Hermann Uhde-Bernays, Artists' Letters on Art [Künstlerbriefe über Kunst]. Part Two

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Hermann Uhde-Bernays
Artists’ Letters on Art [Künstlerbriefe über Kunst]
Confessions of painters, architects and sculptors of the last five centuries

With seventy self-portraits and signatures of artists
Wolfgang Jess, Dresden, 1926, 968 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro

Part Two

Fig. 27) Carl Spitzweg, An outdoors acting company (third version), 1878

Go back to Part One

The introduction to the anthology of Artists’ letters

The introductory text of Uhde-Bernays is dense and full of ideas, but it is definitely not easy to digest. To try to fully grasp it, I felt necessary to first refer to some general categories, on which I have been thinking as I was progressing in the reading. One should take account of the fact that art literature often testified two different needs in parallel. This becomes very clear especially when this literature took the form of anthologies or collections of letters. First, there was a will of the authors to document the way in which artists had expressed their communication strategies. In our case, Uhde-Bernays’ focus was all centered on letters, as a genre through which men of culture express their thoughts by creating a fabric of relations between great individuals, and indeed as a characteristic of modern men (the editor attributed the invention of epistolary, as a dialectic form of communication, to Petrarch and the Italian humanists in general and to the French genre of the confessions esthétiques [47], in the particular case of an art epistolary). Secondly, the texts of the artists were selected with a view to reconstruct history of art, and eventually to search for an historical legitimacy of its course. This operation was conducted by modern scholars through a critical backwards journey, entrusting the analysis of the artists’ word with the task of searching prototypal and primeval common elements in the distant past. Those elements would then develop dialectically and lead to an inevitable outcome. Art literature was in this respect a typical product of historicism. Interestingly, every new modern regime (intended as a social-historical power setting) produced its anthologies of art history sources, in order to prove that the present was always based on solid foundations in the past. In the case of the Artists’ letters on art, the ultimate intention of Uhde-Bernays was to demonstrate the historical primacy of artists and art criticism in the second half of the nineteenth century, after a century-long process of maturation of the artists’ role, which lasted five centuries. Only after that path was concluded, artists assumed, on the one hand, a full awareness of the centrality of their own spiritual life and overcame, on the other hand, every academic schematic order.

Fig. 28) The second edition of the Artists’ letters on Art by Hermann Uhde-Bernays,
published by Wolfgang Jess in Dresden in 1956

This liberation also materialised thanks to the encounter between art and literature, i.e. exactly the two disciplines to which Uhde-Bernays had devoted a lifetime: "An overflowing enthusiasm, which had reached the highest example in Goethe and in his work on the existence of the man kind, exceeded  all aesthetic dogmatism and discovered that the master of the art is the best and surest guide in all art matters, and that his personal language is not made of sensational phrases, but it conveys the strongest inner drives. Since then, all who had yearned to enter the real art sanctuary listened carefully to the written statements of the artists. Several painters made successful use of writing and drafted books on art. The way to express the history of art over the last thirty years is in many respects dependent on the influence of the inner rapprochement between writers and artists." [48]

Fig. 29) Philipp Otto Runge, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1806

There was obviously a convergence between the two aspects: the study of the communication strategies and the search for historical legitimacy.

When analysing the communication strategies of the artists, Uhde-Bernays deliberately focused on letters with relevant contents for aesthetics and art criticism, thus excluding any mere interest in biographical data. In the afterword, he explained that his original intention was to upgrade up to modern times the collection of artist’s letterspublished by Ernst Karl Guhl between 1853 [49] and 1856 [50]. However, that collection was designed according to different criteria, especially to offer the German public testimony of writings which at that time had not yet been translated (and existed instead since some decades in Italian), and to document stages of development of art history. In fact, Guhl’s aim was not to show the progressive spiritual growth of the individual artist as an exegetist of his own aesthetic reasons. Thus, Uhde-Bernays decided to eliminate almost all (five sixths) of the collection of Ernst Guhl and to replace them with other letters. To this end he went in search of new sources. The afterword is therefore also a useful tool to understand which art history sources were available in the first quarter of the last century.

The editor provided very different readings of the artists’ communication strategies and their ability to use letters as a dialectical tool for the understanding of art, depending on the epoch.

