Erinnerungen eines Malers
(Memoirs of a Painter)
Berlin-Grünewald, F.A. Herbig
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1953, cm.21, p. 231
(Review by Francesco Mazzaferro)
[Original Version September 2014 - New Version April 2019]
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| Fig. 1) The first edition of Karl Hofer's Memoirs, published in 1953 by Herbig Publishers |
This is the first
edition of the Memories of the German painter Karl Hofer (1878-1955); they were
drafted in 1948, extended in 1952 and finally published in 1953 by Herbig
publishers in Berlin. A second edition came out in 1963, for the types of List
publishers in Munich. Since then, the Memories have never been published again.
No translation exists in a different language.
Karl Hofer
belongs to the phase of art which in German is normally called “Classical
Modern” (Klassische Moderne), i.e. the
first generation of modern art, still inspired by classicism. While Hofer had
stylistic similarities with Expressionism, New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) and New-Realism, he
refused all those definitions (as also stated in the Memories). Hofer was among
the very first victims of the national-socialist persecution, as it was
deprived of his professional position already in 1933 and included in the list
of degenerated artists in 1937 (Entartete
Kunst). The memories however report that he tried to ignore the ban, and
even “never sold so many paintings as at that time” (p.222). A large part of
his art production (150 paintings and more than 1,000 drawings) went destroyed
during a bomb attack on Berlin on 1 March 1943.
After the war,
Hofer regained important professional positions. With some embarrassment, the
last page of the Memories report about the decision of the Soviets to assign
him the position of Vice-Chair of the German Russian Cultural Alliance (Deutsch-Russisch
Kulturbund). He is then also named chair of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (High
School for Fine Arts) in West Berlin. At the end of his life – he died because
of a stroke in 1955 – he animated a violent polemic against abstract art, which
among others implied that part of the academic corps of the High Scholl left to
protest against his positions. The obituary in Spiegel of 1955 (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-31969912.html)
does not hide that the verbal fierceness of the polemical exchanges may have
contributed to Hofer’s sudden death.
Reading the
memories is important in three respects: (1) it shows what overall reading of
the recent past art history – including art relations in particular with France
- was offered to the general public at the time in which the Federal Republic
of Germany was making a choice in favour of European unification; (2) it offers
a direct testimony of the personal contacts of Hofer and other artists with
France and Italy, especially in the period before World War I, revealing also
some shortcomings of those relationships; and (3) it displays some strange
ambiguities in Hofer’s narrative on the years of Nazism and immediate after war
time, as some important tragic events are missing.
Karl Hofer is
described by his biographers (see www.karl-hofer.de)
as a difficult personality. However, for a person who had an exceptional
difficult life (three year prisoner of war of French authorities during World
War I; the first wife died in Auschwitz in 1942; a large part of the art
production was destroyed by bombing in 1943; the first son was killed by a
criminal gang in 1947) the overall tone of his Memories is written in mild terms
and – if ever – nostalgic tonalities for a beautiful past. The focus is on the
painter’s stays in France (1900 and 1908-1913), in Italy (1903-1908) and in
India (1910 and 1913). Since Gauguin’s journey to Polynesia, long voyages to
know and explore other cultures had become a characteristic of many modernist painters
(let us think about the journeys to Tunisia of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky,
Emil Nolde’s voyage to New Guinea, and Max Pechstein travelling to the Palau
isles). While Hofer devoted two long chapters to India, our emphasis will be on
his interaction with European cultures.
One strong point
of Hofer’s Memories is his assessment on the state of art and culture in
Germany across the two centuries. Hofer’s commitment is avoiding falling in
nationalistic or pseudo-nationalist traps. It is in this same sense of opening
German culture to the outside world that Hofer rejected those cultural streams of
the XIX century (Wagner, Nietzsche) which aim at identifying a separate German
language in music and philosophy. With the benefit of insight, he wrote at
page 50, Wagner was in the same line as national-socialism, and at page 52 he
refered to his music as populist; at page 53, he defined Wagner’s concept of
“total art work” (Gesamtkunst) as
monstrous. On Nietzsche, he observed that his super-human concept (Übermensch) was void, considering that
wars demonstrated that human beings are barely worthy of merit the adjective
‘human’. Significantly, Hofer expressed
these assessments when referring to the years of maximum success of Wagner’s
music and Nietzsche’s thinking. His commitment to avoiding national thinking has
been greatly facilitated by the fact that his long-life advocates and financial
supporters were the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe and the Swiss
industrialist Theodor Reinhart, both well-known figures in art circles with
broad international latitude, operating from outside Germany (Paris the first
and Winthertur the second).
