1973), 169. According to the exhibition catalogue, singular attempts at impressionism could be discerned as far back as the Gothic and Renaissance periods. That the exhibition aimed to show that impressionism was no longer a term of abuse (Schimpfwort) but “something self-evident, [something] historical” was not lost on contemporaries.27 Entwicklung des Impressionismus, 14–16. In an essay on impressionism published in January 1903, Viennese art critic Hermann Bahr wrote that “cultivated” people knew that contemporary art was dominated by impressionism, but they must certainly have been confused by the Secession’s pairing of the old and new. What do these “pure and finely painted works” have in common with “those wild and confused, spotted ones?” Bahr even thought that many visitors to the exhibition would consider such comparisons a joke.28 Hermann Bahr, “Impressionismus,” in Essays (Leipzig: Insel, 1912), 163: “Der ‘Gebildete’ weiß, daß die Entwicklung unserer Kunst vom Impressionismus beherrscht wird.” Bahr, “Impressionismus”: “Was machen die hier, in einer Ausstellung des Impressionismus? Was haben ihre rein und fein gemalten Werke mit jenen wild und wirr gefleckten zu tun? . . . Was ist das also wieder für ein Witz?” For another review of the Secessionist exhibition, see Emil Heilbut, “Die Impressionistenausstellung der Wiener Secession,” Kunst und Künstler 1 (1903): 169–207. He went on to explain, however, that impressionists were in fact part of a long line of painters who displayed a childlike trust of the senses over the mind in their perception of the world around them. The essence of impressionism, he argued, extended to the Renaissance. (He also suggested it went back to antiquity.) The technique used by the impressionists in the current day, Bahr claimed, was not as novel as one might think: “Delacroix already knew about it, and he came to it by way of Correggio.”29 Bahr, “Impressionismus,” 169: “Das ist das Wesen des Impressionismus, welches in der Tat bis in die Renaissance reicht (ich muß mir vorbehalten, ein anderesmal gelegentlich darzulegen, was ich auch schon an der Antike impressionistisch finde). Auch die Technik, deren sich die Impressionisten heute bedienen, ist nicht so neu, als man glaubt. Delacroix hat von ihr schon gewußt, und er ist auf sie durch den Correggio gekommen.”
Bahr paid special attention to Delacroix and Correggio in his lineage of impressionism, but Velázquez was the old master most often aligned with the movement. In his 1888 monograph on the Spanish painter, Carl Justi offered what Jonathan Brown has described as the impressionistic reading of Las Meninas; Justi cited Friedrich von Waagen’s comparison of Velázquez’s painting to an image from a camera obscura, and William Stirling’s claim that it anticipated the invention of Louis Daguerre.30 Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert, 2nd rev. ed. (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1903), 2:297; Jonathan Brown, “On the Meaning of Las Meninas,” in Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 88. Justi, moreover, compared Velázquez’s landscape backgrounds to plein-air painting (Freilichtmalerei) in the way they accurately depict how nature is observed. He also wrote that the artist worked from “the overview of the total impression” and “the optical feeling of the moment.”31 Justi, Diego Velazquez, 2:218. R. A. M. Stevenson, in his 1895 monograph on the painter (German translation in 1904), similarly devoted a chapter to “The Lesson of Impressionism,” writing of Velázquez’s “impressionistic compositions” and his “impressionistic way of seeing.”32 R. A. M. Stevenson, The Art of Velasquez (London: Bell, 1895), 52, 64. For the German edition, see R. A. M. Stevenson, Velazquez, trans. Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen (Munich: Bruckmann, 1904), 91, 103. Liebermann, who, like Manet, was a keen student of the Spanish painter, wrote that Velázquez, like a modern impressionist, painted “simply what he saw.”33 Liebermann, Phantasie, 49. Liebermann copied the head of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. The copy hangs on the wall in Liebermann’s The Artist’s Atelier (1902), which itself is an homage to Velázquez’s Las Meninas. See Mitchell B. Frank, “Painterly Thought: Max Liebermann and the Idea in Art,” Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACAR) 37, no. 2 (2012): 51–54. On the often-cited connections between Velázquez and Manet, see Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre, eds., Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Appealing to the authority of old masters to justify modern painting was not singular to the German-speaking world. In late nineteenth-century France, impressionist paintings were sometimes compared to and juxtaposed with the work of old masters, such as at the 1890 exhibition of the Ernest May collection at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. The exhibition suggested that French impressionism was being admitted into the canon of art history.34 Michael Clarke, “Impressions of Old Masters,” in Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past, ed. Ann Dumas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 175. In Germany, however, the tendency to expand the domain of impressionism to Velázquez and others was often seen through an explicitly evolutionary lens, an approach most evident in Werner Weisbach’s two-volume Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit (1910–11; Impressionism: A problem of painting in antiquity and modern times). Now better remembered for his writing on the Baroque, Weisbach has been little discussed in the literature on impressionism compared with a figure such as Meier-Graefe. Weisbach’s book, however, was the culminating achievement in the project of constructing the long history of impressionism in Germany due to its methodical approach to the subject. Compared to Meier-Graefe’s overtly subjective form of historiography, Weisbach’s more systematic method lays bare many of the unspoken assumptions that motivated the long history of impressionism.35 On Meier-Graefe’s historiographical style, see Patricia G. Berman, “The Invention of History: Julius Meier-Graefe, German Modernism, and the Genealogy of Genius,” in Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889–1910, ed. Françoise Forster-Hahn (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 97.