Fig. 30) Peter Cornelius, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 1813

The artists’ letters during the Renaissance revealed the presence of great personalities (Michelangelo, Dürer). However, they were not yet fully aware of how the artist’s personality would be able to explain, as creators (and therefore in universal terms and not merely episodically), to their counterparts,  the reasons for their art activities. "Not a single painter of the Renaissance has ever dealt with such a captivating pastime. Because of this remarkable difference, the great Florentine artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are not equal to their contemporary poets and philosophers; they are nothing but simple craftsmen and nothing else they want to be." [51] Therefore, he says that from the examination of most of the correspondence we have today (predominantly, simple receipts and commission confirmations) we cannot draw any conclusion. Interestingly, Uhde-Bernays made this statement only from the examination of the letters - as a dialectic instrument of social networking - thus without making any reference to the great season of the Renaissance treatises, confirming the fact that he did not have any great enthusiasm for systematic discussions in the aesthetic field.

With Poussin, a new phase opened where artists used letters as a form of academic dissertation, and thus adhered to models which were not due to reveal either their personalities or their creative mechanisms. The editor devoted a whole chapter to the letters of that phase, but did it primarily in order to highlight their limits: "A new era will be inaugurated, which will extend for over a century and make artists envious of the poet's laurel wreaths and of the philosopher and will indeed try to erase the boundary between the two very distinct camps, poetry and painting. On the one hand the 'ut pictura poesis' doctrine prevailed, and on the other hand artists were confronted with the academic requirement to explain in a treatise compiled for teaching what they had created as painters, sculptors or architects. The question of the learnability of art came to the fore, regardless of talent. It is a clear sign that now a mediocrity for the consumption of the new-born Academies had won.” [52]

Fig. 31) Johann Sperl, Spring in Kutterling, 1880

The first form of emancipation occured with the exchange of letters between Diderot and the French sculptor Etienne Falconet, who discussed on equal terms with the French philosopher and art critic. Through France and England that germ also arrived in Germany, where in the late eighteenth century the Sturm und Drang movement allowed the romantic artist to free himself from academic schematics, even if the letters of this time still documented very different dialectical capacities (Uhde-Bernays cited the cases of Maler Müller and Peter Cornelius, Asmus Carstensen and Philipp Otto Runge as evidence of their different views). The real transition was marked by the passage from Schlegel to Heine. "And then materialized, in the course of a single century, an opposite assessment of the critical judgment of science and an overturning of the general opinion. Even Friedrich Schlegel, whom you cannot certain reproach reactionary ideas, had asked for a 'normative' aesthetics. So, basically, he had misunderstood the words of Winckelmann on the imitation of the old, which should be understood instead as its emulation. Heinrich Heine, in the introduction to his extensive discussion of the Salon of 1831, expressed instead an opinion contrary to Schlegel: ‘The biggest mistake is that the critic puts the question: What should an artist do? Much more important would be the question: what does the artist want?’ And that innovating critic continues in an equally adamant way: ‘Each new genius of art must be judged on the basis of the aesthetics that he himself has produced.’ On the day in which these words were put in writing, the aesthetics course has changed radically in the right direction, overnight." [53]

Fig. 32) Max Liebermann, Samson and Delilah, 1902

Only the following generation (that of Feuerbach and Marées in Germany, Delacroix and Fromentin in France) acquired the full command of language and the synthesis capability which transformed their letters in the necessary documents to understand artworks. "By the middle of the last century, that aesthetic had won a winning position. These teachers had started their journey from creation and therefore from their own work, which had developed as a manifestation of their unconscious creative impulse; furthermore, they had found clear and natural words to explain themselves in the reflection on art matters. For all these reasons, their letters seem even more important than the critical texts that illustrate their art"  [54]. It was the era in which artists had achieved autonomous capacity for development in the aesthetic thought (with his essay The Problem of Form, Adolf von Hildebrand, the sculptor, even became the protagonist of the evolution of the theory of beauty in Germany) and therefore one had to resort to them (in the German-speaking world to Thoma, Trübner, Hodler, Segantini, Liebermann, in the English one to Whistler) to steer the debate on art even in the field of cultural policy. "There is no doubt that artists are given powers that they did not have before. [...] This explains why contributions and protests of the artists are now definitely due to draw public attention and why, when important issues of art are discussed, one runs to collect the views of important artists. This is the case of Courbet, when he wrote to the German soldiers, and Monet, with his call to transfer Manet's Olympia to the Louvre." [55] 