This does not
mean that Hofer lacked reference points in the German world. If in France he
considered Cézanne and Gauguin as inspiring artists, the points of reference in
the German speaking world were the German Hans van Marées (who died of malaria
close to Rome in 1887, and had produced his masterpiece frescos in Naples in 1873)
and the Swiss Arnold Böcklin (who also lived for long time and died in Italy in
1901). Both innovators of academic art schools in Germany and Switzerland (which
were excessively linked to the academic schemes of historic paining, i.e. Historienmalerei), Marées and Böcklin
had however maintained a strong link to classical art. Interest for them has
been growing exponentially in the last years. In line with the exhibition organised by
Meier-Grafe at the Salon de l’Automne in Paris in 1909, Hofer was convinced that
Marées had preceded Cezanne, being the first to intentionally deform the
pictorial surface; he also believed that the failure of French criticism to
accept him as a forerunner of modern painting was ultimately a nationalistic
reflex (p. 54 and p. 97). He told us of his visit to Marées’ frescos, decorating the library walls of the newly built Marine Zoological Institute Anton Dohrn in
Naples. Böcklin’s painting “In the
summer House” (In der Gartelaube) inspired
him to get interested in colourism and tempera painting, while his visit to
Darmstadt to admire the “Isle of the Dead” evoked in him not describable
emotions.
“I could come
across neither with Naturalism nor with Impressionism, and the same with any of
the following –isms” (p. 56). Hofer provided his public with an idea of
eclectic art, far from ideological constraints.
This is however a time in which artists start dividing themselves in
fractions, mostly between groups trying to stick to prevailing academic
conventions (Akademische Richtung) and
artists claiming their end (Neutöner,
literally the New toners). Hofer, Wiess and Laage animate the new group in
Karlsruhe.
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| Fig. 2) Karl Hofer, Concerning Regularity in Visual Art, published posthumous in 1956 by Wasmuth Publishers. |
Despite the lack
of any enthusiasm for ideological positions, still Hofer had clear preferences.
The Memories did not refer in full to the heavy contrasts of the last part of
his life, which saw him as leading opponent in Germany to abstract art. Kandinsky had written a famous pamphlet in
1912, entitled “Concerning the spiritual in art” (Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei ), as a manifesto for abstract art. Hofer responded with a pamphlet
entitled “Concerning regularity in visual art” (Über das Gesetzliche in der
bildenden Kunst) which was published posthumous in 1956. In the Memoirs, Hofer
explains his views proposing two tandems of artists: Paul Klee and Igor
Stravinsky on the one hand, Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schönberg on the other
one (pp.175 ff.). Klee and Stravinsky were language innovators who were still in
the tradition of classic rules, while Kandinsky with abstraction and Schönberg
with dodecaphony made an intellectual exercise which “was appreciated by all
those who have nothing to say”. And again: “The experiment takes the place of
the creation”. About Kandinsky, he said to be bored by his colour constructions . He added that those appreciating this art were “Art hysterics”, blinded by an “Avant-Garde misjudgement”.
