Lovis Corinth
The Life of Walter Leistikow.
A Fragment of the History of Culture in Berlin (1910)
Part Two
(review by Francesco Mazzaferro)
[Original version: December 2014 - New version: April 2019]
Go back to Part One
Why only landscapes? Perhaps an answer in the novel "On the threshold",
(review by Francesco Mazzaferro)
[Original version: December 2014 - New version: April 2019]
Go back to Part One
 |
Fig. 2) The edition of 2000. On the cover, the portrait of Walter Leistikow which Lovis Corinth painted in 1893.
The painter wears a black armband, in mourning for the death of his father
|
The reading of the Lovis Corinth's volume 'The Life of Walter Leistikow', but also of Leistikow's correspondence, helps identify the many contradictory features of the latter painter's work, but also
of his time. We know that Corinth wanted, in fact, to speak not only about
Leistikow, but more generally about the art in Berlin in those years. It is no
coincidence that the title of the biography dedicated to his late friend also
includes the words "A Fragment of the History of Culture in Berlin."
We can then extend our considerations to the contradictions of the artistic
production of Leistikow in relations to the art events of those years, in the
knowledge that it was also one of the objectives of Corinth.
It seems necessary to address at least
three questions that indicate as many contradictions of that time.
1. A
landscape painter, a politically engaged painter or both?
The first question concerns the nature of
painting production by Leistikow: modern or conventional? We are in the
presence of a Landschaftsmaler, a
landscape painter, in the strictest sense of the term, i.e. of a painter who remained
captive of his genre to the point not to paint practically anything but landscapes
all lifelong (except in the early years, around 1889 -1890, when he was still
24-25 years, as shown in two examples in the monograph of Margrit Bröhan [23]).
Anything but scenes from nature, always devoid of any human presence (if not,
again, in the very early phases). The division into distinct genres of art was
one of the characteristics of academicism of the XIX century dominating in
Germany, and Leistikow seems to stick to it, choosing just two landscapers for
his training and never abandoning the genre. The entire stylistic evolution of
the painter - born as a late-romantic realist, then evolved into a naturalist, later become a
symbolist and finally again turned into a late-romantic and perhaps even an impressionist -
takes place within a single genre of painting. Corinth did not seem to feel
quite the paradox between the ceaseless activity that leads Leistikow to create
forms of association and institutional to modernize the artistic life of
Germany and the fact that his production is essentially monothematic. In fact,
Corinth writes just the opposite: "As an artist Leistikow was, however,
not a specialist. While the images of the forest of Grünewald are those that
most occupied it, his talent and his travels in all seasons of the year also
led to paint other motives." [24] He
then goes on to list the landscapes of Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia and
other paintings of forests in Fontainebleau.
Instead, I believe that today readers -
unlike Corinth - must seriously ask themselves this question and seek for an
explanation. The solution is, in my view, to take full awareness that landscape
painting, in those decades, contributed essentially to the artistic renewal in Germany
and the region of the world where Leistikow drew inspiration from: Northern
Europe, the Anglo-Saxon world and Eastern Europe. First, we had an evolution
from romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich) to naturalism (Leibl, Düsseldorf
School) and then to symbolism (Böcklin, Hodler). The German landscape painting
was obviously influenced by the French and European post-impressionism
(Gauguin, Cezanne, van Gogh), but Leistikow precisely acted as a point of
contact with the Scandinavian world and indirectly - through it – also with
Eastern Europe and Russia. Moreover, from the experience of landscape painting
of those years in Europe were born important experiences in the United States.
If the combination of painting and nature
characterizes the entire history of art, it definitely takes a central role in
the culture of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It is a phenomenon that crosses borders and is the product of romanticism and
its variations. Intuitively, I believe that the multiplication, in that period,
of the painters consciously renouncing to reproduce the human figure has a
parallel (in the same years) in the development of symphonic music, which states
the independence of the musical notation from the word.