Fig. 33) Adolf von Hildebrand, Standing young, 1881-1884

Trying to use his collection of letters to establish a comprehensive system to interpret art creation, Uhde-Bernays identified the strongest unifying element in the absolute value of art creation itself as an individual act: "it is the entrancing and absolute belief in the greatness of art production" [56]. He admitted that there are some common originating elements to the artistic creation: "In the context of the history of the development of art, the origin of the greatness of the artistic fact is pervaded by unheard desires and passionate impulses, but they can always be connected to the same or to the similar. (...) Looking into the distance, we watch the strongest past events of the history of spirit and their present bonds with us. We do this in order to perceive their regularity" [57]. These elements allowed to establish lines of continuity, and for example enabled contemporary art historians to attribute to Velázquez and Rembrandt the authorship of some fundamental aspects of the Enlightenment sensibility: and however the efforts of theorists like Gustav Theodor Fechner to elaborate a theory of experimental psychology as a unifying form of aesthetic thought was, in his view, doomed to fail [58].

In addition to stiffness, another risk endangered the rediscovery of the spirit: it was the excess of subjectivity: "It is good to accept that a subjectivity defined by the specificity of experience, and common to the best, can lead to the development of human individuality in the framework that is naturally given to people, with a wise self-restraint, and not beyond it, like unfortunately almost always unbalanced people would crave" [59].

Fig. 34) Hans Thoma, Apollo and Marsyas, 1888

The cult of the spirit and the refusal of uniform interpretative criteria

According to Uhde-Bernays, each letter always expresses the personality of its author, but also proves to be at the same time an ethical manifestation of individual will. This made it impossible to reduce any single letter to general criteria: in the introduction, therefore, the author appealed readers (who could nevertheless verify in passing the existence of common elements among the texts) to separate the individual from the universal. "And, thanks to the concurring exemplary ideal of this belief, aesthetic confessions turn into ethical foundations, the disclosure of which allows, in turn, to discover what separates from what unites, to find out dissimilarities in what has already been concluded, and separates individuals, calling them out from long processions." [60] "The contrasts of talent, character and especially judgment (the latter subject to subjective states of mind, and emotional ups and downs), not least than 'climate' differences, have made it impossible from the outset to attempt reaching a synthesis that would include the wealth of all the points of view on art. Yet we departed from its fundamental principle, the naive faith in the greatness of art production. Since the first few pages it will become immediately obvious that it is unnecessary to take this principle as the basis of an aesthetic system. And in fact between Dürer, Michelangelo and Rubens hinder insurmountable abysses for every speculative desire, through which one would look for an unification beyond the primitive (and at the same time infinite) truth of art. How wonderful is the auspicious blessings of such obstinacy of the artist, which the three great masters reveal in their letters!" [61]

Reading the letters thus allow us to enhance the personal "know-how” in art watching, because they make possible to document the personal characteristics of the interaction between the creative process and the contents of art creation.

Fig. 35) Eduard Schleich the elder, The rest of a young man, 1833

"The letters - even when their story telling is on the general, on the eternal - bring to light the clear and pure intimate preferences of artistic individuals to light, which is possible only making use of this special genre. The essence of these painters, architects, sculptors and graphic artists must therefore present itself to us as if the letters would mirror their works. The impenetrable reciprocal effect between the silent presence of such works and the written word manages to provide the highest representation of the greatness and the richness, of the freedom and of the outcome of different personalities" [62]. 

Fig. 36) Wilhelm Trübner, Smoking Moor, 1873

INTRODUCTION OF "ARTISTS' LETTERS ON ART"