Was Hofer an
expressionist? This is what one can often read. However, let us him speak on
it. He refers to the very first months after the end of World War I, during
which he had been first prisoner of war for the first three years (he had been
treated in a very human way, he says) and in the Swiss exile for the remainder:
“Germany had become a Republic; I was on my way home. A lost war leaves the
morale of a people fall, and so little-pleasing things were to be observed. But
art enjoyed her new freedom, the first works of the expressionists emerged. My
quest however went to a completely different direction; I was able to do little
with them, because for me every great work of art was an expression, just
without the need of this intrusive doctrine. To do it enough with that doctrine,
more important things had to be sacrificed, as in all doctrinaire -isms is the
case. But everything has two sides and the recovery of colour as an intrinsic
value remains the inalienable merit of this direction. Kokoschka, whom I
consider just as little among the Expressionists as myself, had made me the
strongest impression. The exhibitions of the "Storm" (Sturm) began to
excite the minds, one could see good things side by side to wild products that
have since long disappeared into oblivion, along with their authors. It is no
different today and it will always be like this. Of this entire mode, I have
always kept me away and gladly accepted the odium upon myself to be
"unfashionable" and to be despised by the respective prophets. This
too is not different today.” (pp.211-212)
Between 1900 and
1913 Hofer made long stays in France (2 stays) and Italy (5 years). Interestingly,
Hofer came from a part of Germany (Baden) which – as he wrote at the very
beginning of the Memoirs using an Italian word – was in his view still integral
part of the latinitas, the community
of the (European) latins – and, together with neighbouring Switzerland, was
geographically in between the French and the Italian language regions. And yet, what a difference between Hofer’s interests
and activities in the two countries! France was the country where to study
contemporary art, discuss about Cézanne vs. Matisse, hazard some first
assessment of Picasso and be in contact with local art circles in Paris (with artists
like Gustave Caillebotte and Léon Bakst, art collectors as Paul Arthur Chéramy,
Gaston and Josse Bernheim-Jeune, Henri Rouart, Paul Durand-Ruel, Auguste
Pellerin and Ambroise Vollard, philosophers like Bernard Groethuysen, or the
ballet producer Sergei Diaghilev). Italy was, to the contrary, the country of past
art only, antique and renaissance: in five years, not a single reference to any
aspect of contemporary Italian art, but many accurate descriptions of
landscapes, villages, and individuals. On
the one hand, Hofer expressed pure love for Italy – also as a source of art
inspiration – defending it against the arguments of those who considered our
country “too sweet”. “Again and again –
he writes at pages 90-91 – I had to and I have to wonder about those
often-heard views in Germany that Italy is too sweet. I do not know where these
people have their eyes. Is a pure deep blue sky sweet? I cannot get enough of
the blue of the sky and I do not yearn for fog. The formation of the Italian
countryside, from a pure geologic viewpoint, is everywhere so extremely
powerful, sometimes with a tangy size. Rarely shows the vegetation bland
spinach green. The lovely and soft hills and plains of our country - without
any form of force - would be much more likely to be regarded as sweet.” On the
other hand, while Italy was beautiful and full of inspiring artworks from the
past, he seemingly had no real interest at all to interact with present Italian
art culture, whether conservative or avant-garde. The choice of not meetings
artists and intellectuals seemed intentional: “In five years of my stay in
Italy, I saw many poor people, but not a single plebeian. I must confess, while
I consider the Italian bourgeoisie as disgusting, Italian people was a pure
joy.” (p.89) And again: “Everything to be really experienced bases itself not
so much in diversity but in the intensity of the experience, often in quite
ordinary life. We loved these simple rural taverns, frequented no
"circles", the common people was familiar to us, above all, and the Café
Aragno [note of the editor: a famous café of artists and literates in Rome] never
saw us there, not a single time all the five years long. We were also not
Forestieri, we were Artisti, and artists are no strangers in Italy”(p. 120).
And in fact, he met the only Italian painter quoted in the Memoirs, Felice
Casorati, at an event organised in the United States by the Carnagie Foundation
in 1928. Casorati represented Italy, Maurice Denis France and Hofer Germany. There
is a remarkable proximity of style among them. In some respects, the United
States had a broader (and more coherent) view of European culture than Europe itself.
It is worth
reflecting for a second about this shortcoming of the relations between representatives
of the German and Italian culture at that time. The painter lived for 5 years
in our country, but could not bring back anything of Italian contemporary
culture to Germany. Why did he meet several German speaking artists in our
country, but none from Italy itself? This seems also to be a common feature to
all the other non-Italian artists he mentions in the Memoirs during the five
years in Italy, perhaps more interested to meet Italian models (many marriages
resulted from it) than Italian art of those days. Was post-Unitarian Italian
culture in the decades across the two centuries really unable to attract the
attention of artists visiting the country? Were the young artists from Germany
and Switzerland unable to get acquainted with the vibrant art world of those
years? Or was the lack of attention for modern art in Italy rather the mere
result of their prejudice? In the case of other countries (e.g. Hungary and
Finland) the relations with Italian young artists became extremely intense.