Even today, one of the most used mottos in
German musical culture is an Italian phrase that Antonio Salieri had originally
used long before, in 1786, in a completely different context, as the title for a
comic opera from him: “Prima la musica e poi le parole” (Music first, and then
the words). Salieri could not know it, but what in his opera was only an
expression of a personal challenge between a musician and a lyricist - which
ended with the joint agreement to compose an opera of Italian style – later on
became, in the romantic world, the heart of the problem of the nineteenth century
German symphonic music: the proclamation of the superiority of the music on the
song, as a more adequate instrument of musical manifestation of feelings,
thanks to the harmonious relationship between music and nature. In that world, singing
will return only as an integral part of the musical notation (think to Wagner).
There are parallels that are easy to track across the Northern Europe (think of
the Scandinavian symphonic music, from Grieg to Sibelius and Nielsen, and the
Scandinavian landscape painting of those decades).
In a pictorial context, the equivalent of the
motto on symphonic music could therefore be: "Nature first, and then
the figures." And the idea, then, would be that of the superiority of the
landscape on the other pictorial genres, as a means of artistic representation
of the feelings, due to the intrinsic link between painting and nature. As the
entire post-romantic innovation in music was played on the tension between
music and singing (Richard Strauss, Mahler), also the artistic experimentation
(in the years immediately preceding and following Leistikow) moves on stylistic
variations of landscape.
This post is accompanied by a series of
images with which I have tried to provide a visual narrative of the path of the
German landscape painting in this period of time, starting from the romanticism
of Friedrich to conclude with the style of the last years of Corinth (a style often
called ‘expressionist’, although he would have never accepted that term). Seen
in this perspective, the succession of landscapes published here is something
more than just a simple game, but explains how that genre has been at the very heart
of both the diffusion of European art in the world as well as of its evolution
over time: you can see the historical sources (Friedrich, Böcklin) and the two
masters of Leistikow (Eschke, Gude), the other German-speaking symbolists and secessionists
of central and Eastern European (Hodler, Schiele), the Nordic (Willumsen,
Gallen-Kallela, Mønsted), the Russians (Dubovskoy, Bialynicki-Birula), the Americans
(Whistler, A. Harrison, Lawson, Hopper), to end with Corinth and the other German
impressionists in Berlin (Liebermann and Slevogt) and finally the German
expressionist Macke. Many of these artists were not exclusively landscape
painters (as was instead Leistikow), but all of them felt the need to express
their modernity also through the landscape. Scrolling through these pictures
makes us think that this is what Leistikow probably would had wanted: to be
placed in the history of landscape art as part of an evolutionary process in a
regional, if not global context. With a jump in time our image gallery will
then end today with one of the best-selling contemporary painters, the
"radically traditionalist" Peter Doig, also a landscape painter. The
future has often its heart in the past.
2. A victim or a manipulator?
Leistikow certainly had since his youth all
talents of a great polemicist. In fact, he understood that, starting from a
situation of absolute inferiority vis-à-vis the new imperial power (indeed, a very
aggressive power even in ideological terms: think of the Kulturkampf, the struggle conducted by government against the
church in those decades), the only possibility was to pretend to be a victim of
institutions. And he succeeded very well to do it. Thus, for example, he argued
- and his view was taken and certified by Corinth, as well as repeated by all critics,
until a few years ago – that he was expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts in
Berlin after only six months, with the pretext “of being devoid of talent”. [25] Well, it is now certain that it was not
true: on the occasion of a retrospective in 2008 at the Bröhan Museum in Berlin
one hundred years after the death [26], the art critic Sabine Meister did archival
researches in the Academy of Berlin and discovered that the painter not only
abandoned the institution at his own initiative, preferring to pursue his
studies as a private student with the German landscape painter Eschke and the
already mentioned Norwegian landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude, but that he
could even attend selectively some courses at that same Academy over the years,
on the advice of Gude himself. The Academy, therefore, was not a completely
rigid institution.