Weisbach completed his study of impressionism from antiquity to the present day early in his career, when he was living in Berlin and associated with Secessionist artists such as Liebermann and Leistikow.36 Werner Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben”: Erinnerungern aus der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna: Herbert Reichner, 1937), 156. Weisbach, who was born Jewish and converted to Protestantism for religious reasons, wrote these memoirs in Basel, Switzerland, where he had immigrated in 1933. Weisbach had begun studying impressionism seriously in 1898 on a trip to Paris, where he saw the recently installed Gustave Caillebotte collection in the Musée du Luxembourg and met Meier-Graefe, who had moved to the French capital a few years earlier.37 Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben,” 283–85. He was also acquainted with the Bernstein collection through frequent visits to Felicie Bernstein’s Berlin salons in the late 1890s.38 Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben,” 370–77. Weisbach sympathized with the challenges facing Berlin Secessionists such as Liebermann and Leistikow, who both pursued an impressionist style in Wilhelmine Germany. Later in life, he wrote that it was particularly difficult for modern art “to win recognition, because it found in Wilhelm II a bitter adversary.”39 Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben,” 296–97: “In Berlin hatte es die moderne Kunst besonders schwer, sich durchzusetzen, weil sie in Wilhelm II. einen erbitterten Gegner fand und sich den größten Hemmnissen gegenübersah.”
Weisbach believed that impressionism should not be treated as a period style (Zeitstil), like the Gothic or Baroque. Citing his teacher Heinrich Wölfflin, he claimed that period styles only surfaced “where a strong feeling is alive for a certain kind of physical existence. Our time lacks this feeling altogether.”40 Werner Weisbach, Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit (Berlin: G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1910–11), 2:292. Weisbach is quoting Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 3rd ed. (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), 57. He instead treated impressionism as an artistic problem and as an attempt to account for “unstable appearances with special technical means.” This problem had over time “found many solutions,” from prehistoric cave painting to the works of German painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, Menzel, and Liebermann. Style, it should be noted, plays no role in Weisbach’s history of impressionism. The historical epoch might influence the style or mood of a painting, but the impressionist problem “lies as something essential in an ideal sphere, where temporal differences become irrelevant.”41 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:290: “Das künstlerische Problem liegt als etwas Wesenhaftes in einer idealen Sphäre, wo Zeitdifferenzen irrelevant werden.” Weisbach here clarified his central theoretical position: by treating impressionism ahistorically and diachronically, he claimed to be writing an evolutionary history of the technical or formal solutions to the impressionist problem.
The artists Weisbach studied were, for the most part, the usual suspects. Leonardo “is for the Renaissance the founder of the impressionist sketch,” while Titian, “the true founder of modern painting, initiated a colouristic impressionism.” Velázquez was “an Impressionist in the catching of a momentary expression.” Constable’s studies, too, were thoroughly impressionist, and the color of Turner’s water was “only surpassed by modern impressionism.” French nineteenth-century impressionism thus appeared, according to Weisbach, as “the last consequence of previous coloristic endeavors.”42 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1: 59–60; 1:69; 1:104; 2:44; 2:52; 2:68.
Weisbach also made claims to other, more unexpected types of impressionisms. An ancient Roman wall painting depicting an underworld scene from the Odyssey could be counted as impressionist in that the artist used not only a painterly style “to reproduce appearances by the abbreviated fixing of the essential effects” but also free brushstrokes to achieve arresting illusions.43 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1:18: “Es ist ein malerischer Stil, der die Erscheinungen durch abbreviatorische Fixierung der wesentlichen Wirkungsfaktoren wiederzugeben trachtet. Der Künstler bedient sich des freien Pinselstrichs, er setzt Farbenflecke als Valeurs auf, um möglichst starke illusionistische Wirkungen zu erzielen.” Moreover, Chinese Song dynasty artists, through the clarity of their perception, developed in their monochrome landscapes “an impressionist technique.”44 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:12. A landscape by Ma Yuan, for example, brought together “an illusionistic impressionism” and stylization (fig. 6). It did not, however, capture “a uniform viewpoint.” Instead, the painter conceives motifs as single impressions, which are joined together.45 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:12. Weisbach further set apart East Asian impressionism when he noted that it is characterized by the anecdote and that the works are not executed directly in front of nature. Rather, the artist piles up “memory images” in the imagination to reproduce “the momentary experience.”46 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:22–24: “Die Ausführung erfolgt nicht unmittelbar vor der Natur. Erinnerungsbilder werden in der Phantasie aufgestapelt. Die Übung besteht darin, der Hand eine solche Fertigkeit, dem Pinsel eine solche Aktionsfähigkeit zu geben, daß die Impression in der ganzen Stärke des momentanen Erlebnisses reproduziert wird.”
