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History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Bibliothek der Kunstliteratur [Library of Art Literature]
Edited by Gottfried Boehm and Norbert Miller
Frankfurt on the Main, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992-1995
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
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| Fig. 1) The four volumes of the series Source: http://www.zvab.com/ |
A unique work
When the
first volume of the Bibliothek der
Kunstliteratur (Library of Art Literature) by Gottfried Boehm and Norbert
Miller was published in 1992 by the Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, the prestigious publisher linked to Insel Verlag in Frankfurt, that initiative was intended to mark the
start of a new era for these studies in Germany. Gottfried Boehm (1942-) was a
professor of art history and philosophy at the University of Basel. Norbert
Miller (1937-) was a professor of literature at the Free University of Berlin.
Both are now professors emeriti.
Reviewing
the work in 1995 in Die Zeit, the art
historian Martin Warnke wrote: "Four
volumes have been released, but will become eight: the 'Library of Art Literature'. Ideally, one should add another volume to the series, from which
this genre takes its name: the unsurpassed text of Julius von Schlosser on
"Kunstliteratur", which was published for the first time in 1924, and
was proposed again without any change in 1964 and 1985. Schlosser called 'art
literature' the writings dealing with artworks, art making, and the
relationship with art. Alongside theoretical writings on art, they include
biographies of artists, architectural treatises, inventories, guides, travel accounts,
as well as descriptions of places and countries. A selection or a summary of
these texts had never been the subject of publication in Germany. Today
everything is included in the collection 'Library of German classics' “
[1].
Eight tomes
were, therefore, expected. The work plan included: (1) Renaissance and Baroque;
(2) Early Classicism, Winckelmann and Heinse; (3) Classical Period and
Classicism; (4) Romantic Theory; (5) The Birth of Art History; (6) The Transition
to the Modern; (7) Landscape Theory; (8) Theory of Architecture. We must
immediately say that the project was unfortunately interrupted in 1995 and has stopped
with the fourth tome since then. As a result, an index of names, places and
works (probably scheduled for the end of the opera) is still lacking, and above
all there is no programmatic description of the Library, and no discussion of the role of art literature in the broader
context of German literature. To complete the Library with the last four volumes, and therefore to cover at least
the first part of the twentieth century, with fundamental writings for art
history and modern aesthetics, which would help offer a comprehensive
reflection on the history of art literature in Germany, seems unfortunately
almost completely forgotten. Today the collection is presented as a complete series
of four volumes, which embraces art literature "from the early stage to the start of romanticism", in the Suhrkamp/Insel
catalogue (as the publisher, now based in Berlin, is called, after a series of
complicated vicissitudes that have affected the German publishing world). As a
kind of spell that nobody can violate, Schlosser’s concept of art literature did
therefore not cross the threshold of the early nineteenth century. Only the
most famous of Schlosser’s disciples, Ernst Gombrich, accomplished to do it in
a 1952 essay that provided his own definition of artistic literature and drew a
continuous path from Pausanias to André Breton [2].
All volumes
of the Library of Art Literature were
published in the Library of German Classics (Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker), a collection of 190 volumes that
has the ambition to be the German counterpart of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade of the Parisian Gallimard since 1931 and
of the Meridiani published by
Mondadori in Milan since 1969. All volumes of the German collection are based
on the same editorial structure, defined in 1980, prior to the start of the series
in 1981 [3]: there shall be a limit of one thousand pages; the original text
(which is presented immediately, without introduction) shall always be the
subject of a new critical edition; the comments shall not be less than 30
percent of the entire volume, but shall reach 40 percent only in the most intricate
cases; the works shall be presented in chronological order and, when necessary,
according to different genres; texts between 1700 and 1900 shall be
orthographically modernized in order to facilitate reading, according to
uniform rules; texts preceding 1700 shall be translated into modern German.
Therefore, the priority is to present the reader with a true and original, but
still usable text.