Ms Meister has also doubts about the veracity
of the rejection of a painting by Leistikow in the new style, which – as
already mentioned – would have been denied admission for the exhibition to be
held in the Berlin station Lehrter Bahnhof in 1898 (and which caused the birth
of the Secession). It is in any case well-known that as the work was included
in the National Gallery in Berlin as from 1900, after being purchased by a
wealthy collector (Richard Israel) and donated to the Gallery. [27]
Another utterly implausible argument concerns
the novel "On the threshold." Corinth is reporting that a single copy
only of the novel was sold, by himself (does it mean I was the second purchaser?).
Corinth recalls that Leistikow loved to say that, having sold a single copy of
the book, and having delivered a few others to friends and acquaintances, at
its expense, he received an invoice from the publisher, not to be paid of his copyrights,
but with the demand for a (ridiculous low) payment. Even this is a totally
unreliable statement. Leistikow certainly has not gone down in history as a
writer, but he had, as we have said, important contacts in the literary world
of Berlin (and the novel is perhaps a little heavy and bombastic, but still
reads well today, once one overcomes the psychological difficulty to read 268 pages
in gothic font).
One thing is certain: Leistikow had understood
that, in any struggle, it is essential to shoot concentrically on one single,
highly symbolic enemy, and the one was Anton von Werner, whom he described as a
Mephistopheles with terms reported from Corinth in the Life; terms that recall the exact description of the devil in
Goethe's Faust. Today these words can make people smile, but it is true that
every time he spoke of von Werner, Leistikow compared him to Satan. For
example, the Life reports the
passages where Leistikow defends the new director of the National Gallery in
Berlin, Hugo von Tschudi, from attacks by von Werner and the emperor himself,
for having placed at the centre of the Museum, in 1897, a painting by Cezanne.
Corinth cites Leistikow when he refers to von Werner like this: "The famous
spirit that always wants the bad and always creates the good, assisted him in
word and deed, it is unknown whether it invoked or not." [28] It is a quote from a famous phrase of
Goethe, where the devil is presented as "the spirit that always
denies." However, in describing von
Werner as the evil, Leistikow exaggerated, and in fact Tschudi not only
survived the attack, but became one of the most important German directors of
his era. In 1903 the art critic Max Osborn wrote: "The Bastille is taken,
the 'modern' won.“ [29] The Kaiser himself, who had said "Any art that
goes beyond the laws and limits that I have set myself is not art anymore"
[30], had failed to prevent that the new aesthetic trends were successful. Perhaps,
it could have been even possible to grant the honours of war to von Werner.
Let me be clear: the fierce controversy
certainly did not depend on the diabolic nature of individuals. Simply, in
Germany those years, the artistic avant-gardes proposed themselves to public
attention in such an accelerated process that each generation had to cope with
its dialectic controversy: in the next decade, for example, the still young
critic and director Max Sauerlandt purchased for the first time a painting by
the expressionist Ernst Nolde for the museum in Halle in 1913: the Abendmahl (Last Supper). It was the
first public purchase of some importance of an expressionist, and this raised a
memorable attack against Sauerlandt by the general director of the museums of
Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode, a real powerman in his field. This created a debate
with many voices and particularly violent tones. Also in this case, despite the
disproportion of forces, Sauerlandt will prevail. Twenty years later, to the
contrary the attack against modern art of Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels between
1933 and 1937 had a really devilish profile.
 |
| Fig. 3) The version published by Fachbuchverlag-Dresden in 2016. The cover page displays Lovis Corinth's Portrait of Walter Leistikow (1900) |
Another aspect that Leistikow had learned
quickly was that also a real fighter should stop at times, exactly to
consolidate past successes and later on to lead the aesthetic debate on a more advanced
frontline. So, speaking of the Group XI, he wrote in 1896: "What five years
ago still terrified, now cannot even create the slightest surprise. So fast is time,
and art criticism must adapt." [31]
Let me make a perhaps improper comparison: one seems to read Gramsci speaking
of cultural hegemony.