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Description: Reproduction of Ma Juan's "Gentleman Viewing the Room, Gentleman Viewing the...
Fig. 6. Ma Juan, Gentleman Viewing the Room, Gentleman Viewing the Moon, 13th century. Hanging scroll, ink, and light color on silk, 57.3 × 26.5 cm. Moa Museum of Art, Atami. Reproduced in Werner Weisbach, Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit (Berlin: G. Grote’sche, 1910–11), 2:16.
Weisbach’s history of impressionism may seem byzantine in its coverage from ancient Roman murals to Monet, from Europe to East Asia, and in its inclusion of painters who work from sense-impression, memory, and imagination. But Weisbach, adhering to Wölfflin’s formalist and systematic art-historical practice (Kunstwissenschaft), was perfectly methodical and self-reflective in the way he constructed his history.47 Wölfflin’s method of formal analysis, a system of classification based upon what he considered objective principles (for example, linear versus painterly), was extremely influential in art history’s development in the twentieth century. He was keenly aware of the fact that impressionism was a late nineteenth-century label, and that his tracing of the impressionist problem in its “transformations with different peoples” amounted to “an abstraction.” It was as much a history of the painterly or, as he preferred, the “coloristic.”48 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1:7; 1:4. He also recognized that culture does not necessarily develop teleologically: one cannot “predict for impressionist painting any advancement or progress according to a law.” Present-day art and culture, he argued, may appear as “the end of a series,” but later epochs might see it entirely differently.49 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:304: “Es wurde darauf hingewiesen, daß Kultur kein Komplex mit eindeutiger Entwicklungsrichtung ist, die der Historiker gleichsam nur abzulesen braucht.” Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:305: “Man kann daher auch nicht für die impressionistische Malerei irgendeinen gesetzlichen Verlauf oder Fortschritt vorweisen. . . . Während uns Heutigen unsere Kultur und Kunst als Ende einer Reihe erscheint, werden sie spätere Epochen in ganz anderer Weise ansehen.” Weisbach was thus quite careful in the way he presented a developmental or evolutionary history of an artistic problem culminating in French impressionist painting. “Art history,” he wrote, “can only use evolutionary principles of progress with caution and under certain conditions.” One such condition was that the development is deemed to have come to an end: one could only consider a historical development in teleological terms “when the striving for a goal is recognized as realized and attained.” Secondly, one would have to avoid discussing artistic value in terms of progress, because great artistic creations were individual and thus incommensurable. But progress, he assured his readers, could be demonstrated with technical (that is, formal) evidence: “As far as art is technical, one can calculate progress.”50 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:304: “Die Kunstwissenschaft kann das entwicklungsgeschichtliche Fortschrittsprinzip nur sehr mit Vorsicht und unter gewissen Voraussetzungen anwenden. . . . Teleologisch kann eine geschichtliche Betrachtung nur sein, wo Zielstrebungen als verwirklicht und erreicht zu erkennen sind. . . . Große künstlerische Schöpfungen sind individuelle Leistungen, die durch keinen Fortschritt zu überholen sind. . . . Fortschritte lassen sich auf technischem und materiellem Gebiete mit Evidenz aufzeigen. Soweit die Kunst technisch ist, kann man ihr Fortschritte nachrechnen.”