The section
with critical comments shall always follow the text. It shall start - again
according to the directives of the series defined in 1980 - with a presentation
of the "general context of each
tome: the justification of organizational principles, the explanation of the
fundamental contents of the works, of the literary-historical framework
covering the various works of the tome, like as their features per period,
genre and cycle" [4]. Then must follow a comment to each text
according to the following structure: "Reference
to the fundamental thesis of the text, description of the history of the
tradition of the text, explanation of its realization, statements of the
authors on their work, characterization of the sources (if necessary by
comparing the original texts with printed works), reference to the reception
and fortune and finally presentation of specific significant aspects of the
individual work, while avoiding to take a single criterion of interpretation.” [5]
The Library
starts in 1992 with the fourth volume: Romantic Art Theory
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| Fig. 2) The fourth volume: Romantic Art Theory |
The first
volume of the Library of Art Literature to be published, edited by the German
scholar Friedmar Apel in 1992, was actually the one who was destined to become
the fourth in the series, a volume of exactly 1000 pages entitled Romantische
Kunstlehre. Poesie und Poetik des Blicks in der deutschen Romantik (Romantic Theory. Poetry and Poetics of Vision in German Romanticism)
[6]. The Library thus started with early
romanticism, and specifically with Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Wilhelm
Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798), but also included testimonies of artists (the
Nazarenes, Philipp Otto Runge, Caspar David Friedrich and many others),
writings of theoreticians (the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel,
Friedrich Schelling) and passages of literates on art (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann,
Clemens Brentano, Heinrich von Kleist) in the first half of the century,
certainly an important period for the German culture.
For the
discussion about romanticism, the definition that Apel gives of Kunstliteratur (Art Literature) in his
extensive commentary, titled "The
Romantic school of seeing" [7] is as follows: "In this edition shall be understood as
artistic literature the texts that have a constituent relation (konstitutiver Bezug) with fine arts." The term konstitutiver
Bezug therefore determines the cases in which, ultimately, writings preceded
and created the foundation for artistic works. Apel continues: "A wide definition of the concept, however,
would require the inclusion of the majority of romantic writings. We therefore
decided in favour of an anthological view, in which not all the genres and
forms can be represented." [8] The structure of the book chapters
seems therefore to classify artistic literature into four kinds, distinguishing
between Kunstanschauungen (Art
visions), Kunstkritik (Art critic), Kunstlerschriften (Writings by artists)
and Kunsttheorie (Art theory). The
author, who has benefited from the assistance of Claudia Becker and Gisela
Grenz, aims to describe how romanticists "set in motion fantasies and projects", referring to the first
category of programmatic nature; "how
they became more precise in the criticism" with reference to the
second category; "how the written
self-reflection accompanied the romantic artist's practices" for the
third category, and "how finally
reflection and definition were included in art theory, in terms of value" as
to the fourth category” [9].
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| Fig. 3) Philipp Otto Runge, Small morning (first version), 1808 |
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| Fig. 4) Caspar David Friedrich, The summer (landscape with a pair of lovers), 1807 |
Apel even
says that there cannot be any romanticism without art literature. The two
programmatic texts of the first romantic art literature are the "Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving
Monk" of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1796) and "Franz
Sternbald's Wanderings" of Ludwig Tieck (1798). The first conceived the
idea of the religious mission of art and of the artist as a new monk, while the
second defined the centrality of landscape for art. These are the essential
coordinates of the Romantic movement in painting. The two romanticists from
Jena not only defined the iconographic program of the Brotherhood of St. Luke
on the one hand and landscapers (Runge, Friedrich, Carus, von Schwind) on the
other, but also "the programmatic,
the forms of life, the artist's personal state of mind" [10]. I would add that these consequences will have lasting effects for more than one century: think of the role that the idea of the artist's
religious mission and his immersion in nature will have up to secessionist and
symbolist movements at the beginning of the twentieth century, not only in
Germany but throughout Europe. As for the idea of the new monasticism, I would
like to refer to the exhibition "Artists
and Prophets. A Secret History of Modern Art 1872−1972" [11] held at
the Schirn in Frankfurt in 2015 and, if a self-citation is allowed, to the many posts on the fortune of Cennini’s Book ofthe Art throughout Europe since the second half of the nineteenth century,
in this blog [12].