3. A cosmopolitan or a patriot?
The third contradictory element concerns
the German patriotic reading - very strong in the last lines of the book of
Corinth – of the life and work of Leistikow as an artist and intellectual:
"His art had grown into full merger with the ground (Boden) of our German fatherland (Vaterland): quite rightly we can proclaim him a German artist. And
if one day - year after year - the Germans will eventually recover their
national art in their fullness, then he will have to be counted among its first
promoters. As a German, he will remain forever in our memory and in memory of
those who will follow us." [32] It is the terminology of the stiffest
German nationalism.
What nonsense! Leistikow had been the cultural
bridge between Germany and the Scandinavian and Nordic world (he had studied with
a Norwegian painter, had brought Munch to Berlin, he had seen the unknown van
Gogh exposed in Copenhagen - first among the Germans – and made sure he would
be exposed in Berlin, had married a Danish, met in Berlin and Copenhagen with many
intellectuals of the Nordic world, had great admiration for their painting,
literature, philosophy. From what has been said, it is obvious that Copenhagen
was actually his second home in the artistic sense. It is difficult to
attribute to him any pan-German instincts (do not forget that Prussia had conducted
two wars against Denmark not many decades before, to annex Schleswig).
In reality, however, his contacts went even
beyond the Scandinavian world. He was one of the firsts to appreciate American
art. He had contacts with Poland (with Stanisław Przybyszewski, one of the
leading intellectuals of Młoda Polska,
the Young Poland, who lived a long time in Berlin). In 1893 he went to Paris
and, if he did neither have a particular passion for the Impressionists nor for
post-impressionists, there he found a way to tie new contacts with the painters
of the North and of the new continent: in an article that year on 'Modern Art
in Paris’ - published in the essay by Margit Bröhan and of which we will speak more
later on – he wrote: "The whole elementary force (urwüchsige Kraft) comes from Northern Europe and America." [33]
Moreover, there is no doubt at all that
Leistikow did not target French art in his controversies, but the official
painting of Berlin, with its Prussian militarist legacy. And in a totally consistent
and reciprocal way, one of the arguments used against the Berlin Secession by
von Werner was that its members had betrayed the reasons of Germany, drawing
inspiration from French art. So, for his enemies, Leistikow was a traitor to
his country. Something absolutely wrong! In his love for Scandinavia, Leistikow
was following a deeply German tradition: think that the inventor of the modern
German landscape painting, Caspar Friedrich, had studied in Copenhagen and drawn
big reasons of inspiration from the Nordic world. Even the Düsseldorf school
had generated interest in Scandinavia, Russia and the United States. And Berlin
was an irresistible magnet for northerners. In short, even the most genuine
German tradition was an integral part of an artistic world with multicultural
facets, just on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War.
Yet, Corinth (who, as noted, in his
biographical writings drips resentment against Paris) feels the need to
heighten his just dead friend as a hero of a new national artistic tradition,
in line with his own anti-French sentiment.
Upon arrival in Berlin, in 1883, Leistikow
shows immediately, since the choice of his masters, a specific interest in
landscapes: he sorts out (and is not expelled) from the Academy, where he would
have received a specific training focused primarily on the study of the nude,
and chooses to become a student of Hermann Eschke and the Norwegian Hans
Fredrik Gude: the first is a marine painter, the second is the result of the
meeting between the Nordic culture and the Düsseldorf School. In a short novel with an autobiographic
background, entitled "Her cousin" (Seine Cousine) of 1893, Leistikow speaks of a young painter who
voluntarily decides to leave the academy, just because he wants to be sure he
would not take care of the study of figures, and wishes to devote only to nature
and large outdoors. His classmates consider him a "deserter".
