German art at the Louvre

Paris

by David Bindman

THE EXHIBITION De l’Allemagne, 1800–1939. De Friedrich à Beckmann at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (closed 24th June), commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty for economic co-operation between France and Germany, caused a huge controversy, involving bitter denunciations from German newspapers, aggrieved responses from the Louvre, an intervention (in defence of the Louvre) by the German ambassador to France, and reports of dissent among the team responsible for the exhibition. But of course any exhibition that explores the Germanness of German art is bound to arouse strong feelings. The main accusation, provoked by the end date of 1939 in most versions of the title, was that the French bias of the exhibition confines German art to the Sonderweg, or special way, which implies that Germany has had a different historical trajectory from other nations, and that German Romanticism is tainted by Nazism, which it is presumed to have foreshadowed.

As far as I can see this accusation is quite without substance. In fact the exhibition was a model of political tact, perhaps too much so, and reminiscent of Basil Fawlty’s famous injunction to his staff on the arrival of a German hotel guest: ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the War!’. Furthermore the exhibition and the catalogue,1 carefully divided between French and German contributors, only rarely mention any of the other wars between France and the German states in the nineteenth century that had such a decisive effect on national self-definition in both countries.

The exhibition began in an introductory space with a series of huge woodcuts, adapted from earlier designs specially made for the exhibition by Anselm Kiefer, on the subject of the Rhine which, as the artist explains in the catalogue, was particularly appropriate to an exhibition commemorating a treaty between France and Germany that effec­tively made the river common to the two countries, rather than being the ‘fleuve d’Allemagne’ of German nationalists. One could well imagine this as an introduction to a fascinating exhibition in which the Rhine is central to a visual and cultural exploration of the relationship between the two countries, returning to Kiefer’s other work. He is the artist who has reflected most profoundly on the German Sonderweg, but in fact it was the only work in the exhibition that dates from after the 1930s. This was unfortunate, especially as one of the chief organisers of the exhibition, Danièle Cohn, is an expert on the artist, but it was explained by the Director of the Louvre, Henri Loyrette, who noted that bringing in any later twentieth-century art at all is to go beyond ‘les strictes bornes chronologiques des collections du Louvre’.

The exhibition was divided into three sections, described in the introductory panel as a play in three acts: 1. Apollo and Dionysus; 2. The Hypothesis of Nature; and 3. Ecce Homo. Although the essay in the catalogue explains the rationality of the first section in terms of Nietzsche’s famous contrast between the Apollonian and Dionysian in Greek culture in his book The Birth of Tragedy, written under the impact of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, the Apollonian was made to cover virtually the whole of German figure painting from Asmus Jacob Carstens to the Nazarenes in all their variety. Although the Klassik of Winckelmann and Goethe can be adequately covered by the Apollonian, it is problematic to apply it to the Nazarenes, who were after all in conscious revolt against the rationalism that the Enlightenment invested in Greek Antiquity. While it is true that Winckelmann and the Nazarenes were united by an appreciation of noble simplicity, a reverence for the art of the past, a desire to appeal to a wide audience, and – unfortunately in the present circumstances – a deep distaste for all things French, their visual differences made the earlier sections, although full of great paintings, incoherent and inexplicable to anyone who had not read the catalogue.

The Dionysian came in with the return to Italy and the advent of Feuerbach and Böcklin, both of whom were represented by striking paintings. Here Wagner and Nietzsche were invoked as creators of the Dionysian, which was applied not only to classical Anti­quity but to the Middles Ages in the figure of the ewige Frau, represented by Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal. Although the catalogue essay by Sébastien Allard and Danièle Cohn argues that Nietzsche makes the Dionysian dominant over the Apollonian in the human psyche, Böcklin and other artists tend to show the hybrid creatures who represent the Dionysian as ultimately defeated by the superior brainpower of more advanced human species. In Böcklin’s richly comic scene of the rape by the centaur Nessus of a disturbingly matronly Dejanira (cat. no.21), the centaur is thwarted by Hercules, who drives a poisoned spear into his flank. Similarly, in Franz von Stuck’s Combat over a woman (no.23) there is surely no doubt that a reading of Darwin would suggest that the battle will be won by the more ‘civilised’ man over his ‘primitive’ enemy.