Evolutionary thinking, it should be noted, was not uncommon in German art-historical writing. One can find it in earlier texts by Gottfried Semper, Wölfflin, and others.51 Mitchell B. Frank, “Recapitulation and Evolutionism in German Artwriting,” in German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism, ed. Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 97–116. Meier-Graefe’s Entwicklungsgeschichte der moderne Kunst (1904; The developmental history of modern art; published in English as Modern Art) is an important statement in this context. Through a representation of artistic developments as natural and inevitable, Meier-Graefe helped establish the canon of French modernist painting.52 Jenny Anger, “Courbet, the Decorative, and the Canon: Rewriting and Rereading Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 157–77. Meier-Graefe’s influential approach has also been described as a “genealogy of genius.” See Berman, “Invention of History.” His evolutionary approach is evident in his use of the metaphor of a tree, a common image in evolutionary biology, to plot modern art’s development from Rubens to the French impressionists.53 Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffman, 1904), 1:51. He also took for granted the division between French/perceptual and German/conceptual art. German painters such as Alfred Rethel, Menzel, and Moritz Schwind were “real Germans; there is not an atom of foreign blood in them: they are draftsmen.”54 Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 1:71–72: “Es sind echte Deutsche, es ist nicht das Atom fremden Bluts in ihnen: sie sind Zeichner.” What becomes evident in Meier-Graefe’s text is that an evolutionary history could only be written about painting based on sense perception; only realist art had a developmental history that could be traced. Meier-Graefe claimed that the “essential” artistic current of his day was the French realist tradition, as exemplified in the work of Manet, whose paintings did not demonstrate “an idea, a theory” but were unified organisms. Modern German conceptual art, on the other hand, had no such evolutionary trajectory for Meier-Graefe: tendencies arose arbitrarily and all attempts to form a national school failed due to a lack of well-defined goals. Dominated by “great solitaries,” such as Philipp Otto Runge and Hans von Marées, Germany’s art history, Meier-Graefe concluded, was only “a chain of accidents.”55 Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 2:704: “Deutschlands Kunstgeschichte dagegen ist eine Kette von Zufällen. Alle Versuche, eine Schule zu bilden, versagten an dem Mangel an unzweideutigen Zwecken.” He confirmed this position in his Impressionisten, in which he claimed that the significance of French art lay in the “demand for progress.”56 Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 26. Liebermann wrote something similar in a letter to Hamburg Kunsthalle Director Alfred Lichtwark, in which he contrasted the works of Velázquez and Rembrandt with German art, which was driven by “thoughts, poetry, and even philosophy.” For Liebermann, “developments in painting . . . [could] only lie on the side of impressionism: this [was] proven by art history and by the history of Rembrandt or Velázquez.”57 Max Liebermann to Alfred Lichtwark, December 10, 1902, in Der Briefwechsel zwischen Alfred Lichtwark und Max Liebermann, ed. Birgit Pflugmacher (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 143: “Die einzige Entwicklung der Malerei . . . kann nur noch der Seite des Impressionismus liegen: das beweist, die Kunstgeschichte u[nd] die Geschichte Rembrandts oder Velasquez’s. Deutschland aber verlangt von der Malerei—Gedanken, Poesie ja sogar Philosophie.”
In Weisbach’s long history of impressionism, national categories were still present (his chapter organization is, for the most part, by nation), but his treatment of the evolution of the impressionist problem was not fraught with national hierarchies. Unlike Meier-Graefe’s combative text, Weisbach’s situates cultural achievements across national boundaries comfortably within an evolutionary paradigm. In the case of German artists, he wrote: “It would be entirely wrong, if we were to judge the German situation by French standards. In certain great tracts the development is parallel. But each phase has its own special nuances in both countries.”58 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:233. Weisbach’s even-tempered tone, as compared to Meier-Graefe’s strong rhetoric, and his careful methodology illustrate how he approached the impressionist problem from what he considered an objective stance. He staked a claim to historical distance by maintaining, as has been discussed elsewhere in this essay, that a past phenomenon can only be understood after it has come to an end. Furthermore, he believed that he had eliminated to a great degree the historian’s bias by restricting his inquiry to technical matters (supported by evidence he deemed accessible to all) and by avoiding what was so evident in Meier-Graefe’s writing—subjective and idiosyncratic judgments about artistic value.59 On historical distance, see Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). On objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007). Weisbach’s positioning of himself as the detached observer and Meier-Graefe as the engaged critic demonstrate how similar developmental histories of modern art could be argued from different perspectives. Weisbach’s text, however, clarifies what Meier-Graefe never addresses: the methodological assumptions in charting the evolution of impressionism in terms of technical or formal developments. Moreover, through principles of Kunstwissenschaft, Weisbach leveled the playing field in terms of national hierarchies: French efforts need not be prioritized.