To leave the Academy was therefore a
radical ideological choice. In those years Leistikow had become an integral
part of the symbolist literary scene in Berlin. And also to his literary
friends he showed that radical determination: in a letter to the future Nobel
Prize for Literature Gerhart Hauptmann, who begged him to illustrate a poetry collection of him, Leistikow said January 24, 1904 that he could not do it, because
he was totally unable even to conceive (ersinnen)
anything else that was not a landscape. [34].
The same naturalist choice is - implicitly
– at the very centre of the novel Auf der
Schwelle (On the threshold), published by Leistikow in 1896, but actually
written in 1893. The title refers to the difficult process of maturation of the
writer Hans Lürssen, a process that materializes between love disappointments
and intense friendships. Written in the year of his stay in Paris, where among
other things he met the poet Maeterlinck, and at the height of his symbolist
painting phase, the novel definitely belongs to what is referred to in German
symbolist literature (Jugendstil) as
the specific 'floral' style, with a characteristic blend of
mystical-philosophical motives, an attempt to use a very sophisticated language
and at the same time many decadent thematic attitudes. Frequent are the
landscape descriptions. The reflections on the weakness of character, on the
impossibility to communicate and on the sufferance of the mankind permeate the
novel of a sense of sadness and melancholy.
Here too the autobiographical references
are important, even if Lürssen is not a painter, but a writer. The central
theme is the opposition between the world of interpersonal relations and the
sphere of intellectual interests, the latter dependent upon natural
environment. The plot of the novel is to demonstrate, in the final analysis,
that the force of artistic creation can only be derived from the 'physical'
relationship of the artist with nature (and, more generally, from his immersion
in the places that surround him, since in this case it is the full immersion of
Lürssen in the great city of Berlin to return him the power to write). Instead,
the 'physical' relation of the artist with the persons interacting with him
sentimentally is quite disappointing, because the passion of love can only
cause illusions, misunderstanding and lack of communication. Lürssen is a
man of great intellectual passions (between the characters of the novel you can
recognize many of the writers and philosophers whom Leistikow in Berlin spent
time with in those years), but unable to fully manifest their affection. In a
clearly theatrical interaction, the young Lürssen - a literate arrived in
Berlin from the province - fails to have rewarding romance relationships with
three young women (when he loves, he is mocked; when he is loved, he does not
notice), and emerges destroyed from the last episode, but finds the opportunity
to begin anew: it is the physical proximity with the environment around him
that returns him the intellectual strength needed for literature and
philosophy, while on the contrary the passion of love neutralizes his creative
ability. And in the last lines of the novel, while he returns to Berlin by
train, the miracle renews that had already occurred when, very young, he had
reached for the first time a station of the large city: "The old magic,
that once the great city had aroused against him, became active again. He could
not escape it. Something seductive, promising was before him, as a mystery, a
secret of life. The train came to a halt: Hans came down the steps, and his
eyes shone in a secret expectation." [35]
The man, therefore, is an integral part of the space in which he lives, has a
direct relationship with it, and derives from it - much more than from any
interaction with other people, and certainly more than from amorous interaction
- the vital energy for artistic creation.
Leistikow (we saw it) persuaded Corinth to
come to Berlin writing him that he was wallowing in money. Therefore, the love
for the landscape, which in his youth had been an ideological claim, became
with time a revenue of money, which allowed the painter to live in comfort and to
travel around a lot. Moreover, a few years later the same success smiled on
Lovis Corinth with his series of paintings on the Walchensee, the Bavarian lake
where he had a country house.
How much of Leistikow’s focus on the
representation of forests and lakes in the Mark of Brandenburg (where Berliners
had their country estates) was the result of poetic inspiration and how much of
a good marketing strategy? There were probably both components.