According to the catalogue the Apollo– Dionysus dichotomy came to a definitive end with the First World War, although the Dionysian is seen to be an important element of later painting. This may be arguable in terms of serious painting, but surely the Apollonian lives on in the kitschy classical nudes that continued to be produced throughout the Third Reich, works of which Hitler was particularly fond, and of course in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, which were represented in the third section by a brief clip showing classical figures from her Olympia of 1936. One can also find Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in the sculpture of Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Georg Kolbe and, above all, Arno Breker, but to have included the last two in the exhibition would have been to go against the ‘Basil Fawlty principle’ guiding the exhibition. But it is odd that there was no sculpture in the exhibition, with the single exception of a head of Goethe by David d’Angers.

The second section of the exhibition, ‘The Hypothesis of Nature’, was perhaps the most coherent of the three sections, ranging from a fascinating examination of Goethe’s researches into natural history, compared also with a group of nature studies by Paul Klee, to a spectacular room of mountain landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich, who was contrasted illuminatingly with Carl Gustav Carus and others. There were magnificent groups of both famous and unfamiliar paintings by Friedrich, but other artists such as Carus (Fig.63), Joseph Anton Koch and Ludwig Richter made a great showing. Werner Busch, in his essay in the catalogue that covers the depiction of landscape from Friedrich to 1939, reveals a particularly telling interconnection between Friedrich’s and Richter’s views of the Watzmann (nos.76 and 78) and Koch’s Schmadribach Falls of 1822 (no.77), a couple of years earlier than the other two paintings. The essay, however, takes the story of German landscape through to Adolph Menzel’s interiors, Max Liebermann’s garden scenes and the cityscapes of Die Brücke, none of which featured in the exhibition. While Henri Loyrette claims in his preface that the exhibition avoided the parade of ‘isms’, it seems a little perverse to omit these artists, on the presumed grounds that they were too cosmopolitan, although that in itself is a defining feature of much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German art.

The final and most controversial section of the exhibition, ‘Ecce Homo’, was based on the premise that the horrors of the First World War destroyed any belief in myth in favour of a concentration on humanity. The result was a slightly incoherent cacophony of horrific images, set against a poignant group of very late drawings by Menzel of old people and photographs of ordinary people by August Sander, which represent human vulnerability, despite the rigid order in which they are confined by the photographer. The main focus was on Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Lovis Corinth and Max Beckmann who, with the exception of Corinth, were represented by print series as well as paintings. The section culminated in Beckmann’s spectacular painting Birds’ hell of 1938 (no.44; Fig.64), which brought the exhibition to its chronological terminus.

Why is the extremism of horror so prevalent in German art, when England and France endured similar experiences in the trenches? The curators of the exhibition in the catalogue attribute it partly to the continued influence of Nietzsche’s Dionysism; they develop a subtle argument about heroism and its denial, then its return in the 1930s, as attitudes towards the First World War changed in the last years of the Weimar Republic. But there are other distinctive elements of German culture that could have been highlighted that would have helped to unify the themes of the exhibition. The first is the distinctive German concern with the ‘prim­itive’, in the early nineteenth century with the age of Dürer, and continuing into the twentieth century with the constant reprise of Grünewald. But there is also the concern with the non-European, particularly in the case of Emil Nolde and Die Brücke, and which in a wholly distinctive and powerful way becomes bound up with the city in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s urban scenes. These are as distinctively German as anything in the exhibition and their total omission (although they are discussed in the catalogue) must be seen as seriously diminishing the show’s argument.

There is obviously something potentially contentious about the stated aim of the exhibition to reveal what is different about German art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but this is compounded by the disjunction between what was on show, which was magnificent and stirring, yet at times incoherent and baffling, and the catalogue, which is full of subtle and diverse arguments by French and German scholars. The problem seems to lie in both national and museological politics. The commemorative nature of the exhi­bition, celebrating a political agreement between France and Germany, was almost bound to lead to an avoidance of the terrible previous history of Franco-German relations, but there is also the problem of holding it at the Louvre. There the constraining effect of the Louvre’s reluctance to go more fully into the twentieth century denied the possibility of dealing with post-War German art, which often has reflected illuminatingly on the very issues at stake in the exhibition. There is also the belief common to many of the great art galleries of the world that they should only give houseroom to ‘great art’ and, as we could see from this exhibition, that makes it extremely difficult to tell the complex story of German art in its wider context. The result was a confusing exhibition full of tremendous treasures, and a rich, varied and informative catalogue that has only a tenuous connection with what was on the walls.

1    Catalogue: De l’Allemagne, 1800–1939. De Friedrich à Beckmann. By Sébastien Allard, Danièle Cohn et al. 432 pp. incl. 330 col. + b. & w. ills. (Hazan Editions, Paris, and Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2013), €45. ISBN 978–2–75410–690–0.