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| Fig. 5) Friedrich Overbeck, Italy and Germany, 1811 |
With the
programmatic texts of the early Romantic, also a number of other concepts
developed that would eventually form the basis of the entire evolution of art
in the nineteenth century: since E. T. A. Hoffmann, the idea of an inner vision
of things in the soul of the artist, of an inner eye that allows the artist to
reinterpret nature has dominated romanticism (in fact, Apel’s essay opens with a
reference to Paul Klee and to his statement, in 1920 Creative Confession, that art does not reproduce the visible, but make
it visible, a claim that - along with Kandinsky’s essay on the Spiritual in Art
of in 1911, is a gateway between romanticism and abstraction) [13]. Also the
idea of the artist who works in a state of near-hallucination is born from E.T.A.
Hoffman [14]. It is a concept that remains at the centre of artistic
self-representation for decades: think of the writings of Alfred Kubin in his 1899
memoirs on the relationship between dreams, nightmares and artistic production,
which reflect all the sensibility after the diffusion of psychoanalysis, or
what Emil Nolde wrote in the thirties of the twentieth century on his painting,
which he described as production in a state of ecstasy and delirium.
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| Fig. 6) Carl Gustav Carus, Oaks at sea, 1834/35 |
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| Fig. 7) Moritz von Schwind, Apparition in the woods, 1858 |
The 1992 fourth
volume was followed in 1995 by the first three volumes foreseen in the work plan.
The first volume: Renaissance and Baroque
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| Fig. 8) The first volume: Renaissance and Baroque |
The first
volume is titled "Renaissance und
Barock" (Renaissance and Baroque) [15], and was edited by the literary
historian Thomas Cramer and the art critic Christian Klemm. The title should
perhaps also include – as Martin Warnke wrote in the aforementioned review for Die Zeit - a reference to the
Reformation, to define the specific framework within which the German art
literature developed compared to, for instance, the Italian one. The texts
included German art literature (not including however the rich German production
in Latin) from the text of the theologian Andreas Bodenstein (1486-1541)
against the sacred images, in the field of the German reform (against which
Luther himself took a stance) until the ''German Academy" by Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), which marked the importation in Germany, of the model of
Vasari's Lives in the middle of the
baroque period. However, we look in vain for a definition of the genre
"art literature": in fact, in the short comment of Thomas Cramer
"German art theory from Dürer to
Sandrart" [16] the term itself Kunstliteratur
is missing: he always referred to theoretical texts on art (Kunsttheorie) [17].
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| Fig. 9) Walter Ryff (Rivius), Human Proportions, 1547 |
Obviously,
this does not mean that the volume does not offer very interesting insights.
However, it seems to abandon Apel’s idea that art literature would be a
constitutive element of art, and focuses on the difficult relationship between fine
arts and religion (in the decisive decades of the Reformation) and the gradual
autonomy that the first obtained from the latter over German Renaissance, as
well as their step-by-step assimilation to the other arts, first of all to
literature. "If according to the
medieval theories the work of art makes sense as a physical instrument of
mediation [available to the religion], then the work of art refers to something
(metaphysical) that is outside it and has no one meaning in itself. A work of
art which, on the contrary, originates from nature and according to its rules
has, at least in theory, its meaning in itself, and becomes independent. With
this postulate, it opens up a whole set of new problems, which are recalled
here only by keyword and that will define the theoretical discussion on art
until the twentieth century: the imitation of nature, illusionism, the
difference between artistic beauty and natural beauty, the relationship between
aesthetics and ethics, the role of the artist as creator (Dürer was the first
talking in his handwritten notes of the divine nature of the artist ...), the
report of the autonomous artist and the work of art with society, clients, the
public, the dominant taste, criticism" [18].