Listening to Corinth, the Brandenburg
landscape painting of the friend was the result of a pure aesthetic conversion,
which – for God’s sake – came to overcome his symbolism: "The eyes of
Leistikow suddendly opened to the harsh beauty of the woods and lakes of the Mark
of Brandenburg. Leistikow has been able to represent like no other the charm of
melancholy, placed in the forests of pines, whose dark knotted tips railed
against the clouds in the wind and whose feet were reflected in a black pond.
" [36]
If it was a pure poetic intuition, it was
his fortune; and in fact that of Leistikow became, in many ways, a mannerist way
of painting, pointing to the quantity of the works produced, probably also in
order to generate an income that would allow him to pay for medical care. Here
is what it said in a letter of August 20, 1904, addressed to the already
mentioned Gerhart Hauptmann, and reproduced here in full.
To
Gerhart Hauptmann
Berlin W. Geisberg Str. 33
August 20, 1904
Berlin W. Geisberg Str. 33
August 20, 1904
My
dear Hauptmann,
How can I thank you for your good words? And how happy I was to spend my convalescence at your place! As you know, the days at your house are for me like days of celebration.
But this is the crucial thing! Right now I have no time for holidays. Because of my illness, because of the inadequate summer trip, I fell behind in my work, so now – whether I like it or not - I have to rush in the forests of pines with their round lakes, to somehow meet the expectations that are addressed to me.
And it is always so: the world wants the forest of Grunewald from me or what it conceives of it [Die Welt will Grunewald von mir oder was sie darunter versteht]. Fortunately, this also corresponds to my artistic tendencies. So today I'm going to work a bit of time at the Wannsee lake, and then I will go in the direction of Grunau. I always want to paint two paintings at a time - I own two hands for this - to be able to realize many of them.
In early October I will go again to the sanatorium of Martensbrunner (Meran); I hope I will succeed before to recover a bit of time and then I will come. At the condition that you are still here. Thank you for all her kindness to Gerda. (...)
The warmest greetings from Anna and me, to you and Grete as well as to Butzi.
Leistikow paints every day; in the evening,
dinners are organized during which he always sells one or two pictures. The
artist knows what his customers want; and therefore, although he is painting en plein air, his paintings appear to be
subjective interpretations of the landscape more than real landscapes. [37]
The
charm of melancholy: a poetic motif?
Following literally what Leistikow wrote to
Hauptmann, one would think he was painting serially identical paintings for an almost
industrially organised sale. Not so, however, according to Margit Bröhan, who agrees
that the images by Leistikow are not accurate representations of nature, but also
argues that this is because of aesthetic reasons and due to the singularity of
the fusion of different styles.
"The analysis of the Berlin paintings by
Leistikow leads to the question whether the landscapes reproduce exactly what
he sees, without intentional changes, additions or omissions. The stylization
that Leistikow had developed in the northern images of the half of the nineties
was used sparingly in the Berlin images; it was in fact overcome as a stylistic
device in the late nineties, in favour of a composition style that was based on
lines and surfaces, but did not mark the return of the naturalistic painting
with its postulates of truth and objectivity. Leistikow's painting is not even
an art-pour-l'art impressionist painting
that reduces the painter to only eye and hand. Leistikow does not even want to
limit himself to a non-binding representation of the nature, but differs
between beautiful and ugly, between chaos and order, between nature and
landscape. He creates and interprets, unifying and re-formulating the
impression of nature. Nature and culture are overcome - in a form of creative
subjectivism - in a higher unity. If his paintings do not reproduce arbitrary details,
however, they are not limited to an objective representation. (...) The painting
is nothing but the subject of dialogue with nature in a state of absolute calm.
To the well-ordered landscape - which Leistikow amends of all that can be
troubling and disturbing - corresponds the dreamy serenity of the observer. The
painting does not reproduce the experience of a landscape, but a state of
poetry in a landscape composition. The studies of nature are the material for
the expression of an idea." [38]
The
limits of the Life: A eulogy or a
biography?
