German art's hidden influence

Jealousy by Edvard Munch  

Last week’s interview with Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator International Art, looked at the European Masters (Staedel Museum 19-20th Century Collection), currently on show at the NGV and dealt with the vast gulf between US and Australian reception of German art exemplified in the art of Max Beckmann.

Arguably, the ramifications of this divergence, where Australian taste stayed aligned to Britain as the US developed its own assertive visual cultural ideology, is still with us. This week’s feature continues the interview drawing on several key works selected by Gott to illustrate major cultural and art historical themes and sub-texts represented in the collection.

The discussion ranged over the formative and farsighted collection philosophy that created the Staedel collection, the relative positions of Berlin and Paris as cultural centres, more insights into the central position Beckmann held, the German taste for French art, Max Liebermann in Berlin and Edvard Munch and Symbolism.

The conversation ends with a returned to the point of Post-War divergence that led to the rise of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism and provides still further insights into the hidden influence of German modernism on Australian art.

ArtsHub: The collection is notable for its breadth- is that systematic approach a German trait?

Ted Gott: What is remarkable about the Staedel is that its founder (Johann Friedrich Staedel, 1728-1816) said in his will that it’s OK to sell works from his collection. He left his collection of paintings and sculpture and all his money to establish a museum, remarkably with an art school attached , and it was OK to sell works if they were not to the taste of future generations. From its inception the Staedel was able to de-accession works to raise funds to build the collection. That said, they have never thrown the baby out with the bathwater (not as the NGV did when it sold its Tiffany glass in the 1940s.) The Directors have always maintained a judicious and cautious policy of building the collection, deciding to have one great example by every major artist rather than to collect any one artist in depth- with the expectation of Max Beckmann of course.

AH: The collection was ravaged under the Nazis.

TG: In 1936 the Beckman rooms were closed. Beckmann had already been dismissed from the Painting School on 1933 and he was no longer able to show in commercial galleries (but he still had avid collectors). In 1936 all Jewish directors of Public Institutions including galleries were removed. Director Georg Swarzenski is removed. He had managed to survive with the backing of his Board, and was lucky enough to be allowed to emigrate to Boston where he become Curator of Fine Art in Boston.

AH: And he was later to meet Beckmann again.

TG: In 1947. They had a very interesting relationship, as you can judge from Beckmann’s famous double portrait of the Director’s wife and his mistress, a very teasing relationship.

Swarzenski was replaced by Ernst Holzinger who managed to sequester what the Nazis had not already stripped out. They first came in ‘33 and came back in waves. To protect the collection, works were sometime literally taken out in great danger at 4am in the morning in a wheel barrow to the country side preserving the great collection of Carl Hagemann, (whose heirs gifted the entire collection of drawings as well as paintings to the Staedel in gratitude after the war).
AH: Given the risks this seems like a form of political or at least cultural resistance. Yet this seems remarkable that Staedel has no holding of Otto Dix or Neue Sachlichke (New Objectivity) protest works....

TG: They did not buy it. They may have perceived that sort of critique as caricature.

AH: There is such a strong interest in French painting.

TG: After training in Weimar (1990-3) Beckmann himself had studied in Paris. He hung around in cafes and night clubs. He went to Paris every year and bought an apartment there with his second wife. This pattern only stopped on his exile to Amsterdam (but he did still visit and stay with his advocate and gallery owner Lackner and his wife before they emigrated to California - taking a very large collection of his works with them which they assiduously promoted) . He was interested in Braque - he is a Francophile - even though we think of him as quintessentially German.

AH:That’s a very interesting contrast culturally given the great Franco-Prussian rivalry in the political and economic spheres.....

TG: everyone was looking to Paris. It was the Mecca, everyone was there, Australian artists went there.

AH: but it wasn’t all the highlife as we see in Edvard Munch’s works in the show.

TG: Much had emerged for Munch as a promising young artist in Oslo. He had problems, with his father, and with women- he was obsessively in love with a local woman and stalked her in the street literally peeping through windows.

He is already self-tortured when he wins a government scholarship to study painting in Paris in his early 20s. In Paris he takes a room on what was then the outskirts of the city and gets interested in Impressionism and then Neo-impressionism. Some of his work is clearly inspired by Seurat and Signac. He suffers a double crisis (his father dies and the subject of his obsession remarries).

He begins a diary that will become his manifesto where he writes that he is now going to ‘abandon forever painting s of women sewing by lamp light’ (referring to common domestic themes seen in the works of artists such as Bonnard or Degas). He writes that he will not paint sweet Parisian paintings but will take instead as his subject..anger, jealous, sickness, fear and death. He is almost addicted to suffering . In the painting we see the beginnings of that, a lonely, frustrated alcoholic.

AH: And the beginnings of colour as a symbolic motif.