With this collection we brought to end the effort to collect and sort letters written by artists over the course of half a millennium of maximum spiritual tension, provided they have an overriding aesthetic interest rather than a biographical one. They are letters that, beyond the historical record, refer directly to the relationship which individual masters had towards their own artistic creation or the one of others; letters which - even when their story telling is on the general, on the eternal - bring the clear and pure intimate preferences of artistic individuals to light, which is possible only making use of this special genre. The essence of these painters, architects, sculptors and graphic artists must therefore present itself to us as if the letters would mirror their works. The impenetrable reciprocal effect between the silent presence of such works and the written word manages to provide the highest representation of the greatness and the richness of the freedom and of the outcome of different personalities. Beyond earthly happiness and pain, away from the commotion of the battle, whose scream is now silent, we walk a path that leads us to majestic heights. Having now reached our destination, and being at the same time confused and affected, we contemplate the unison path. And in fact, despite the difference of convictions, despite dissent ambitions (which always coincide with direction and energy of the talent belonging to them), it is indeed a common and deep feeling, a feeling as unfathomable as the definition of genius, to unite the artists whose fruits we will meet below: it is the entrancing and absolute belief in the greatness of art production. And, thanks to the concurring exemplary ideal of this belief, aesthetic confessions turn into ethical foundations, the disclosure of which allows, in turn, to discover what separates from what unites, to find out dissimilarities in what has already been concluded, and separates individuals, calling them out from long processions. It can be shown in this way and without difficulty that the extraordinarily unique (and expressed with full feeling) justification of the life force capable of creating art is always presented as the sum of countless subjective value judgments. And in fact, in the context of the history of the development of art, the origin of the greatness of art production is pervaded by unheard desires and passionate impulses, but can always be connected to the same or to the similar. But the observation of unity in multiplicity, multiplicity in unity of the written statements of figurative artists leads us in a position of pure contemplation. The artists are always a step beyond this common origin. Looking into the distance, we watch the strongest past events of the history of spirit and their present bonds with us. We do this in order to perceive their regularity. 

Fig. 37) Johann Sperl, Return from the church in Berbling, without indication of date

We live today in a time of conviction and spiritual development when - whether it is a sign of strength or weakness – we actually prefer, and want to rely almost exclusively on individual value judgments in our critical approach. And in fact the success in literature seems to have become totally dependent on the capacity, accentuated up to the paradox, to stage even the simplest things in a different light. An age like ours, where the forces of demagogy also reject the highest performance potential of individuality, has to look for a matching item that can replace it. We overlook the fact that a subjective judgment is only allowed to the master who has earned this right because of objective safety of his character, so thanks to his deeds. The educational basis on which it was possible to educate a new generation was set a generation ago, when a beautifully reverent gratitude still buttressed the temples of German culture, which now lie in ruins; then the quiet industriousness of the scholars of the time of our ancestors moved, through reflections, on other routes, while routinely using the intellect to form an opinion. Then a hopeful youth (who had finally gained access to the very nature, the vision of the vitality, and had formed his own way of impressionist thinking from impressionist art, and full of jubilation had mocked all the negatives of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche) discovered the idea of the greatness of art production more clearly than it has ever been the case, despite all the high-sounding speeches against. An overflowing enthusiasm, which had reached the highest example in Goethe and in his work on the existence of the man kind, exceeded all aesthetic dogmatism and discovered that the master of the art is the best and surest guide in all art matters, and that his personal language is not made of sensational phrases, but it conveys the strongest inner drives. Since then, all who had yearned to enter the real art sanctuary, listened carefully to the written statements of the artists. 

Fig. 38) Adolph von Menzel, The studio wall, 1872

Several painters made successful use of writing and drafted books on art. The way to express the history of art over the last thirty years is in many respects dependent on the influence of the inner rapprochement between writers and artists. It remains uncertain whether even then the attention to subjective judgments may have caused the careless attitude of getting lost in the presumption of excessive subjectivity. The masters were immediately considered as dominating and only they were allowed what they liked, without their supporters being branded by the charge of the cult of authority, behind which ignorance lurks. It is good to accept that a subjectivity defined by the specificity of experience, and common to the best, can lead to the development of human individuality in the framework that it is naturally given to people, with a wise self-restraint, and not beyond it, like unfortunately almost always unbalanced people would crave.