Today, the criticism is unanimous in
regarding the authenticity of the personal testimony of Corinth as the highest
quality of the Life. However, both
Kertin Englert in 1995 [39], as well as Raimar Lacher in 2000 [40] cannot help
but notice that there is no sufficient critical detachment, necessary to make
more diversified judgments. In short, to listen to Corinth, everything made by
Leistikow is to be uncritically considered as beautiful. Moreover, the
biographical reconstruction is lacking, especially in documenting the period
when the two did not knew yet each other, or at least did not meet frequently.
We are therefore more in the context of eulogy that art criticism.
The only explanation that is offered to narrate
how a young intellectual could play such an important role in the Berlin of
his years consists of listing his extraordinary personal qualities. Leistikow
is seen as a virtuous natural talent, outside of any cultural reference context.
As mentioned above, any reference to the participation of young Leistikow group
poetic-literary Friedrichshagen (which was inspired by Nietzsche and Tolstoy)
is missing. There is no reference to the experience as a theatre critic for the
association Freie Bühne, to the
impact of the Belgian Symbolist poet Maeterlinck whom he met in Paris in 1893
(Maeterlinck, the great inspirer of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, will be the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1911), to the relationship with the world of classical music, and, in this area,
the friendship with the composer and critic Max Marschalk [41]; nothing is
said, moreover, of the relations with Italian and French artists.
Also the discussion of the aesthetic models
of Leistikow is basically hasty. Corinth does not mention it, but the
transition from naturalism to symbolism (a phase which Corinth basically did
not like, since he writes – at the conclusion of this period - that in 1897
Leistikow "had again touched down to earth" [42]) is not a whim: it
is due (writes Lacher, referring to Leistikow's writings on modern art in
Paris) to a reflection on the monumental painting of Puvis de Chavannes and to the
contacts he had already at that time with the Munich Secession painters (Eckmann,
Strathmann), contacts on which Corinth had to be well informed, since they were
among his closest friends. [43]
Leistikow:
a finer art critic than Corinth?
The short essay "Modern Art in
Paris" by Leistikow offers us a proof of his critical qualities. Written
in 1893, the article has a central thesis: if Paris had been the centre of the
art world in the 70’s of the XIX century, it was not more like that, twenty
years later, because art had become a universal phenomenon. Leistikow assesses
negatively, above all, the official French art, that of the Salons, with its academicism and its
inadequate limitation to the national art scene. The negative judgment derives
not only from the exhibition methodology (too many pictures, and of poor
quality), but from the repetitive nature of compositional models. The real
discovery in Paris is that of the artists exhibiting at the Champ de Mars: the representatives of
American art first of all (one cannot speak of modern art without thinking in
the first place of Whistler, according to Leistikow), and also very young
artists from all over the world, bringing a new sense of colour and
compositional freedom to the French art.
Leistikow is thus an innovator, who even in
Paris wants to break with the academics patterns. At the same time, he is a
witness of French art who is not able to grasp the full meaning of the
movements of his time: the great French artist of his day is - in his opinion –
still Puvis de Chavannes. He had great intuition for the Nordics (Munch, van
Gogh), but not for the French. No reference is done, on that year, to Cezanne
and other great artists of post-impressionism. He will discover them in
Germany, later on (and here we must say that the same thing had happened to
Corinth, who stayed in Paris 4 years and never visited an exhibition of
impressionists or post-impressionists).
A
counterproductive eulogy?
Most of the
questions on Leistikow that we set ourselves in this second part of the post do
not appear in the Life, whose not
sufficiently thorough analysis prevents the author to grasp the basic themes of
the artist and his time in Berlin. In essence, the book was printed at the
wrong time and in the least convincing form. We are in 1910, the year in which
the Secession is subjected to harsh tensions, leading to the break between
Corinth, the Impressionists and the more traditional representatives on the one
hand, and Nolde and the other Expressionists on the other hand.