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| Fig. 10) Joachim von Sandrart, The twelfth month of the year, 1642 (?) |
The often dominant
role of Italian developments as a benchmark for German progress on all these
issues explains why already then German artists developed an interest to travel
in our country; besides Albrecht Dürer, true precursor of the relationship
between German and Italian art, one can think to Matthias Quad’s journey notes
(1557-1613) and the notebooks of the architect Heinrich Schickhardt (1558-1635).
Beyond travel notes, the influence of Italy and the classical world is evident
with the writings of Walter Ryff’s (1500-1548) on architecture in the sixteenth
century and the aforementioned German
Academy of Joachim von Sandrart (1606- 1688) in the seventeenth century.
The second volume: Early Classicism
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| Fig. 11) The second volume: Early Classicism |
The second
volume is dedicated to "Früh-Klassizismus.
Position und Opposition: Winckelmann,
Mengs, Heinse."(First classicism. Positions and oppositions:
Winckelmann, Mengs, Heinse) [19], and is a collective work of the German
scholar Helmut Pfotenhauer (1946-), the comparative literature scholar Markus
Bernauer and the already mentioned Norbert Miller, with the collaboration of
Thomas Franke. We are in the period 1755-1777 and the reference here is to the
controversy between the neo-classicists Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717- 1768)
and Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) on the one hand and Wilhelm Heinse (1746-1803),
the proponent of the Sturm und Drang,
on the other. The first is present with the Thoughts
on the Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture and other early
writings of the time of Dresden; the second with the Thoughts on Beauty and Taste in Painting and the third one with the
Letters on Paintings in Dusseldorf.
All three were great admirers of Italy, where they
stayed for a long time, but drew opposing inspirations from our country. In
this case, the comment, entitled "Winckelmann, Mengs, Heinse" [20] explicitly
refers to the concept of Kunstliteratur,
however without defining it. There are also references to similar categories like
Kunstlehre (Art doctrine) and Künstlerschrift (Artists’ writing). In
particular, Mengs is seen as one of the first German artists to write as an
artist to the benefit of an audience of peer artists, both to be understood and
appreciated as well as in order to transmit his know-how.
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| Fig. 12) Anton-Raphael Mengs, The Judgement of Paris, 1757 |
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| Fig. 13) Anton-Raphael Mengs, Parnassus, fresco, Villa Albani, Rome, 1761 |
The polemic
is between the positions of neoclassical artists and Winckelmann, on the one
side, who see the only parameter of beauty in the study of ancient statuary and
want to make of it a normative canon and those who on the other side seek for
an alternative, anchored to the multiplicity of developments and variations
that evolved since Renaissance: it is the case of Wilhelm Heinse that developed
the theme of the artistic genius on the basis of his contemplation of the 48
paintings by Rubens (first of all, the Rape
of the Daughters of Leucippus) in the picture gallery in Düsseldorf, then
one of the most important art collections in Europe.
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| Fig. 14) Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, 1617 |
Heinse
rebels against the primacy of drawing over colour, the ideal beauty, the
hierarchy of the arts, the primacy of sculpture, the reference to antique in painting:
his champions are, in addition to Rubens, the Venetian colourists, the naturalists
and the erotic painters. "Heinse
shows that art literature of the time, despite its clear classical imprint, is
not a homogeneous experience, but a discursive field full of productive
contradictions: a field defined on the one hand by positions, which are
themselves the result of tensions, and on the other one by the extreme nature
of the positions in the struggle between them. We want to document here the
antagonistic nature of our corpus of texts" [21]. To the controversy between beauty defined by a
system of rules (Winckelmann and Mengs) and beauty as the result of the unique
greatness of a heroic spirit (Heinse) the authors assign a fundamental role to
understanding how since then (and therefore first still under classicism and later
on under romanticism) German art literature was always featured by primary
divisions, which will become more and more distinct in other contexts. I am referring
to the division between naturalists and realists at the end of the nineteenth
century, that is between those who want to paint nature as it is and those who
want to paint as it should be (think of the treatment of the theme in the theoretical works by Lovis Corinth). I am thinking, again, also to the attempt by Max Klinger to resolve this dichotomy by distinguishing between the
(naturalist) role of painting and the (idealistic) role of design. Moreover, I
would not like to forget the rift between the Impressionists and Expressionists
within the Berlin secession in 1910, and the inability of that world to find a
synthesis between different forms of innovation coming to Germany - all at once
- from the French art world. I am thinking, finally, of the dialectic, in the
German art literature (like in the anthology of Paul Westheim) between
figurative and classicist positions and the advocates of abstract art. These
dichotomies are often interpreted as the ultimate consequence of different
forms, more or less radical, of aesthetic sensitivity within the late romantic
world (to simplify, the Brahms and the Brückner party), but in reality the rift
is deeper and originates from the classical world of the eighteenth century.