Perhaps, a benevolent interpretation is that Karl Hofer came to Italy in order
to preserve his link to the classical world, and could even not understand why
Italian artists wanted to disrupt it.
The last ten
pages of the 230-page Memoirs, drafted in 1952 (the remainder dates back to
1948, as already mentioned), narrated about the persecution of National-socialism,
the immediate expulsion from the High School where Hofer had a teaching
position, the inclusion in the category of ‘degenerated art’, the bombing of
the atelier in Berlin in 1943 (with the destruction of many work art pieces),
the attempt to paint again some of them immediately, the bombing of the house, and
the nomination to chair academic institutions after the war. It goes without
saying that 12 years cannot be properly narrated in so few pages. It looks like
the painter had lost the capacity to speak, in front of such tragic events.
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| Fig. 3) The paperback edition of Karl Hofer's Memoirs, published by List publishers in 1963 |
It remains to reflect why these Memoirs have gone almost forgotten:
only two editions, the last one in 1963, fifty years ago. No translation into a
foreign language. The last struggle of Hofer against abstract art made him an
enemy of the most successful German artists of the after war period, including
his disciple Ernst Nay. These were the artists who made the new Federal
Republic of Germany known in the rest of Europe and later on in the United
States. Becoming the main theorist in Germany against abstract art, Karl Hofer turned
to be seen as a reactionary, something which he probably never was. But to be a
reactionary in art, in the country which had already persecuted modern art only
twenty years before, was a sort of moral sin. And certainly, in was not in the
interest of the new Republic, which had established itself quite firmly in the
area of cultural interest of the United States, where abstract expressionism was becoming the new Avant-guard movement, with
Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
There is a
paradoxical element here, which can be put into evidence only comparing the
(limited) fortune of Karl Hofer’s memoirs with the success of the writings of
two contemporary painters, Emil Nolde in Germany and the already mentioned
Maurice Denis in France. Nolde suffered the same persecution by
National-socialism, despite of the fact that he was strongly nationalist,
member of the National-socialist party and, in many respect, an anti-Semitist.
Maurice Denis was very close to the nationalist Action Française,
close to the Vichy authorities and certainly a hyper-conservative intellectual.
Karl Hofer, in post-war correspondence with friends, called him with disdain
“Nazi-Emil” and “Nazi-Nolde”. See the item ‘Nolde’ in the delicious booklet
“Artists offend artists” by
Peter Dittmar (Künstler beschimpfen
Künstler, Reclam, Leipzig, 2008). However, after
the Second World War Nolde’s memoirs were revised to suppress all compromising
passages. In a long transition starting with his participation in the first
edition of Documenta in Kassel in 1955 and terminating with the publication of
Siegfried Lenz masterpiece novel “The German Lesson” in 1968, Nolde was
re-interpreted as a hero of the so-called “internal emigration” opposing the
totalitarian regime. Curiously, also Nolde refused abstract art. However, his
radical colourism, the intransigent violation of all rules on form and the
primitivism of pictorial language made of him an optimal candidate to belonging
to mainstream painting in after-war Germany. It is not a coincidence that his
journals – in the revised after-war version – have been re-edited several
times, last in 2013. Something similar happened in France with Maurice Denis,
who was a hyper-conservative intellectual, close to the nationalist and
anti-democratic Action Française and to the Vichy Regime. In art, he had
been the champion across Europe of a “new-traditionism” to link modern art to
figurative art (like Hofer). He died of an accident (he was run-off by a lorry)
on 13 November 1943 in Paris, the same day in which the Germany army completely
deprived of any authority Marechal Petain, who wanted to give a speech at the
radio to announce the return of powers to the French assembly. Immediately
after the end of the war, three monographs were published (including one by the
Louvre director, Maurice Brillant) already in 1945, to redesign his profile in
a way it would be more in line with the democratic post-war period. Also here,
this task was facilitated by the fact that Denis had been member of the Nabis
art movement, had been in contact with Gauguin and Cézanne and could therefore
be sold as part of a linear trajectory linking the late XIX Century with modern
Avant-Garde. Denis’ treatises continue to be printed in several languages.
Hofer had been, most probably, the only one who was really firmly on the anti-fascist
camp: however, his choice to fight against the new vanguard streams in
after-war Germany probably made of him above all a perceived champion of
cultural nostalgia.
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