Fig. 39) Carl Spitzweg, Linz on the Danube, 1838

Artists dared to claim very late the right to a subjective judgment that deserves to be heard. So we have received significant communications from them only one hundred  and fifty or two hundred years after the first "modern man", the poet Francesco Petrarca, had started in his letters to bring in the form of monologue to his friends – in a consciously correspondence with life and events of the day - what joyful and painful happened in the world and gave him the poetic inspiration. He did it not for their pleasure, but with the purpose of the liberation of his soul. (“quidquid loquor non tui instructio, sed levamen animae meae est”). He was joined by several Italian humanists who developed the artistic diction of their own epistolary style, in which they announced one another, so witty, the stories of their worldly practices, mixed with games and literary entertainment. They were the ancestors of the confessions esthétiques practiced by all major writers until the nineteenth century. Not a single painter of the Renaissance has ever dealt with such a captivating pastime. Because of this remarkable difference, the great Florentine artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are not equal to their contemporary poets and philosophers; they are nothing but simple craftsmen and nothing else they want to be. All the more explicitly they show, in the few texts that have survived them, the occasional outbursts of their pride as artists and the signals of human participation, and the mood of the soul, which in Michelangelo's full of temper letters rise in a much more tragic mood that in the very cold excerpts of the humanists. The superiority of the conventional form is presented to us for the first time only in Giorgio Vasari’s correspondence.

Fig. 40) Wilhelm Leibl, Girl with a white handkerchief, around 1876

This expression of sobriety is the reason why many masters - from whom we would like to hear with particular attention a precise clarification on their work - has left us no written statement, but only some insignificant receipts or confirmations of commissions, certainly of a great value as documents and autographs, but of no help to be able to scrutinise their spirit. Unfortunately we lack a true dialogue, which would satisfy our soul, like the one we would like to conduct with the masters of the Colmar altarpiece or the frescoes of the City Hall of Basel, with Mathias Grünewald and Hans Holbein. It is a futile effort to try to learn from the letters what Vermeer van Delft and the Dutch minor masters, and even Velazquez, Murillo, Goya have thought on the practice and theory of fine arts, what Chardin and Fragonard have perhaps felt in the visit of the Salons or what occupied architects of a rank like Cuvilliès and Fischer von Erlach in their study tours. Faithful to the commandment "act, artist, and do not speak", many of the best masters have stubbornly remained silent until the beginning of modern times. And even to this day - when for other reasons writing letters only in exceptional cases goes beyond the narrow limits of business communication – the ever improving transport links, thanks to the expansion of transportation, did not manage to overcome the resistance that some diehard "non-writers of letters" (Erzunbriefschreiber) oppose against exchanging written texts. In our age of telephone and typewriting, which anyway have prepared the end of the art of correspondence, it is in any case understandable that those artists, who do not feel an intimate special impulse to release art proclamations sub specie aeternitatis in the form of letters, lost any pleasure to use their free time to tell confidentially to friends the content and progress of the work of a lifetime. If such letters exist, however, they are occasional expressions of the greatest charm, and have the maximum value from a human point of view, and also for art and literature. Then those are examples of the letters, which Alfred de Vigny mentioned once in his diary: "Every letter is a beautiful picture, it is a portrait of both the sender and the recipient. And in fact, while being so completely unaware of it, we will always depend on our style from the recipient's character and also from what he expects from us.

Fig. 41) Anselm Feuerbach, Dante and noblewomen in Ravenna, 1858

Historians have already raised several times, but never been able to solve so far the captivating question of writing a history of the development of the letter in the context of the history of language development. Only the hypothesis of such an endeavour would open up huge perspectives of cultural history. Because of their fluency (the "style naturel et dérange" of Madame de Sévigné) the epistolary expressions are of great significance, in their natural eloquence, for the consideration of the success or the crisis of a language. Exactly today, we Germans would have the task of learning from excellent examples how we can remedy the serious 'inflation' of our language. As the golden era of Latin was followed by its silver era, when the spiritual leaders of the nation no longer had full control of the native language, also in Germany writing in a German-style good - until a generation ago considered the minimum precondition for the writer's activities - has succumbed to a fastidious routine. What would say today Jakob Grimm, who already eighty years ago, in his most famous speech at the Academy [Translator's Note: the 1847 speech "On what is pedantic in German language"], complained bitterly of the unprecedented corruption, in the history of languages, of the German idiom after the time of Luther?

In the "pictures", defined in Vigny’s definition, we should seek the typical and specific spirit characterizing the temperament and the talent of the artist. Since long-time an aesthetics of psychological nature has aimed at comparing on this point the surviving theoretical notions from antiquity with the real internal constants of artistic creation, to contrast absolute and personnel. Although starting from the present and its needs, such as an aesthetics has methodologically more and more gone back to its roots; thus, they has travelled the same backwards road undertaken by the early supporters of the Impressionist movement, when they dared to praise twenty years ago Velázquez and Rembrandt as predecessors of this art (despite the censure they received from outmoded art historians). While art scholars reached their goal without effort, since they were directed in a specific direction by a specific starting point, philosophers - confused by the variety of matter – never managed to find their way, and not even the theses of [Gustav Theodor] Fechner (more spiritually conceived theses than systematically proven ones) managed to synthetize the infinity of problems of the artistic experience with a satisfactory formula. The contrasts of talent, character and especially judgment (the latter subject to subjective states of mind, and emotional ups and downs), not least than the 'climate' differences, have made it impossible from the outset to attempt reaching a synthesis that would include the wealth of all the points of view on art. Yet we departed from its fundamental principle, the naive faith in the greatness of art production. Since the first few pages, it will become immediately obvious that it is unnecessary to take this principle at the base of an aesthetic system. And in fact between Dürer, Michelangelo and Rubens hinder insurmountable abysses for every speculative desire, through which one would look for an unification beyond the primitive and at the same time infinite truth of art. How wonderful is the auspicious blessings of such obstinacy of the artist, which the three great masters reveal in their letters!

Fig. 42) Hans Thoma, Round dance, 1884

And yet, soon after their time, a new era will be inaugurated, which will extend for over a century and make artists envious of the poet's laurel wreaths and of the philosopher and will indeed try to erase the boundary between the two very distinct camps, poetry and painting. On the one hand the 'ut pictura poesis' doctrine prevailed, and on the other hand artists were confronted with the academic requirement to explain what they had created as painters, sculptors or architects, in a treatise compiled for teaching. The question of the learnability of art came to the fore, regardless of talent. It is a clear sign that now a mediocrity for the consumption of the new-born Academies had won. Even the effective perception of art by Nicolas Poussin became at time a pure repetitive form, and only in rare exceptional cases his human interest prevailed on the pedagogical use of statements that he proposed. Even longer than in France, where the sculptor Falconet dared to challenge, as a brilliant aesthete, nobody less than Diderot, this form of impersonal communication was preserved in Germany and Switzerland. A form of impersonal teaching was actually imposed in the genre of landscape painting, the artistic genre which is the most far away from any theory among all. And in reaction to the disapproval and admonition of the poets and romantic painters, often wrapped in the veils of a dreamy mystic, artists decided to acquire the mastery of the eighteenth century dialectic (which will continue in classicism) only after overcoming many prejudices and deeply rooted errors. The divergence of views can be shown in the most obvious way while comparing the letters written by Maler Müller and Peter Cornelius, Asmus Carstensen and Philipp Otto Runge. But gradually, albeit slowly, and coming from Britain and France, artists accomplished to liberate their spirit from the constraints of those aesthetic requirements which clearly gave priority to scholars against artists. Then the proud art guides of the nineteenth century presented themselves as heroes of a new aesthetic based on the decisive merits of the artistic personality. By the middle of the last century, that aesthetic had won a winning position. These teachers had started their journey from creation and therefore from their own work, which had developed as a manifestation of their unconscious creative impulse; furthermore, they had found clear and natural words to explain themselves in the reflection on art matters. For all these reasons, their letters seem even more important than the critical texts that illustrate their art. The extraordinary talent to display the content of their opinions on art in a clear analysis, as it was given as a dowry to Feuerbach and Marées, to Stauffer and Hildebrand, attaches a rank of very high value to all what we possess from them in writing, with a purpose to get educated to observe and understand art works. To these Germans corresponds a selected group of French painters, led by Delacroix and Fromentin, who had a chance to live the atmosphere of high education in the Paris of the Second Empire, as never done before, and to benefit fully of the two fundamental factors for a noble culture: good taste and knowledge. Precisely for these reasons, as once wrote Delacroix, they could be said to use the pen more easily than brush and palette. They have played an enormous role for the understanding of art. Both powerful fulcrums of diffusion of artistic life, Rome and Paris, form the backdrop for an unprecedented concreteness to the artistic instincts of many painters, who express themselves clearly in their desires, plans, hopes, and even doubts. Any comparison would be arbitrary. Only one thing I can tell based on my experience: in Delacroix's letters (as later in those of Vincent van Gogh) is embodied in the clearest way the indivisible flame of enthusiasm that reflects the spiritual excitement of the utmost sensitivity. Over the years his strength, free from any literary restrictions that had cooled the heat, became even more enhanced, as if he lived of his own energy. Only the prophetic fanaticism of van Gogh was able to go beyond Delacroix’s need for externalization, where sacrifice and modesty manifest as well. 