The third volume: Classical Period and
Classicism
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| Fig. 15) The third volume: Classical Period and Classicism |
The third
volume has the title "Klassik und Klassizismus" (The classical period
and classicism) [22]. The curators are the aforementioned Helmut Pfotenhauer
and the German literature scholar Peter Sprengel (1949), with the collaboration
of Sabine Schneider and Harald Tausch. As “classical period” (Klassik) the
authors mean here the Weimar world between 1770 and 1830, where Herder, Goethe,
Meyer, Schiller, Moritz and Fernow are active. As Lothar Müller wrote in his
review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung [23], he would have expected to see also Lessing, whose complete
works, however, were already part of the Library
of German Classics. In the comment of the third volume [24], the same idea
of art literature as proposed by Apel returns: it is through art literature and
its classicism - i.e. its orientation to the antique – that the Weimar world
defined the concept of 'classic'. The book opens and closes with the writings
of Goethe who recognize the value of Claude Lorrain’s painting, as a paradigm
of the classic landscape that is opposed to the romantic Friedrich.
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| Fig. 16) Claude, The Expulsion of Hagar, 1668 |
While
remaining convinced of the primordial value of classic and engaged in a fierce
struggle against romanticism, the world of Weimar does not necessarily adhere
(despite all attempts by Goethe and Meyer) to Winckelmann’s idea that its
superiority derives from a regulatory definition of ideal beauty, expressed in
classical statuary. Rather, in Schiller, classic art is the historical product
of the genius, the result of the manifestation of the beauty in history, the
product of the capacity of the senses to reproduce what is beautiful. With the
"Preliminary Ideas on the Theory of
Ornament" Moritz even posed "one
of the central themes of art literature: whether it is possible to describe
art. The question becomes substantial when it is recognized that the classic
and the ideal beauty are separated from life and are therefore governed by
their own laws; this self-reflexive logic of art creates the problem of the
impossibility to translate one aesthetic medium - that of figurative art - into
the other medium of language" [25]. Moritz therefore raised the
question of how to create a classical art that would be again in line with
experience. To this end, he proposed a paradigm shift: the centre of art must
not assigned to the statue, but "to
the ornament, to what seems accidental, marginal" [26]. It is the
start of the rediscovery of the Baroque as a new form of classic, and the
opening of classic to modernity.
Open questions
There is no
doubt that, with its total of 3,500 pages, the Library of Art Literature offered the German public a large collection
of annotated texts on art, between the years when the Reformation confronted itself
with the Renaissance of Italian derivation and those in which the Nazarenes
rediscovered the art of the primitives. It is an important route, but it is
only part of the contribution of German culture to art literature. It would be
interesting to find out the reasons for which such an ambitious project has
stalled after 1995. What were the difficulties encountered? Is there a specific
problem to treat art literature after the first half of 1800? We will try to
find it out in the next few months, by contacting the editors, and hoping to
learn more.
