Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ on the Kaiser’s favourites. Artists like Max Reinhardt struggled on, producing works by Wedekind and Shaw and Chekhov at the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele and even opening his famous Grosse Schauspielhaus before the collapse of the empire. But despite their increasing appeal the works would only become ‘acceptable’ after the First World War.⁹⁶

      William was as disgusted by contemporary art as he was by the new theatre. Like many of his contemporaries he had been influenced by the eighteenth-century interpretation of Greek culture which assumed that there was such a thing as an absolute artistic ideal.⁹⁷ All forms of modern art were rejected and he continued to ban the French Impressionists and to attack the local Berlin Secessionists who were, in his words, ‘vulgar’, ‘crass’ and ‘revolutionary’.⁹⁸ Despite the fact that they were attracting the attention of artists and critics throughout the world Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Slevogt, Ernst Barlach and Max Beckmann were treated with such contempt that Franz Servaes was moved to call Berlin ‘the scullery maid of Europe’.⁹⁹ In return for conformity the Kaiser gave his appointees a free hand to control the Berlin art world. Anton von Werner, the conservative President of the Academy of Fine Arts, had soon become to painting what Hülsen-Häseler was to opera.

      Werner echoed the tastes of his master. For him, historical painting was the rightful subject of the modern artist and themes of national history were the most important of all. Art and nationalism coincided as paintings were meant to portray the greatness of the German past as well at to instruct the viewer about decisive world historical moments. On the other hand Werner commonly referred to any form of modern art as ‘dreadful’ or ‘worthless trash’, and even insulted Berlin’s liberal press by complaining that ‘art was better when the critics were better’. For a man who claimed to have ‘no sympathy, no understanding and no apology for historical lack of genius’ his inability to see the great gifts of contemporaries from Manet to Munch was astounding. Artists of whom he approved included the now forgotten Franz Krüger, Eduard Gaertner, Michael Aschenbach, and Ernst Hildebrandt, and the top floor of the National Gallery in Berlin still bears witness to his limited taste; after a visit in 1913 the American critic James Huneker wrote, ‘The sight of so much misspent labour, of the acres of canvas deluged with dirty, bad paint raises my bile.’¹⁰⁰ Hans Rosenhagen complained that he ranked Bonnat with Rembrandt, Anton Graff with Holbein and Gustav Richter with Reynolds, and concluded that ‘When one knows that Herr von Werner is one of the artists who advises the Kaiser … one cannot be surprised that so much meaningless art finds its way to the throne, while none of the painters who are creating the art of our time are found anywhere near the palace.’¹⁰¹

      The artist who captures the era was the Kaiser’s friend Adolph Menzel. Menzel was one of the few outstanding Berlin painters of the period to be accepted at court. He had started on the road to fame with lithographs illustrating the works of Frederick the Great which were recognized for their brilliance. His early paintings, particularly landscapes like Houses in the Snow, were similar to those of Corot or Constable (whose work he knew), and he was open to new ideas – as can be seen in his paintings of construction and industry such as the Iron Rolling Mill of 1875. This momentous work depicts the interior of a huge rail factory with its cavernous interior lit by the glow of molten iron in which around forty workers hurry to lift a bar on to a set of rollers while in the foreground a young girl brings them a basket of bread. The work is reminiscent of Courbet’s The Stone Breakers. Menzel broke new ground with works like Travelling through the Countryside (1892), one of the first pictures to depict rail travel. Such works bring to mind Theodor Fontane’s comment that Menzel was possible only in Berlin – ‘indeed Berlin was for him a necessity’.¹⁰²

      Sadly the more famous Menzel became the more he was seen as the chronicler of the showy Wilhelmine court. This began with his paintings of Frederick the Great, including The Flute Concert in which he created an image of life at Sanssoucci which has impressed leaders ever since – from William II to Hitler – and continued with depictions of Hofbälle and galas and processions for which he was increasingly criticized by his fellow artists. Even his friend and admirer Fontane once referred to him as a ‘grandiose little bauble’, and when he was awarded Prussia’s highest decoration Gerhart Hauptmann called him a traitor to art: ‘Imagine him receiving the Order of the Black Eagle: what horrible blasphemy!’¹⁰³ Although they were friends Liebermann said of him that for all his pretensions he was backward and provincial ‘like all Brandenburgers’.¹⁰⁴ Liebermann admired Menzel but saw him as an artist of the past who dismissed Impressionism with its ‘fuzzy lines’ as the ‘art of laziness’. The art critic Julius Meier-Graefe saw two distinct ‘Menzels’, both the ‘Impressionist’ and the ‘painter of Frederick the Great’.¹⁰⁵

      Despite the opprobrium since heaped upon him it must be said that Menzel’s attempts to create realistic portraits of the great men and events of the past were executed with a skill unmatched by any Berlin painter of his generation. As a result of William’s admiration for his historical works he became a fixture at court and when he died in 1905 the city staged a grand procession with so many flags and officers in uniform that Oskar Loerke remarked that ‘it looked more like a carnival than a funeral’. The Kaiser himself walked behind the coffin; the only other European artist to have been so honoured by his monarch was the incomparable Velázquez, who had died in 1660. But it was clear which aspect of Menzel William admired, saying he was ‘the most distinguished of German artists … not of course the Menzel who anticipated in his street scenes, landscapes and interiors what the younger generation strove for, no, the posthumous Chronicler of old Fritz’.¹⁰⁶

      Historically Berlin art collections had never compared with those in the old German court cities like Munich or Dresden, and it certainly had nothing to match the Louvre or the Hermitage. Thankfully William had nothing against the Old Masters and was determined to bring Berlin galleries up to the standard of his rivals. Thanks to men like Carl Osthaus, Hugo von Tschudi, Ernst Wichert and, above all, Wilhelm von Bode he came closer to his goal than might have been expected.

      Berlin owes a great debt to Bode.¹⁰⁷ An extraordinary art historian in his own right, he had a marvellous eye for lost masterpieces or forgeries; legend has it that he spotted a Frans Hals in a flea market from a street car, which he then bought for a mere 50 marks. He began his spectacular career by collecting Renaissance bronzes but he soon attracted a tremendous group of specialists and art historians who between them turned Berlin into a centre of the European art market and art journalism. He also developed a network of ‘informers’, such as his friend Hainhauer, who would tell him if there was anything of interest for sale in Paris or Rome. He was a most charming man and managed to beguile most of the famous private collectors of the day from the coal magnate Eduard Arnold to the newspaper baron Rudolf Mosse. He befriended the mine owner Oscar Hulschinsky, whose collection included a Frans Hals, a Botticelli and a Rembrandt, along with other important and generous friends – among them Jacoby, who collected Japanese art, and Eugen Gutmann, the founder of the Dresdner Bank who had works by Van Dyck, Ruisdael, Rubens, Tintoretto and Rembrandt. Bode worked closely with the Kaiser to persuade collectors to give to the Berlin museums; if a potential donor was spotted Bode would ask William to ‘have coffee’ with them, and the Kaiser would then casually promise the collector honours or titles if he would consider donating his treasure to the state. Bode’s Berlin acquisitions were spectacular by any standard before or since, and included works by Filippo Lippi, Dürer, Botticelli and Bellini, Rembrandt, Raphael, Correggio, Veronese, Titian, and dozens of others. Felix Braun once wrote from Vienna that he was amazed by the works he had seen in Berlin, the likes of which were ‘missing from our Hofmuseum’, while Jacob Burckhardt said in 1882 that ‘nowhere else offers the chance to become familiar with the best of so many periods of art’. The Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, which juts out into the Spree and is crowned by a great dome, was filled with Bode’s treasures and was later renamed the Bode Museum in his honour.¹⁰⁸

      But the acquisition of Old Masters was not enough for the Kaiser; it had not escaped his attention that the other great European cities were building up СКАЧАТЬ