Fig. 43) Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust, 1891

Now the artist finally took over the leadership of a chorus of enthusiastic young people for art. Science took a step back, conveniently taking a secondary position, and life and imagination gave the basic tone to the new mood. There is no doubt that artists are given thereby powers that they did not have before. Confidence in that power is the reason why the artistic life of nations could move forward in many directions, also thanks to the writings of artists, like Hildebrandt’s The Problem of Form. This explains why contributions and protests of the artists are now definitely due to draw public attention and why, when important issues of art are discussed, one runs to collect the views of important artists. This is the case of Courbet, when he wrote to the German soldiers, and Monet, with his call to transfer Manet's Olympia to the Louvre; of Thoma and Trübner, Hodler and Segantini, Whistler and Max Liebermann. They are the names of those who most often have been involved in art policy issues. Among them materialized even very large differences of opinion. It follows an instantaneous blossoming of topics and words, the echo of which testifies the attention it is given to the content and form of their criticism. The letters of these modern artists bring all traces of the more secure consciousness, the more they distance themselves from the banalities of daily events. Their orientation is in any way dependent from their personal orientations (in the positive and negative aspects of personal taste). In this way, the letters become infallible interpretations of the work and faithful images of the character of the individual artists.

And then materialized, in the course of a single century, an opposite assessment of the critical judgment of science and an overturning of the general opinion. Even Friedrich Schlegel, whom you cannot certain reproach reactionary ideas, had asked for a 'normative' aesthetics. So, basically, he had misunderstood the words of Winckelmann on imitation of the old, which should be understood instead as its emulation. Heinrich Heine, in the introduction to his extensive discussion of the Salon of 1831, expressed instead an opinion contrary to Schlegel: ‘The biggest mistake is that the critic puts the question: What should an artist do? Much more important would be the question: what does the artist want?’ And that innovating critic continues in an equally adamant way: ‘Each new genius of art must be judged on the basis of the aesthetics that he himself has produced.’ On the day in which these words were put in writing, the aesthetics course has changed radically in the right direction, overnight. The freedom of art creation cannot stand any objections that may be based on scientific considerations and not at the same time on the experience of life. Even this characterizes the majority of below letters of artists. And the attentive reader will become also aware of other parallel and converging patterns of activities and approaches of the artists, in particular in the various reports which the different teachers described at their arrival in Rome, or in their written reports for teaching in academies. The differences between nations become clear in the letters which Dannecker wrote to Schiller and David d'Angers to Goethe. Even stronger and more exciting than these modest suggestions contained in the ‘Artists Letters on Art ' and shown in passing, will remain the increasingly firm thought in our consciousness of how much we owe to the word of the artists for the understanding of the organic link between process and content in art creation, and how little we could grasp if their words had not opened our eyes, interpreting and teaching in a benevolent way. 

Fig. 44) Ferdinand Hodler, Spring, 1907

AFTERWORD (pages 933-934)

It may be interesting to some readers to gather some more accurate information on the "preparation" (as they used to say in the 'ars poetica' of the seventeenth century) of this book. Starting from the desire to prepare a new edition of [Ernst] Guhl’s Letters of artists, I wanted to reduce and enlarge its size at the same time, first by working at an extension of the letters up to now, and then by selecting the documents of the artists not according to their historical and biographical value, but on the basis of their aesthetic and artistic contents. 

Fig. 45) Title page of the first volume of the Letters of artists by Ernst Guhl, 1853

Fig. 46) The second edition of the collection of the Letters of artists by Guhl,
revised and expanded in 1879 by Adolf Rosenberg

In first and - with very few exceptions - exclusive place, this objective determined the inclusion of artists' letters in this collection. Obviously, because of this desire, the task and enthusiasm of the editor grew. He must pay credit and graditudine herewith to the large and friendly support of numerous libraries, fellow scholars and collectors, which enabled the successful conclusion of this undertaking.