There is
another open question in the four volume collection of the Library of art literature. Why has the very notion of artistic
literature, which gave the title to the collection, not been the subject of a
more systematic reflection? Why a definition of Kunstliteratur is proposed only in the fourth volume published in 1992? Why its use in
three volumes published in 1995 is so uneven? Why does the Library of artistic literature no longer refer to the concept of Kunstliteratur as a constitutive element
of art, if not for the late classical and the early romantic period? We already
noted that in the Deutsches Kunstblatt,
the magazine of the German Kunstvereine
(Art associations) published between 1850 and 1858, and thus only one
generation after the conclusion of the Library
of artistic literature, the term was used in a much broader sense, in fact
including all studies on art. But if so, why was this title chosen? And if the
editors wanted to revive Schlosser’s concept (and, as mentioned, also the one
of his pupil Gombrich), would have not been better to open the Library with a text that would make a
more clear statement on the concept of art literature as an independent genre
of German literature?
NOTES
[2] Gombrich, Ernst Hans, Kunstliteratur, Atlantisbuch der Kunst: eine Enzyklopädie der bildenden Künste, Zurich, 1952, pp.665-679 [Trapp no.1952B.1]. See: https://gombricharchive.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/showdoc18.pdf
[3] See the brochure at: http://www.suhrkamp.de/download/Gesamtverzeichnisse/DKV_GV_2008_2009.pdf
[4] ibidem
[5] ibidem
[6] Apel, Friedmar - Romantische Kunstlehre: Poesie und Poetik des Blicks in der deutschen Romantik, Frankfurt am Main, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995, pagine 1001.
[7] Apel, Friedmar - Romantische Kunstlehre (quoted) …, pp.711-760
[8] Apel, Friedmar - Romantische Kunstlehre (quoted) …, p. 758
[9] Apel, Friedmar - Romantische Kunstlehre (quoted) …, p. 759
[10] Apel, Friedmar - Romantische Kunstlehre (quoted) …, p. 714
[11] See: http://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/artists_and_prophets_a_secret_history_of_modern_art_18721972/.
[12] See the list of essays published under the Cennini project in this blog.
[13] Apel, Friedmar - Romantische Kunstlehre (quoted) …, p. 721
[14] Apel, Friedmar - Romantische Kunstlehre (quoted) …, p. 753
[15] Klemm, Christian; Cramer, Thomas - Renaissance und Barock, Frankfurt am Main, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995, p. 928.
[16] Klemm, Christian; Cramer, Thomas - Renaissance und Barock, (quoted) … pp. 641-646
[17] Klemm, Christian; Cramer, Thomas - Renaissance und Barock, (quoted) … p. 645
[18] Klemm, Christian; Cramer, Thomas - Renaissance und Barock, (quoted) … pp. 643-644
[19] Pfotenhauer, Helmut; Bernauer, Markus; Miller, Norbert; Franke, Thomas - Frühklassizismus: Postion und Opposition: Wincklemann, Mengs, Heinse, Frankfurt am Main, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995, pp. 788.
[20] Pfotenhauer, Helmut; Bernauer, Markus; Miller, Norbert; Franke, Thomas- Frühklassizismus (quoted) …, pp. 325-335
[21] Pfotenhauer, Helmut; Bernauer, Markus; Miller, Norbert; Franke, Thomas- Frühklassizismus (quoted) …, p. 332
[22] Pfotenhauer, Helmut; Sprengel, Peter - Klassik und Klassizismus, Frankfurt am Main, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995, pp.879.
[23] Müller, Lothar - Der Sammler und die Seinigen. Von Luther bis zur Romantik: Die Bibliothek der Kunstliteratur, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 13, 1996. See: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezension-sachbuch-der-sammler-und-die-seinigen-11317439.html
[24] Pfotenhauer, Helmut; Sprengel, Peter - Klassik und Klassizismus, (quoted)…, pp. 525-531
[25] Pfotenhauer, Helmut; Sprengel, Peter, - Klassik und Klassizismus, (quoted) …, pp. 528-529
[26] Pfotenhauer, Helmut; Sprengel, Peter, - Klassik und Klassizismus, (quoted) …, p. 529
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