VPerhaps at no time has there been a country in which the struggle for art was greater than our fatherland,” wrote Julius Meier-Graefe in his “History of Development of Modern Art”, which he published from edition to edition after the first successful edition in 1904 added. He should have known, because Meier-Graefe himself, born in 1867, was one of the greatest comrades-in-arms of his time. With witty eloquence and an immense talent for writing, he fought for a new conception of art in an epoch of strong social upheaval. Learning to see is everything, he proclaimed in his “History of Development”. By placing the sharpening of the gaze and the subjective experience at the center of the experience of art, he declared war on the aesthetic rules of a staid academicism and made the established art science of the Wilhelmine era his enemy. From 1895, he often lived in Paris for many years, paving the way for the Impressionists, but also for their predecessors Delacroix, Corot and Courbet, to Germany.
Meier-Graefe became the most widely read art writer who wrote comprehensive monographs on subjects such as Félix Vallotton, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. With a willingness to fight, he swam against the tide of his time in order to start debates with his contributions: initially as a pioneer of modernism, who met with violent rejection from the German national camp, but by the 1920s at the latest he himself belonged to a conservative faction and left the new art movements Cubism, Expressionism or New Objectivity hardly have a good hair.
At the same time charmer and Don Quixote
Now a volume with selected writings gives the opportunity to rediscover the polemical, fighting Julius Meier-Graefe, who contributed a lot to Franco-German understanding in and beyond art. Numerous illustrations of the works discussed in the reviews and essays are attached. Although only in black and white. but that is perceived as an aesthetic decision: it’s primarily about the lyrics.
Julius Meier-Graefe: “Art – Scenery – Heresies”. Memoirs of an Enthusiast.
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Image: Nimbus Verlag
The articles appeared in various magazines, but primarily in the “Berliner Tageblatt” and the “Frankfurter Zeitung”. For the latter, Meier-Graefe advertised as a permanent employee from Berlin from the mid-1920s. He was offered the art presentation after a sensational slating in the right-wing conservative “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung”, with which he wrote down Otto Dix’s painting “Schützengraben”, which indicted the atrocities of the First World War, and even by Wallraf-Richartz -Museum demanded that the painting be taken down.
High comedy and price comparisons
Maier-Graefe is hard to grasp and always there where you don’t expect him. It was not foreseeable that the young bon vivant and also a gambler would end up in the arts. But then he got lost in the Paris art scene. “A very strange fellow, Meier-Graefe,” wrote the art historian Alfred Lichtwark, “a charmer personally, talented as a writer to the point, a Don Quixote when it comes to art.” Associations and his way of enlighteningly combining art appreciation and social observation.
This can be seen clearly, for example, in the ironically sparkling text “Die Nase”, in which he uses the olfactory organ and its artistic representations to go far into art history in order to express his criticism of his contemporaries – he had an exhibition of the sculptor Margarete Moll, but also thinks of Schlemmer or Brâncuși – to substantiate. Especially in the late articles, before he fell into nationwide disfavor in the early 1930s due to an affair involving counterfeit Van Gogh paintings, which he had certified as an expert, his often ironic verve is captivating. An article about a visit to Essen, where he expects anything but art, is almost a short story and highly comical. He likes to include other people, perhaps invented, like the patient Mrs. Bredeney in his Essen story. There it is first about Camembert and price comparisons, about Lautrec and the way of life in France, before the actual subject, namely André Derain, is discussed.
It is an art-historically rich volume that fuels the pleasure of thinking about art, to which the editor’s knowledgeable annotation apparatus certainly contributes. However, the editorial idea of reversing the chronology of the writings remains questionable. The author’s development cannot be followed over time. One therefore has the irritating feeling of reading against the grain. And then at some point it just starts from the back of the book – that actually means from the beginning.
However, the chronological reversal can be credited with one thing: the first in the volume, i.e. the late writings, captivate the reader more easily than the early ones. “It’s nice to live for art,” wrote Julius Meier-Graefe in 1933, two years before his death. He did it convincingly.
Julius Meier-Graefe: “Art – Scenery – Heresies”. Enthusiast’s memorabilia. Nimbus Verlag, Wädenswil 2022. 592 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €38.