Fig. 47) Inventory of autographs and historical documents making up the collection of M. Benjamin Fillon, 1877

Five-sixths of the letters published by Guhl have therefore left the first chapter. For the next part, which includes the late seventeenth and the entire eighteenth century, there was no previous work for inspiration. Here I was able to track down the material mainly thanks to large catalogues of French autograph collections (as the inventories of Fillon and Bovet) and then thanks to the exemplary completeness of French archival publications in the Munich State Library. As to Germany I scrutinized the catalogues of autograph, and then worked systematically on Goedeke’s Grundriss zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, on Thieme-Becker’s Lexicon of the artists and several monographs.

Fig. 48) The collection of Artists’ Letters of the Eighteenth Century, published by Cassirer in Berlin in 1913

For the nineteenth century, I got a solid foundation from the 'Artists' Letters' collected in fine form by the publisher Bruno Cassirer. My excellent library, which gathers nearly all monographs available on the nineteenth-century artists, provided me with an even excessive amount of letters; I was therefore forced to make a selection of what I had. From the beginning of my job I gave particular attention to every element that would complete the collection. I accomplished my desire to draw unknown or difficult material from forgotten collections only with reference to the last sections of the book. Certainly, in archives and libraries abroad lie forgotten treasures that could fundamentally enrich our knowledge. But even the most serious researchers must admit that - especially for Italian Renaissance artists - research efforts have not yielded the desired results.

Fig. 49) A compendium of Artists’letters from the Renaissance by Guhl, edited by Wilhelm Miessner in 1913

I found precious indications in two volumes: Hermann Popps, The aesthetics of painters (Strasbourg 1902) and Arréat, Psychologie du peintre (Paris, 1893). Especially from the second book I drew the sources of the interventions of contemporary French artists. My real task as publisher, however, was to start looking for the material according to a canon that eschews the availability or unavailability of documentation. In an unbroken correspondence during around half a year I tried to follow the twisted and hidden knots of art literature, unfortunately not always being able to get in contact with the relevant experts. And yet, of few hundreds requests, only two questions have remained unanswered, and only one request has been rejected. And on the contrary, in a whole series of cases, colleagues whom herewith I would like to thank in a particular warm way, have either completely forsaken their already ready publication of letters or authorized that I would publish them in advance. 

Fig. 50) A war-time edition: European Letters of Artists, Confessions of the Spirit (1941)

Once again, it should be remembered here that the absence of letters from some of the main artists is explained by the mere fact that they did not write letters on art. Only after checking with insistence experts and close friends of the artists, I had to give up. The final setting has been prepared on the basis of the principle, justified from a scientific point of view and entirely determined on the ground of the maximum size possible for the volume, that first the best writers of letters were taken into account with more letters and second, all otherwise important contemporary artist were represented by one or two letters maximum, depending on their significance. It was thus obtained that the number of 350 letters was not exceeded and that I could still create in the reader a complete picture of the literary-aesthetic development of changes in the artists’ views from the Renaissance to the present day.

Fig. 51) Gerhard Peters, German Artists’ Letters of the Nineteenth Century, 1948

NOTES

[47] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst. Bekenntnisse von Malern, Architekten und Bildhauern aus fünf Jahrhunderten, Mit sechzig Selbstbildnissen und den Künstler-Unterschriften, Verlag von Wolfgang Jess, Dresden, 1926, 967. Quotation at pages 10-11.

[48] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p. 9.

[49] Guhl, Ernst - Künstler - Briefe. Übersetzt und erläutert, Berlin, Trautwein, 1853. The complete original text is available at: https://archive.org/details/kunstlerbriefe01guhl

[50] Guhl, Ernst - Künstler-Briefe. Band 2, Kunst und Künstler des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts, Berlin, Guttentag, 1856. The complete original text is available at: https://archive.org/details/kunstlerbriefe02guhl

[51] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p. 11.

[52] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p. 15.

[53] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p. 19.

[54] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p. 16.

[55] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p.18.

[56] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p.7.

[57] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p.8.

[58] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p.14.

[59] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p.10.

[60] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), pp.7-8.

[61] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p.15.

[62] Uhde-Bernays Hermann, Künstlerbriefe über Kunst ... (quoted), p.7.