Written with
insufficient critical depth, the Life
seems to have been drafted exactly to suggest to the young rebelling artists
the model of an artist who (despite having led the revolt against von Werner)
never questioned the art project of the Berlin Secession. Above all, he had
never confronted himself with the central themes that Edvar Munch - the artist
he himself had brought to Germany - had placed at the center of the aesthetic
discussion: colour, deformation of the figure, and sense of drama. A
revolutionary, who is however presented by Corinth as still perfectly
compatible with his own impressionism, respectful of classical tradition. The
praise of his friend may have seemed to the "young painters" as an
indirect attempt to Corinth to make them a sermon on what to do, at the very
moment of their rebellion. Thus, Leistikow was immediately removed from the
world of poetry and creativity of the new generation, now projected towards the
formal experiences of expressionism.
Corinth, in
short, was at the same time the major source of information on the life of
Leistikow but - unconsciously - also the one that ended up diminishing his
overall significance for the history of art. They were great friends, but
perhaps Corinth never did understand him thoroughly. This article aims to
contribute to a reflection on the relationship between the two painters, the role
they have had in art and in literature on art and also on the cultural
mediation who they exercised both at
national and at regional and global level in Germany and in the very first
decade of the XX century in Europe.
NOTES
[23] Bröhan, Margrit – Walter
Leistikow (1865-1908) Maler der Berliner Landschaft, Berlin, Nicolaische
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1989, pp. 170.
[24] Corinth, Lovis – Das Leben Walter
Leistikows. Ein Stück Berliner Kulturgeschichte. Neu herausgegeben, kommentiert
und mit einen Nachwort versehen von Reimar F. Lacher, Gerubedr Mann verlag,
Berlin, 2000, pp. 68-69
[25] Corinth, Lovis – Das Leben …,
quoted, p. 17
[26] Meister, Sabine
– Der Fall Leistikow. Mythen, Strategien und
Erfolge (The Leistikow case. Myths, strategies,
successes), in: Stimmungslandschaften.
Gemälde von Walter Leistikow (1865-1908) (Mood landscapes. Painting by
Walter Leistikow), Berlino, Deutscher Verlab and Bröhan Museum, 2008.
[27] Meister, Sabine
– Der Fall Leistikow … (quoted), p. 57
[28] Corinth, Lovis – Das Leben …, quoted,
pp. 68-69
[29] Lachert, Reimar F. – Afterwards
to: Corinth, Lovis – Das Leben Walter Leistikows. Ein Stück Berliner
Kulturgeschichte, Berlin, Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000, p. 217
[30] Lachert, Reimar F. – Afterwards
to: Corinth, Lovis – (quoted) , p. 217
[31] Bröhan, Margrit – Walter
Leistikow … (quoted), p. 34
[32] Corinth, Lovis – Das Leben …,
quoted, p. 132
[33] Bröhan, Margrit – Walter
Leistikow … (quoted), p. 105-110.
[34] Bröhan, Margrit – Walter
Leistikow … (quoted), p. 134
[35] Leistikow, Walter – Auf der
Schwelle, Berlin, Avi Verlag, 2008, p.268.
[36] Corinth, Lovis – Das Leben …, quoted,
p. 57
[37] Lachert, Reimar F. – Postfazione
a Corinth, Lovis … (quoted), pp. 223
[38] Bröhan, Margrit – Walter
Leistikow … (quoted), p. 64
[39] Englert, Kerstin – Introduction
to: Lovis Corinth, Gesammelte Schriften (Raccolta di scritti), Berlin, Gebrüder
Mann Verlag, 1995, p. 24
[40] Lachert, Reimar F. – Afterwards
to: Corinth, Lovis … (quoted), pp. 207-208, pp. 221-222
[41] Lachert, Reimar F. – Afterwards
to: Corinth, Lovis … (quoted), pp. 208-210
[42] Corinth, Lovis – Das Leben …,
(quoted), p. 57
[43] Lachert, Reimar F. – Afterwards to: Corinth, Lovis … (quoted), pp. 212-213
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento