Paul Westheim. Confessions of Artists. Letters, Memoirs and Observations of Contemporary Artists. Part One

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Paul Westheim,
Confessions of Artists.
Letters, Memoirs and Observations of Contemporary Artists.

Propyläen Publishing House, Berlin, 1925, 359 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
Part One

[Original Version: March 2016 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) Paul Westheim’s Anthology of Art History Sources

A German anthology of sources of contemporary art history
in the golden years of the Weimar Republic

The volume Confessions of artists (Künstlerbekentnisse) [1] was published in 1925 by the then forty year old Paul Westheim (1886-1963) [2], one of the central figures of German art history. The volume was dedicated to the German industrialist, art collector and patron Harry Fuld (1879-1932), who had made a fortune by bringing phones into the homes of his countrymen and had invested it in art. In 359 pages, the anthology collected 88 texts by 64 artists, many of which unpublished in Germany [3]. In the essay "Paul Westheim and the Kunstblatt" [4], Lutz Windhöfel, a scholar of Westheim, explains that preparations lasted four years [5].

We are in the golden years of the Weimar Republic, which had just left hyperinflation behind, had overcome (albeit only temporarily) a number of serious institutional crises, was experiencing a phase of relative stability (which would be brutally interrupted by the 1929 financial crisis) and even allowed itself the luxury of snubbing the imminent Nazi threat. However, with the benefit of insight, to ignore the Nazi danger turned to be a big mistake, as the Mein Kampf was also published in 1925. Westheim, a Jew, would soon find it out the hard way, being forced to flee first to France and then to Mexico. Two of the artists whose texts were included by him in this 1925 anthology (Josef Čapek, 1887-1945 and Moissey Kogan, 1879-1943) would die only a few years later in concentration camps. Many more would be forced into exile.

If the Confessions had the clear intention of documenting the art of the last two generations, they however did it from an almost 'timeless' viewpoint. Indeed, Westheim wanted to testify that, despite their variety and modernity, contemporary artists shared the same creative genius as all those who had preceded them over centuries. It is certainly no coincidence that, with the exception of the letters, whose date was seen as an integral part of the text, the book did not offer any systematic chronology of the writings included in the anthology: this absence was entirely intentional, suggesting that, according to Westheim, the artists’ statements should not be considered as being attributable to any precise chronological event, and thus as a reaction to specific occurrences, but should have a timeless value. With the help of the sources on the internet, I still managed to identify the date of almost all the texts, providing to indicate time and original location of the sources in this post.

In any case, the anthology did not include any reference to the chronicle of those years, if not a sad joke of the cartoonist Walter Trier (1890-1951), who in his memoirs (titled Panoptikum) wrote, in 1922, that he was happy for having now finally reached success, for even having become a billionaire, and explained he had used that huge amount of money to finally buy a silver spoon for his daughter [6]. With that exceptional reference to hyperinflation, the turbulent politics of the years following the First World War remained off the Confessions. An example: the painter Ludwig Meidner had launched a "Manifesto to all artists, poets and musicians" in 1919, seeking to mobilize cultural avant-gardes in favour of the socialist revolution [7]. He was a great friend of Westheim since 1917 and shared with him the feeling of rejection towards the official nationalistic and belligerent policy of Emperor William II. They exchanged views on it in letters written while he was at the front [8]. Yet his text "On real art" [9], published for the first time in the Confessions, showed him once his interest had shifted to mystical themes, and when he was hoping that Jewish religion - i.e. the 'real art' – would make possible to cure the most tremendous ills of society. Nothing appeared of the previous political manifestos and his pacifist views.

The decision to collect testimonies of artists in an anthology form was a new development originating from those years. Only shortly before, in 1920, the volume Bekenntnisse deutscher Künstler (Confessions of German artists) of Hanns Fechner (1860-1931) had been released. He was a Berlin-based portrait painter who had published numerous writings, both autobiographical as well as of specifically literary nature, and had collected testimonies of academic painters of his time, centred on the theme of art internationalism [10].

In 1921 had appeared in France the first anthology of writings from artists of the modern era, entitled Les artistes écrivains, edited by Paul Ratouis de Limay (1881-1963), which covered the years from Leon Battista Alberti to Thédore Rousseau, a landscape painter of the Barbizon school, and therefore excluded impressionists and post-impressionists.

Westheim’s passion for the testimonies of artists was entirely consistent with his aesthetic conception: he refused to see painters, sculptors or architects as members of groups or currents, and every time interpreted them only as individuals, always different among each other. He was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer and his "The World as Will and Representation", on the basis of which it is the spirit of the artist to give him the ability to grasp and represent reality. As an introduction to a 1918 theoretical writing, entitled "The world as representation. The way to the vision of art" [11], the German critic reproduced a famous page of Schopenhauer: "The world is my representation... It becomes clear and certain, that people do not know sun and earth, but they are always and only their eyes, which see the sun, and their hands, which touch the ground; it also becomes clear that the world around us exists only as representation, and therefore always and only in relation to the other, the representative, who is himself." Thus, artists' confessions were used to describe how art creators appropriated the world for themselves, both through physical tools and spiritual means. Thanks to this appropriation of reality, the artist creates a new order (Ordnung) that provides a point of synthesis between sensual (sinnlich) and spiritual (geistlich) aspects. And the theme was so important for Westheim, that he opened with it the theoretical essay "Thinking on art". [12]

With the Kunstblatt, the magazine on art, Westheim was a star of the German art scene in those years. He was the leader of what we might consider the 'moderate' wing of modern German art criticism. Politically, he was a liberal. In aesthetic terms, he had strong references for French classicism (on which he had written an essay in 1923 [13]) and, as we have seen, for the nineteenth century German aesthetic philosophy. During those years, his great rival was Herwarth Walden, the promoter of the most radical German expressionism, founder of the magazine and of the Berlin gallery Der Sturm (The Tempest), politically close to Marxism. The two exchanged fire articles against each other from their respective journals. Walden accused Westheim of pseudo-expressionism; Westheim responded blaming Walden of market manipulation, through indecent speculative operations to the benefit of his artists, first of all Kandinsky.

When reading the Confessions, we must therefore understand that the anthology had a twofold purpose. On the one hand Westheim wanted to present a reassuring image of modern art to the cultivated reader from the German mid-bourgeoisie, in a phase when there was a strong commercial interest in art as a safe haven. He was, in fact, the art critic supporting the so-called ‘return to order’. Perhaps, he even offered a more classical interpretation of the German modern art than would do, ten years later, the critics of nationalist orientation, like Max Sauerlandt (who would promote Nolde as the climax of the German national art, as opposed to the French one - see Emile Nolde, Mein Leben [My Life] Part Two - The Anti-Classical Painter, Paragraph Max Sauerlandt as critic of Emil Nolde). Westheim wrote instead in a highly cosmopolitan and European perspective, opposing the heroic-nationalist orientations of the German vanguards in the previous years before the Great War (and again later on in the 1930s).

On the other hand - and this is the second dimension of the anthology - the Confessions are also an attempt to rewrite the history of German and European art literature, diminishing the importance of the writings of the main expressionist streams of the early decades of the twentieth century (Die Brücke, or The Bridge and Der blaue Reiter, or The blue Rider), marginalizing the texts of abstract artists, cancelling the manifestos of Dada and experimentalism, rewarding the theories of figurative art, and promoting interest in the writings of a host of new German artists. It should be very clear that this attempt eventually failed. A few decades later, many of the artists’s writings contained in the Confessions would not be remembered anymore as representative of the main currents of German art of the twentieth century, and the texts would not be to found anymore, after Westheim’s anthology has gone out of commerce.

Today Walden, the supporter of rebel art, is considered the benchmark of art criticism in the Weimar Republic, because those years are mainly remembered for expressionism and abstract art, i.e. the art streams that served as inspiration to Americans and Europeans after the Second World War. The test of history, then, was won decades after by expressionism, abstraction and dada. The final outcome of the clash between the then present different critical interpretations was however not the final outcome of lesser or greater dialectical and polemical skills of the leading German critics of the Weimar Republic: both Westheim (the liberal, favourable to figurative), Walden (the Marxist, supporter of expressionism and the abstract) and Sauerlandt (the nationalist, special advocate of Nolde) were eventually swept away by the advent of Nazism. Westheim - as mentioned - would take refuge first in France and then in Mexico, where he would begin a second life by becoming a famous critic of pre-Columbian art. Walden would repair in Moscow where his last traces would be lost in 1941, when it would disappear as a result of Stalin's purges against the large community of German Communists fled to Russia. And Sauerlandt would die instead of illness, shortly after he was sacked from his position as director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg in 1934; up to the end, he would be convinced that he had been completely misunderstood by the Nazis. Instead, the rediscovery of Walden as a cornerstone of expressionism in Weimar Germany would be the result of the work of German critics in the after-war time, under the influence of American abstract expressionism.

With the Confessions, in short, Westheim aimed at rewriting the history of German art literature (and art), but failed to do it. I do not think it is a coincidence that the volume has never been published again after the first edition of 1925. Nonetheless, we will attempt to show that it was a fundamental text to understand the debate on art in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Germany. And it was, anyway, a central text for disseminating the sources of contemporary art history among the public.

The role of Westheim’s Confessions in the German art literature

The title Bekenntnisse (Confessions) was inspired by the Confessions of Saint Augustine (397 A.D.) and those (equally known at the time) of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782). The volume offered the cultivated German-speaking readers  (who had already read the main text of Julius von Schlosser, the Kunstliteratur published in Vienna in 1924, whose first edition covered however art literature only until the mid-eighteenth century) an anthology of autograph texts of artists of the last two generations, from the Roman letters of Hans von Marées (1837-1887) addressed to the theorist and art critic Konrad Fiedler, still all characterized by the nineteenth-century idealistic culture, to the statements on constructivism and suprematism of the Russians Puni (1892-1956), Malevich (1878-1935) and Lissitsky (1890-1941), in the years when the Soviet Union was still at the forefront of art experimentation.

In those years, the model of the Confessions was particularly fashionable. We already mentioned the Confessions of German artists by Hanns Fechner, published in 1920. In 1926, i.e. one year after the volume of Westheim, Hermann Uhde-Bernays (1873-1965) edited the Letters of artists. Confessions of painters,sculptures and architects from five centuries, a more extensive anthology that opened with Leon Battista Alberti and closed with the letters of Van Gogh [14]. The anthology of Uhde-Bernays was reprinted continuously until the sixties. As Andreas Zeising explains in a recent article on the use of communication tools by artists, they had recourse in those years to the confession as a communication strategy [15]. That fashion was driven by typical aspects of idealism and historicism, which saw history as a succession of personal manifestations of will revealing the Zeitgeist, the spirit of times.

Zeising also explained that the publication of memoirs and letters of artists had spread in the German world as from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In Germany, great editorial successes were recorded first with the Memoirs of a German painter (Lebenserinnerungen eines deutschen Malers) of the romantic painter Ludwig Richter (1885), the translation of the Letters to the brother of Van Gogh (1906) and the posthumous publication of two volumes of the Letters to the mother (Briefe an seine Mutter) by Anselm Feuerbach (1911) [16]. In 1913 was published a booklet, again by Anselm Feuerbach, entitled Letters and confessions (Briefe und Bekenntnisse) [17] while in 1924 were printed the Confessions (Bekenntnisse) by Caspar David Friedrich, of course posthumously [18]. Always of 1925 were Paintings and confessions (Bilder und Bekenntnisse) by Hans Thoma. [19] [20]

The legacy of the Nineteenth Century

The anthology of Westheim documented all steps of German and European art literature in the transition from the nineteenth century to the modern world (one of the last texts was by Charlie Chaplin, as Westheim considered cinema as the new art). However, in the introduction, Westheim proved that he still had very strong links with the German classical world and with the idealistic aesthetics bases of the nineteenth century: "The best that has ever been said about art was written by the artists themselves" [21], he wrote citing a statement by Hugo von Tschudi (1851-1911), one of the great art critics of the previous century. Soon after, Westheim clarified that, in truth, Tschudi had relativized his own statement: "Every artist with great capabilities – wrote von Tschudi - has his own aesthetics, an aesthetics that depends on the person. There is therefore a great danger that he would express himself in an unfair and arbitrary way to third parties. (...) The best which artists have said about art is therefore what they said on their own art." Thus, artists have to be questioned about the art they have created themselves: hence the idea of the testimony, the personal revelation, the confession.

Westheim continued: "Ultimately and decisively, every creative intuition is something elusive, one of those wonderful possibilities of the human spirit, which we can glimpse in an equally intuitive way. However, we will never be capable - fortunately, really never be capable - of fixing it in conceptual terms. The admiration for the brilliant performance is coupled with the desire to at least understand what it is understandable in this inaccessible reality. One can therefore appreciate why it is possible to hope and believe - and rightly so - to seek clarifications or at least indications from the same person who creates. The artist writes from another point of view than all the others who are trying to give these interpretations; he sees the works of art not only as a finished object, as existing entities, as objects taken for granted, but from within, from his own atelier and the ongoing process. Hence, the expectation to obtain, above all, a revelation from the artist about the most enigmatic side of the artwork: about its conception and the translation into reality of this conception. The expectation is, then, that he has not only other things to say, but above all he can speak to us about existential issues." [22]

The link with the German classical world is also demonstrated by the choice of the publisher: the Propyläen Verlag, a new publishing house created in 1919 to disseminate the German classics (Goethe, Schiller). Since 1923, the "Propylaea" publisher printed a famous universal art history, the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte. Even typographically, the bond of the Confessions with the world of German Classicism was strong: for Westheim, "Propylaea" delivered a text in Gothic letters, when we were already then in a transition phase to the use of international typographic fonts (the Kunstblatt, i.e. the magazine of Westheim, was already published in Western characters).

A European intellectual

However, it would be wrong to think that Westheim was simply a man of conservation, the representative of the past. It was one of the great culture providers in Weimar Germany. And he offered to his readers, with the Confessions, an anthology that included the latest state of affairs in international art literature. Some examples: "The aesthetics of the machine. Manufacturing - The artisan and the artist" by Fernand Léger, was published in French in 1924, and translated into English only in 1974 [23], but, thanks to Westheim, was available in German already in 1925. Even today, the text of the conference "The man’s creative mission in the plastic domain", held by Albert Gleizes, one of the most famous 'philosophizing painters', on December 17, 1921 at the Society of Theosophy of Paris, has only been translated in German in the 1925 version published by Westheim and in a Polish one edited in 1927 by Povolozsky (the original publisher of the French version in Paris). In short, for the German reader the Confessions have remained a very useful source of information on the aesthetic guidelines of the artists at the end of the first quarter of the century. Such an updated anthology of art writings was even not available to the French public in those days.

In this post, we want to honour Westheim as a theorist of figurative modern art, but also as a forerunner of European integration. Lutz Windhöfel explains that, when the just thirty year-old Westheim founded the Kunstblatt, in 1917, during the First World War, the German culture was going through a fundamental change. Before the war, and until 1916, art avant-gardes had passionately advocated the conflict and had deeply engaged in war advertising (e.g. producing works of art with a belligerent tone, printed on propaganda brochures for distribution to the soldiers). Thus, for example, already in 1911 a group of artists had published a manifesto, titled Protest deutscher Künstler (The protest of German artists), to protest against the commercial and public success (or influence) of French art in Germany. Nothing to be surprised: in August the same year the French searched from top to bottom the transatlantic Kaiser Wilhelm II, departing from Cherbourg to New York, claiming that the Germans had stolen the Mona Lisa and wanted to transfer it in the United States. Westheim entered the game with his magazine in 1917, when the German public's attitude was radically changing after the massacres of Verdun [24]. Since then, the Kunstblatt aimed at explaining modern art to the Germans as a common mission of all European peoples, without claiming any supremacy of Germany and German art over the others.

This cosmopolitan line featured Westheim’s entire path. In fact, six months before the Confessions, but always in 1925, Westheim and the art critic Carl Einstein, also active in the Kunstblatt, co-edited the "Europe Almanac: painting, literature, music, architecture, sculpture, theatre, film, fashion and other non-trivial observations." It was a fascinating text, which has been republished in facsimile edition a few years ago [25]. It hosted eighty original contributions which the European intelligentsia wrote especially for that occasion, at the request of Westheim and Einstein, on various topics. The goal was to provide the German-speaking public with an overview of what Europe writers and artists just discussed in those years. In addition to texts by artists (articles, poems, reflections by Léger, Kandinsky, Severini, de Vlaminck, Modigliani, Malevich, Le Corbusier, Schlemmer and many others) articles were published by Bertold Brecht, André Gide, Ezra Pound, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie. The last article was by Westheim himself: they were two pages of aphorisms on the role of art criticism, but also an attempt to play down the content of the almanac with some caricurated expressions on art.

I already mentioned that the Almanac was a text that did testify the basic unit of European culture. I must however specify that, while the two curators (Paul Westheim and Carl Einstein) made, in the one hand, profession of hope in culture as an element of solidarity between Europeans, they also declared, on the other hand, their absolute scepticism about any possibility to move towards forms of political unity among Europeans. The Paneuropa movement (1923), the first action group to pursue the goal of the United States of Europe, had just been created; however, it was the subject of their mockery in the preface. The tone of the few introductory lines ("Europe's trade fair") was replicated by an illustration with a significant title, presented just before the index page: "Europe drawn by a madman", with no indication of the author.

That design was perhaps the presentiment that it was too early to advance along the road of European unity, while the strength of nationalism was still intact. That the world did not go in Westheim’s desired direction was moreover demonstrated by a review of the young Otto Schüttler (1905-1974), published in February 1926 in the journal of one of the nationalist and anti-Semitic movements of "völkisch" character (the literal translation is 'popular'), i.e. the Bartels Bund [26], which culturally anticipated National Socialism. The article intended to denounce the danger of what was called "Judaization of the press" (Presseverjudung). Schüttler wrote: "Extraordinarily interesting and important from the point of view of timing is the Almanac released last year by the Kiepenheuer publishing house, which had the characteristic name of Europe and which was published by the two race companions Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim. Over 75 percent of the original contribution is written by foreigners [...] and among the remaining 25 percent, there is no German but only Jews."[27] What for the anti-Semitic nationalist Otto Schüttler was an intolerable insult to the German people, revealed instead Westheim’s ability to frame German art in a European framework.

The first attempt of a Franco-German reconciliation in art

If Europe’s political unification goal was far, Westheim had nevertheless very clear ideas on the need for reconciliation between the aesthetic worlds of France and Germany, after the break that occurred with the 1871 Franco-Prussian War. To this he devoted the essay "Deutsche und französische Kunstanschauung" (The conception of art in Germany and France), published in the collection of articles Für und Wider (Pros and Cons) in 1923 [28].

"Natural sciences know the concept of endosmosis: two cells are side by side, are each separated from the other, and the content of one is transmitted to the other. Until the beginning of the conflict - writes Westheim - the German and French art were marked by a constant endosmosis. A movement on the one hand corresponded to a movement on the other one" [29]. Westheim explained it in his aforementioned essay on "Classicism in France", in which he quoted the correlation between the "mathematical spirit" that run through the French art, from Poussin’s time, and Goethe’s aesthetic theories, and in particular his style definition, as opposed to the simply imitation of nature and to the maniera [30].

If the endosmosis was thus fuelled by large European spirits, "the war also marked a break of this natural process of exchange. The consequence is that the way of considering art took different paths in Germany and in France" [31]. "The specificity of this situation is seen in the fact that, on the one and on the other sides, different forms of artistic will (Kunstwollen) [translator's note: the Kunstwollen is an "artistic category" invented by Alois Riegl of the School of Vienna in 1901, and clearly inspired by Nietzsche] began to develop; they were characterized by a different attitude (Einstellung) for both the creation as well as the creator" [32]. Westheim recognized that, as part of the culture of both countries, there had been the most diverse developments, and that generalizations were arbitrary: "Is the French artist only Delacroix or Ingres or Courbet or Cezanne? The art character of a people is in both extreme swings of a pendulum. The German is in Bach and certainly also in Wagner." [33] Yet, when the two nations went to war and a rivalry was formed between the two cultures, the result was a diversification between two basic guidelines: rationalism in France, romanticism in Germany. Rationalism led - to the extreme - to cubism, romanticism instead to expressionism. Vis-à-vis both cubism and expressionism Westheim had reasons of suspicion.

"The risk of this new art in Germany is called formlessness (Formlosigkeit), the risk of the last evolution of art in France is formalism." [34] In Germany dominated the irrational desire of artists to anchor themselves in ancestral and primitive feelings, getting rid of the critical and reflective control functions of intellect. One believed in a mystical and original force, which had an echo for the performer in the "inner sound" (innerer Klang); it followed that the creation was always individual and autonomous, that it was the result of will more than technical ability, and that the artist's task was to make use of that will to interpret and represent the visible world. The individuality of art prevented creating real art schools; expressionism also lacked the ability to define itself in a unified manner. In France, instead, artists were given the task to "look for elements within themselves that could be shared by more individuals and to generalize their own know-how, creating schools that would be of reference to generations. From genius one had to derive order, from inner necessity a general rule."[35] The artists’ task was to "convert their dreams into reality, transforming what is romantic into what is material, (...) translating the utopia into reality" [36]. The catchwords of the French artistic spirit are therefore: "order, discipline, objectivity, clarity, simplicity, logic". [37]

"It is the teaching of Cezanne's 'sphere, cone and cylinder'. The work of art is an organism, a spiritual body, a unity, in which there can be no randomness and arbitrariness. (...) It is the 'constructive' of which one always talks." [38].

Westheim hoped to return to the original state of endosmosis between the two worlds: the individual and the school, soul and craft. 

Of France he admired the peintres philosophes, philosophizing painters, since the time of Poussin, for their ability to develop theories that offered a rational reading of art; of Germany he valued the idealistic souls, driven by ethical spirit and passion, of artists who pursued painting as a spiritual mission, like Caspar David Friedrich. And his essay on German and French art finished with the words of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798) and Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), the very first German romantics, in their collection of aesthetic essays Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (The heart outbursts of an art loving monk). In a page where they sing the praises of Albrecht Dürer as a spirit that was able to combine the art of northern and southern Europe, they wrote: "Rome and Germany are not part of the same earth? Has the eternal father not tracked roads from north to south, as well as from west to east in our planet? The life of a man is perhaps too short? The Alps cannot be possibly climbed? Well, for all these reasons it should be then possible that more than one love lives in the chest of a man."[39]

This is perhaps the key to read the Confessions: it collected the words of German and French artists, of the heirs of romanticism and rationalism, of philosophizing and spiritual painters, in order to show the underlying unity of art. To contemporary art Westheim assigned therefore the task to reconstruct that unity of Europe that nationalism had broken. And not surprisingly, the essay included illustrations of works where he could capture reciprocal references (think of Max Pechstein’s painting Im Frauenhaus, now lost, where it was evident the influence of Gauguin).

It may seem an obvious scheme, based on a rigid reading (rationalist France, romantic Germany), but one cannot forget that at that time other and quite opposite stereotypes prevailed in Germany: they recognised to French art the supremacy in the use of technical tools, but assigned to German art the superiority in spiritual content. As Norbert Elias taught us, German nationalism was living of the idea that the German culture was superior to French civilization. Therefore, compared to Westheim, the terms were reversed: the Germans were philosophers, while the French were suffering the sin of irrationalism, or at most they were able only to pursue a purely decorative art. Paul Adolf Seehaus (1891-1919) also wrote it in 1916, then in the middle of World War II, in a passage cited in his Confessions: "We have the technical means of France, but the German element will be the new content." [40] He will die young in 1919 for a fulminant pneumonia.

End of Part One

Go to Part Two 


NOTES

[1] Westheim, Paul - Künstlerbekenntnisse: Briefe, Tagebücher, Betrachtungen heutiger Künstler, Berlin, Propyläen, 1923, pp. 359, with 32 tables and 16 drawings in the text.

[2] For a concise information on Paul Westheim see:

  https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/westheimp.htm.

[3] An attachment at page 263 indeed explains that only 18 texts had already been published by other German publishers, which Westheim thanked for the authorisation to reproduce the passages. Internal evidence in the volume also reveals that some of the texts had already been commissioned by Westheim to painters, sculptors and architects for publication in his magazine Kunstblatt. For example, the text by Hans Fehr "From the life and the workshop of Emil Nolde" which presented a few letters by Emil Nolde between 1905 and 1910 (see p. 233), had already been published in Kunstblatt in 1919. Even a letter of the then octogenarian Hans Thoma, dated June 23, 1921 (see p. 21) contained a reference to Westheim’s request to produce a text for the journal.

[4] Windhöfel, Lutz – Paul Westheim und Das Kunstblatt, Cologne, Weimar Vienna, 1995, 408 pages plus 10 pages illustrations. The index is available at: http://d-nb.info/945368488/04

[5] Windhöfel quotes in particular Westheim’s exchange of letters with some painters and architects included in the anthology (Ernesto de Fiori, Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann, Bruno Taut).

[6] Westheim, Paul - Künstlerbekenntnisse… (quoted), p. 322.

[7] The text of the manifesto "An alle Künstler, Dichter, Musik" is published at 

http://www.kunstzitate.de/bildendekunst/manifeste/meidner1919.htm. 

[8] Windhöfel, Lutz – Paul Westheim und Das Kunstblatt… (quoted), p. 184

[9] Westheim, Paul - Künstlerbekenntnisse… (quoted), p. 255.

[10] Fechner, Hanns - Bekenntnisse deutscher Künstler. With contributions of Waldemar Bonsels, Ernst Berger, Julius Exter and others, Leipzig, Vieweg, 1920, p. 96. The index is visible on the internet. See:http://d-nb.info/57221698X/04

[11] Westheim, Paul – Die Welt als Vorstellung. Ein Weg zur Kunstanschauung, Potsdam, Kiepenhauer Verlag, 1918. Quotation at page 7. See: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000209399 (access only in the US).

[12] Künstleriches Denken, in Westheim, Paul – Die Welt als Vorstellung (quoted), pages 9-27.

[13] Westheim, Paul - Klassizismus in Frankreich, Berlin, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1923 See: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001668495 (access only in the US).

[14] Künstlerbriefe über Kunst. Bekenntnisse von Malern, Architekten und Bildhauern aus fünf Jahrhunderten, (Letters of artists. Confessions of painters, sculptors and architects from five centuries), edited by Hermann Uhde-Bernays, Jess Verlag, Dresden, 1926. The second edition of 1958 is extended by the author, that concluded it with a letter from Kandinsky to Westheim.

[15] Andreas Zeising, Vom Künstlerbekenntnis zum Künstlerinterview. Spurensuche im frühen Rundfunk (From the artist confession to the artist interview. Looking for sources in the first radio archives), in Kunsttexte, 2012. See: http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/kunsttexte/2012-2/-zeising-andreas-9/PDF/-zeising.pdf

[16] Feuerbach, Anselm - Briefe an seine Mutter (Letters to his mother), edited by G.J. Kern and Hermann Uhde-Bernays, Berlin, Meyer and Jessen Verlag, 1911.

[17] Feuerbach, Anselm - Briefe und Bekenntnisse (Letters and confessions), Buchhandlung des Stenographenverbandes Stolze-Schrey, 1913, 16 pages

[18] Friedrich, Caspar David – Bekenntnisse (Confessions), edited by Kurt Karl Eberlein, Leipzig, Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1924, 364 pages and 38 illustrations.

[19] Fischer, Otto (edited by): Hans Thoma. Bilder und Bekenntnisse (Hans Thoma. Paintings and confessions), Stuttgart, Verlag von Strecker und Schröder, 1925, 58 pages and 36 illustrations.

[20] The already vast panorama of art history sources published in those years in Germany, and quoted by Zeising, would not be complete if we did not at least also refer to the Artists’ letters (Künstler-Briefe) of Ernst Guhl, which inaugurated the genre in 1853. In 1914, Else Cassirer edited the Künstlerbriefe aus dem 19. Jahrhundert (Letters of 19th century artist). They were followed by the Letters (Briefe) of Hans von Marées, published by the publisher Piper in 1920 and the Selection of Letters and Poems by Philipp Otto Runge, a painter in Hamburg (Eine Auswahl Brief und Gedichte von Philipp Otto Runge, Eine Auswahl Brief und Gedichte von Philipp Otto Runge), published by Neuland in Hamburg in 1922. In 1925 Uhde-Bernays published, in two volumes, the Minor writings on art history of the antiquity (Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums) and the Selected letters (Ausgewählte Briefe) by Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In those years were also released a few new editions, annotated and not, of the Letters (Briefe) by Albrecht Dürer, which had been already available from 1871, edited by Moritz Thausing.

[21] Westheim, Paul - Künstlerbekenntnisse, … (quoted), p. 7.

[22] Westheim, Paul - Künstlerbekenntnisse, … (quoted), p. 8.

[23] Modern Artists on Art, Edited by Robert L. Herbert, Second Enlarged Edition, New York, Dover, 2000. See p. 93. 

[24] Windhöfel, Lutz – Paul Westheim und Das Kunstblatt, (quoted), p. 163

[25] Europa-Almanach: Malerei, Literatur, Musik, Architektur, Plastik, Bühne, Film, Mode, außerdem nicht unwichtige Nebenbemerkungen, edited by Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim, Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, Postdam 1925 and Leipzig 1993, 317 pages.

[26] The Bartels League was founded by the writer and poet Adolf Bartels (1862-1945), who called himself 'militant anti-Semite'. Seemingly, Otto Schuettler did not play a special role in German culture and in politics of those years and in the following years.

[27] Quotation from: Rechts und links der Seine: Pariser Tageblatt und Pariser Tageszeitung 1933-1940, edited by Hélène Roussel,Lutz Winckler, Tübingen, Niemeyer Verlag, 2002 (quotation at page 131).

[28] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (Pros and cons - Critical Essays in contemporary art), Potsdam, Kiepenhauer Verlag, p. 194. The article is published on pages 35-47. 

[29] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 36.

[30] Westheim, Paul - Klassizismus in Frankreich, (quoted), p. 9

[31] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 36.

[32] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 36.

[33] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart … (quoted), p. 35-36.

[34] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 41.

[35] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 41.

[36] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 42

[37] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 43

[38] Westheim, Paul – Für und Wider – Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart… (quoted), p. 43

[39] Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich and Tieck, Ludwig - Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, Berlin, Holzinger, 2010

[40] Westheim, Paul - Künstlerbekenntnisse,… (quoted), p. 168.