If, as Weisbach claimed, art-historical developments could only be traced after they were completed, then modern impressionism was the end of an artistic enquiry that, in his words, “[strove] after the highest illusionistic realization of momentary appearances.”60 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1:4. It had become something “historical,” as the catalogue to the 1903 Impressionist Exhibition in Vienna claimed. For Weisbach the naming of impressionism seems also to have been its death knell. When an artistic treatment “[fell] into the extreme,” he wrote, the essence of the problem became “overstated and ever more one-sided,” and it was finally “swept away.” In modern impressionism, “the optical-color element” was so unilaterally favored that it became merged into “a mere color intoxication.”61 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:306: “Der moderne Impressionismus als optischer Pleinairismus richtet sein Hauptaugenmerk auf die Farbenbeziehungen der Erscheinungen. . . . Indem der moderne Impressionismus das optisch-farbige Element einseitig bevorzugte und anderes darüber vernachlässigte, ging er aber schließlich in einem bloßen Farbenrausch auf.” In recent times, however—especially in Germany—attempts had been made, Weisbach argued, to redress this imbalance. The final ten pages of his text (before the conclusion) were devoted to Hans von Marées, who “tried to solve the division between coloristic Impressionism and constructive form through a new stylistic synthesis.”62 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:277: “In Deutschland hat eine Persönlichkeit . . . den Zwiespalt zwischen farbiger Impression und konstruktiver Form durch eine neue Stilsynthese zu lösen gesucht: Hans von Marees.” It was not uncommon at this time to describe Marées, Böcklin, Max Klinger, and other German neo-idealists, as they were often called, in terms of this dialectic, as synthesizing, in different ways, realist and idealist tendencies. Through this synthesis, Weisbach suggested, Marées’s artistic program, which was “notably relevant” at this time, resolved an essential dichotomy of nineteenth-century painting “between determination of form and optical appearance.”63 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:286. Weisbach also saw Marées in national terms, as bringing together the “two great tendencies,” classicism and realism, of German art, which began to emerge at the turn of the nineteenth century. Weisbach was wary to predict the historical importance of the Marées “cult,” because modern impressionism was not “the final result of a national process of development.”64 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:286: “Das, was das eigentliche Wesen des modernen Impressionismus ausmacht, ergibt sich aber bei uns nicht als End- und Gesamtresultat eines nationalen Entwicklungsprozesses.” His treatment of Marées, however, does demonstrate how impressionism could be regarded more as a transnational phenomenon than a stylistic movement linked inexorably to France.
Weisbach’s book thereby acts as an extreme example of the long history of impressionism. Yet other writers, such as Bahr, Liebermann, and Meier-Graefe, shared this interest in weaving French impressionism into longer lineages of painterly production. Constructed through teleological, dialectical, and evolutionary arguments, the long history of impressionism ranked perceptual practices over conceptual concerns. As such, it tended to privilege French painting, as Meier-Graefe’s writings demonstrate. But for others, such as Liebermann and Weisbach, understanding painting as a creative process that involved the artist’s mediation, an idea often connected to the conceptual art of Germany, was never completely abandoned. As Weisbach put it: “Impressionist representation takes for granted a special organization of imagination and memory.”65 Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:294: “Impressionistische Darstellung setzt eine besondere Organisation von Phantasie und Gedächtnis voraus.” Indeed, the long history of impressionism, as an artistic problem tackled by artists from many nations, could be told without France at its center and with modern Germany as a significant player.
 
1      The Bernsteins were related to Charles Ephrussi, director of the Gazette des beaux-arts, who purchased paintings on their behalf. Ephrussi was an early supporter and avid collector (especially in the 1880s) of French impressionist paintings. On the Bernstein collection, see Barbara Paul, “Drei Sammlungen französischer impressionistischer Kunst im kaiserlichen Berlin,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 42, no. 3 (1988): 11–30; Sven Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich: Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsammlerkultur (Kiel: Ludwig, 2005), 221–31; Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, “‘Haben Sie wirklich Geld für den Dreck gegeben?’: Die Sammlung Carl und Felicie Bernstein,” in Aufbruch in die Moderne: Sammler, Mäzene und Kunsthändler in Berlin 1880–1933, ed. Anna-Dorothea Ludewig et al. (Cologne: Dumont, 2012), 90–103; and Martin Faass, “‘Haben Sie wirklich Geld für den Dreck gegeben?’—Wie der Impresssionismus nach Berlin kam,” in Max Liebermann und Frankreich, ed. Martin Faass (Berlin: Michael Imhof, 2013), 162–71. »
2      Nicolaas Teeuwisse, Vom Salon zur Secession: Berliner Kunstleben zwischen Tradition und Aufbruch zur Moderne 1871–1900 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1986), 107. »
3      Manuela Lintl, “Ludwig Pietsch und Adolph Menzel,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 41 (1999): 274. »
4      Ludwig Pietsch, “Gurlitt’s Ausstellung,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 473, October 10, 1883, quoted in Teeuwisse, Vom Salon zur Secession, 107. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. On the reception of French impressionism in the German popular press, see Beth Irwin Lewis, Art for All? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). »
5      Max Liebermann, “Meine Erinnerungen an die Familie Bernstein” (1908), in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922), 123–24. Liebermann himself had a large collection of French impressionist paintings. »
6      Adolf Rosenberg, Geschichte der modernen Kunst (Leipzig: Grunow, 1884), 1:338. »
7      Peter-Klaus Schuster and Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, eds., Manet bis van Gogh: Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne (Munich: Prestel, 1996); Michael F. Zimmermann, “A Tormented Friendship: French Impressionism in Germany,” in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002), 162–82. Tschudi was a museum director in Berlin and later Munich, Lichtwark in Hamburg, and Pauli in Bremen and later Hamburg. »
8      Alfred Koeppen, Die moderne Malerei in Deutschland (Bielefeld: Velhagen und Klasing, 1902). The rest of the book examines idealist painting in Germany. »
9      Angelika Wesenberg, “Impressionismus und ‘Deutsche Jahrhundert-Ausstellung Berlin 1906,’” in Schuster and von Hohenzollern, Manet bis van Gogh, 364. In the introduction to the Jahrhundertausstellung catalogue, Tschudi writes that France was “the classical ground” for nineteenth-century painting, as Italy was for the Renaissance and Holland was for the painting of the seventeenth century. See Die deutsche Jahrhundertausstellung Berlin 1906 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1906), ix. On the Jahrhundertausstellung, see also Sabine Beneke, Im Blick der Moderne: Die ‘Jahrhundertausstellung deutscher Kunst (1775–1875)’ in der Berliner Nationalgalerie 1906 (Berlin: Bostelmann und Siebenhaar, 1999). »
10      Thomas W. Gaehtgens, “Le Cas Böcklin de Julius Meier-Graefe et les débats sur l’art moderne dans l’Empire allemand,” in De L’Allemagne: De Friedrich à Beckmann, ed. Sébastien Allard and Danièle Cohn (Paris: Hazan, 2013), 210–21. »
11      Henry Thode, Böcklin und Thoma: Acht Vorträge über neudeutsche Malerei (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1905), 138: “Daß sie [Böcklin and Thoma] nicht, wie die Impressionisten, hinausgehen mit Palette und Pinsel, um das, was flüchtig in Lichterscheinungen sich dem Auge darbietet, ohne Weiteres auf die Leinwand zu fixiren, und das so Entstandene für ein Kunstwerk halten, sondern daß sie aus dem Gedächtniß und aus der Phantasie schaffen.” Thode’s lectures were in response to Meier-Graefe’s condemnation of Böcklin in his Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1905). »
12      Eckhart Gillen, “German Art—National Expression or World Language? Two Visual Essays,” in Haxthausen, Two Art Histories, 97. »
13      Carolyn Kay, Art and the German Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and Modern Painting in Hamburg, 1886–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 25. »
14      Celia Applegate, “Culture and the Arts,” in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918, ed. James Retallack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 107. »
15      Julius Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten: Guys, Manet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Cézanne (Munich: R. Piper, 1907), 11: “Man nennt französische Kunst eo ipso das, was der deutschen entgegengesetzt ist, und es fehlt nicht an Patrioten, die den Anhänger dieser Kunst für einen Feind des Landes halten.” »
16      Karl Scheffler, Deutsche Maler und Zeichner im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Insel, 1911), 3: “Anschauung ist das sinnliche Empfinden der Welt . . . ; der Begriff aber denkt über die Erscheinung und produziert die Idee. . . . die Anschauung malt, der Begriff zeichnet.” »
17      Scheffler, Deutsche Maler und Zeichner, 7. »
18      Wilhelm Bode, “Max Liebermann zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag,” Kunst und Künstler 5 (1907): 382: “Eine nationale Kunst in dem Sinne wie in alter Zeit giebt es freilich heute nicht mehr; der leichte und enge Verkehr der Nationen unter einander nähert sie auch in geistiger Beziehung, in ihrer künstlerischen Bethätigung, und so ist die moderne französische Kunstform, der Impressionismus, heute die herrschende über die ganze Kunstwelt.” »
19      Bode, “Max Liebermann,” 390. »
20      Liebermann’s Judaism and issues of German anti-Semitism are discussed in almost every monograph on the painter. For especially insightful discussions of the issues, see Barbara Gilbert, ed., Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Peter Paret, “‘The Enemy Within’—Max Liebermann as President of the Prussian Academy of Arts,” in German Encounters with Modernism, 1840–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185–201. »
21      Karl Scheffler, “Liebermann als Zeichner,” Kunst und Künstler 10 (1912): 345. »
22      Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Kunst und Leben (Cologne: M. Dumon-Schaubergschen Buchhandlung, 1907). On Hamann’s treatment of impressionism as “a diagnostic category of reflection on the period as a whole,” see Lothar Müller, “The Beauty of the Metropolis: Toward an Aesthetic Urbanism in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin,” in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43. Max Picard similarly described impressionism as “the expressive form of a time that believes nothing.” See Max Picard, Das Ende der Impressionismus (Munich: Piper, 1916), 12. »
23      Hamann, Der Impressionismus, 317–18. »
24      Max Liebermann, Die Phantasie in der Malerei (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916), 32: “Aber Delacroix oder Böcklin, die . . . nie nach der Natur gemalt haben, ebenso wie Manet und Leibl, die jeden Strich nach der Natur malten, haben aus dem Gedächtnis gemalt. Nur prozedierten sie auf verschiedene Weise.” »
25      Liebermann tended to position himself as both “cosmopolitan Weltbürger” and German patriot. See Françoise Forster-Hahn, “Max Liebermann, the Outsider as Impresario of Modernism in the Empire,” in Gilbert, Max Liebermann, 181, 191. For an important assessment of Liebermann’s cultural contributions on German and international fronts, see Marion F. Deschmukh, Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany (New York: Ashgate, 2015). »
26     Entwicklung des Impressionismus in Malerei u. Plastik. XVI. Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession Wien (Vienna: Secession, 1903). The title of the exhibition echoes Julius Meier-Graefe’s Entwicklungsgeschichte der moderne Kunst, which appeared the following year. According to Kenworth Moffett, the Secessionist exhibition shows the “guiding hand of Meier-Graefe,” who was one of the exhibition’s advisors, according to the catalogue. See Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel, 1973), 169. »
27      Entwicklung des Impressionismus, 14–16. »
28      Hermann Bahr, “Impressionismus,” in Essays (Leipzig: Insel, 1912), 163: “Der ‘Gebildete’ weiß, daß die Entwicklung unserer Kunst vom Impressionismus beherrscht wird.” Bahr, “Impressionismus”: “Was machen die hier, in einer Ausstellung des Impressionismus? Was haben ihre rein und fein gemalten Werke mit jenen wild und wirr gefleckten zu tun? . . . Was ist das also wieder für ein Witz?” For another review of the Secessionist exhibition, see Emil Heilbut, “Die Impressionistenausstellung der Wiener Secession,” Kunst und Künstler 1 (1903): 169–207. »
29      Bahr, “Impressionismus,” 169: “Das ist das Wesen des Impressionismus, welches in der Tat bis in die Renaissance reicht (ich muß mir vorbehalten, ein anderesmal gelegentlich darzulegen, was ich auch schon an der Antike impressionistisch finde). Auch die Technik, deren sich die Impressionisten heute bedienen, ist nicht so neu, als man glaubt. Delacroix hat von ihr schon gewußt, und er ist auf sie durch den Correggio gekommen.” »
30      Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert, 2nd rev. ed. (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1903), 2:297; Jonathan Brown, “On the Meaning of Las Meninas,” in Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 88. »
31      Justi, Diego Velazquez, 2:218. »
32      R. A. M. Stevenson, The Art of Velasquez (London: Bell, 1895), 52, 64. For the German edition, see R. A. M. Stevenson, Velazquez, trans. Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen (Munich: Bruckmann, 1904), 91, 103. »
33      Liebermann, Phantasie, 49. Liebermann copied the head of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. The copy hangs on the wall in Liebermann’s The Artist’s Atelier (1902), which itself is an homage to Velázquez’s Las Meninas. See Mitchell B. Frank, “Painterly Thought: Max Liebermann and the Idea in Art,” Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACAR) 37, no. 2 (2012): 51–54. On the often-cited connections between Velázquez and Manet, see Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre, eds., Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). »
34      Michael Clarke, “Impressions of Old Masters,” in Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past, ed. Ann Dumas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 175. »
35      On Meier-Graefe’s historiographical style, see Patricia G. Berman, “The Invention of History: Julius Meier-Graefe, German Modernism, and the Genealogy of Genius,” in Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889–1910, ed. Françoise Forster-Hahn (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 97. »
36      Werner Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben”: Erinnerungern aus der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna: Herbert Reichner, 1937), 156. Weisbach, who was born Jewish and converted to Protestantism for religious reasons, wrote these memoirs in Basel, Switzerland, where he had immigrated in 1933. »
37      Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben,” 283–85. »
38      Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben,” 370–77. »
39      Weisbach, “Und alles ist zerstoben,” 296–97: “In Berlin hatte es die moderne Kunst besonders schwer, sich durchzusetzen, weil sie in Wilhelm II. einen erbitterten Gegner fand und sich den größten Hemmnissen gegenübersah.” »
40      Werner Weisbach, Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit (Berlin: G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1910–11), 2:292. Weisbach is quoting Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 3rd ed. (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), 57. »