TG: Munch’s use of colour is critical to understanding his work. He had studied French colour theory but developed his own symbolism, very much in sympathy with Symbolist interests current in Paris at the time. We see again his problem with women - the subject of the femme fatale developed in the works by Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a dark demonic side, the Madonna-whore.

AH: And in this show the Redon is hung next to a Symbolist work by Gustave Moreau (1826-1898).

TG: Munch become actively involved with Symbolist circles- painters, writers poets and musicians in Paris in the late 1890s and goes on to exert his own profound influence. By 1895 he was established as an artist of great interest, whose emotive style was seen as perfectly in tune with French Symbolism, and in turn it influenced the young Beckmann.

AH: And to contrast Paris with Berlin, like Beckmann, the work of Max Liebermann is also little known here......

TG: When the first show of progressive German painting was shown in Paris, Liebermann was part of the shop. He came to Paris in 1870 to study Courbet, and you can see the influence on his style - the drawing and the open use of the palette knife, as well as in the subject. He paints working class subjects , orphanages , old men’s retirement homes, ordinary people ennobled in their desolation.

AH: It was controversial work.

TG: These non-noble subjects were directly criticised by Kaiser Wilhelm as “art of the gutter” but they were very influential, and curiously similar, if less sentimental, to what was happening in Victorian England genre paintings of widows, orphans, poor-house inmates and the destitute. Later he becomes very influenced by French Impressionism- he is the first German artist to collect Impressionism and had the largest collection of anyone in Germany. He was influential, and around 1906 Beckmann picks up on themes ...sick child, the death room....

AH: Yet the Staedel was relatively slow to collect French Impressionism.

TG: Everyone was. Our own NGV Director of the day set off in 1905 for his first acquisition trip to London where he bought a Pissaro which arrived in 1907.

It was Lambasted in the Press. The Melbourne Argus described the work as “....lamentable- all out of focus like a viagraph image”. The viagraph was of course early cinema. Without knowing it the Argus critic had hit it exactly. There was a new visual sensibility developing in Paris already influenced by the moving picture, by the Lumiere brother’s creation of the cinema. And we see this absolutely in the Degas on show and in the Bonnard. The photograph is now the key, the radical influence of new perspectives obtained by the camera.

AH: But Cubism does not feature, shouldn’t that be part of radical new way of viewing?

TG: There are works in the Staedel collection but they were too fragile to travel, artists like Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956).

AH: Did Australian artists travel to Berlin at that time?

TG: Whether they travelled or not the influence is clear, especially that of Beckmann - just look at the watercolours of Joy Hester. The first monograph on Beckmann was already published in 1913. And in the ‘38 London Degenerates Show his work was promoted by Herbert Read (an influential art critic).

In July 1938 Max Beckmann was on the front cover of the Times Literary Supplement where Read’s show on German “Degenerate” Art was extensively reviewed and that too came to Heide. More than that- Herbert Read was in correspondence with John and Sunday Reed.

It’s certain that Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan and Joy Hester had access to these reports on Beckmann’s work. Tucker went to Europe in ’48. He went to Paris and Frankfurt and there started the extraordinary series of works on prostitutes. He wrote in his diaries about the smell of the bodies still rotting in the rubble and of all the women who had to ‘strut their stuff’ to survive. How interesting that Tucker went to Frankfurt of all places. Munch is also a great influence on Tucker because he read books about him in the state library of Victoria (and Heide had a very large art library).

It is very hard to understand why at that time, when Beckmann was huge in the states, he was still almost unknown in Australia outside of small avant garde circles . By ‘47 Beckmann had arrived in the USA bringing more than 80 paintings including five of the enormous triptychs which consolidate his fame – these grand allegories of life. He has success after success including in 1951 his one man show at Venice Biennale, just before he dies of a heart attack. He became a US wide name not just famous in New York. He had a huge influence on Pollack and the New York school.

AH: And this is the period when critic Clement Greenburg’s influence was rising sharply promoting a distinctive American painting aesthetic.

TG: There is the notion that it is extremely American to like Beckmann because America stands for freedom and democracy. Beckmann is very influential on the Abstract Expressionists while they were still in their figurative phases. You can see echoes of his work in De Kooning (who at that time was painting dejected men.....), in early Jackson Pollock, ....and yet the ideology is the same.

It’s the idea of the USA to promote gestural figuration as the art of true democracy. So you have the CIA supporting Jackson Pollock....you think they would have supported the German Neue Sachlichkeit artists ...and yet they supported Abstract Expressionism because it is about art being a symbol of individual liberty. It’s about the right to freedom of expression- freedom of speech is very important. It’s this ideology of free speech that even in a time of cold war manages to survive- (but not everywhere- Hollywood was subject to McCarthy’s communist witch hunts).

it’s an ideology expressed in painting.