41      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:290: “Das künstlerische Problem liegt als etwas Wesenhaftes in einer idealen Sphäre, wo Zeitdifferenzen irrelevant werden.” »
42      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1: 59–60; 1:69; 1:104; 2:44; 2:52; 2:68. »
43      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1:18: “Es ist ein malerischer Stil, der die Erscheinungen durch abbreviatorische Fixierung der wesentlichen Wirkungsfaktoren wiederzugeben trachtet. Der Künstler bedient sich des freien Pinselstrichs, er setzt Farbenflecke als Valeurs auf, um möglichst starke illusionistische Wirkungen zu erzielen.” »
44      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:12. »
45      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:12. »
46      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:22–24: “Die Ausführung erfolgt nicht unmittelbar vor der Natur. Erinnerungsbilder werden in der Phantasie aufgestapelt. Die Übung besteht darin, der Hand eine solche Fertigkeit, dem Pinsel eine solche Aktionsfähigkeit zu geben, daß die Impression in der ganzen Stärke des momentanen Erlebnisses reproduziert wird.” »
47      Wölfflin’s method of formal analysis, a system of classification based upon what he considered objective principles (for example, linear versus painterly), was extremely influential in art history’s development in the twentieth century. »
48      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1:7; 1:4. »
49      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:304: “Es wurde darauf hingewiesen, daß Kultur kein Komplex mit eindeutiger Entwicklungsrichtung ist, die der Historiker gleichsam nur abzulesen braucht.” Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:305: “Man kann daher auch nicht für die impressionistische Malerei irgendeinen gesetzlichen Verlauf oder Fortschritt vorweisen. . . . Während uns Heutigen unsere Kultur und Kunst als Ende einer Reihe erscheint, werden sie spätere Epochen in ganz anderer Weise ansehen.” »
50      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:304: “Die Kunstwissenschaft kann das entwicklungsgeschichtliche Fortschrittsprinzip nur sehr mit Vorsicht und unter gewissen Voraussetzungen anwenden. . . . Teleologisch kann eine geschichtliche Betrachtung nur sein, wo Zielstrebungen als verwirklicht und erreicht zu erkennen sind. . . . Große künstlerische Schöpfungen sind individuelle Leistungen, die durch keinen Fortschritt zu überholen sind. . . . Fortschritte lassen sich auf technischem und materiellem Gebiete mit Evidenz aufzeigen. Soweit die Kunst technisch ist, kann man ihr Fortschritte nachrechnen.” »
51      Mitchell B. Frank, “Recapitulation and Evolutionism in German Artwriting,” in German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism, ed. Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 97–116. »
52      Jenny Anger, “Courbet, the Decorative, and the Canon: Rewriting and Rereading Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 157–77. Meier-Graefe’s influential approach has also been described as a “genealogy of genius.” See Berman, “Invention of History.” »
53      Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffman, 1904), 1:51. »
54      Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 1:71–72: “Es sind echte Deutsche, es ist nicht das Atom fremden Bluts in ihnen: sie sind Zeichner.” »
55      Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 2:704: “Deutschlands Kunstgeschichte dagegen ist eine Kette von Zufällen. Alle Versuche, eine Schule zu bilden, versagten an dem Mangel an unzweideutigen Zwecken.” »
56      Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 26. »
57      Max Liebermann to Alfred Lichtwark, December 10, 1902, in Der Briefwechsel zwischen Alfred Lichtwark und Max Liebermann, ed. Birgit Pflugmacher (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 143: “Die einzige Entwicklung der Malerei . . . kann nur noch der Seite des Impressionismus liegen: das beweist, die Kunstgeschichte u[nd] die Geschichte Rembrandts oder Velasquez’s. Deutschland aber verlangt von der Malerei—Gedanken, Poesie ja sogar Philosophie.” »
58      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:233. »
59      On historical distance, see Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). On objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007). »
60      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 1:4. »
61      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:306: “Der moderne Impressionismus als optischer Pleinairismus richtet sein Hauptaugenmerk auf die Farbenbeziehungen der Erscheinungen. . . . Indem der moderne Impressionismus das optisch-farbige Element einseitig bevorzugte und anderes darüber vernachlässigte, ging er aber schließlich in einem bloßen Farbenrausch auf.” »
62      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:277: “In Deutschland hat eine Persönlichkeit . . . den Zwiespalt zwischen farbiger Impression und konstruktiver Form durch eine neue Stilsynthese zu lösen gesucht: Hans von Marees.” »
63      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:286. »
64      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:286: “Das, was das eigentliche Wesen des modernen Impressionismus ausmacht, ergibt sich aber bei uns nicht als End- und Gesamtresultat eines nationalen Entwicklungsprozesses.” »
65      Weisbach, Impressionismus, 2:294: “Impressionistische Darstellung setzt eine besondere Organisation von Phantasie und Gedächtnis voraus.” »
6. The Long History of Impressionism in Germany
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