German Artists' Writings in the XX Century - 12
Arthur Kampf
From my Life [Aus meinem Leben]
Aachen, Museumsverein Aachen Publishers, 1950,
64 pages of text and 16 pages of black and white pictures
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part Three
[Original Version: March 2017 - New Version: April 2019]
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Fig. 3) The volume on Arthur Kampf by Bruno Kroll (1944)
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World War I
At the outbreak of the Great War, Arthur Kampf
had no hesitation in taking side. In September 1914, i.e. a month after the
beginning of hostilities, he signed the nationalist manifesto “Appeal to the
world of culture!” (Aufruf an die
Kulturwelt!), signed by 92 other personalities from the world of art, music
and literature [77]. The text defended Germany against the charges that it had
attacked treacherously Belgium, a neutral country, and vindicated the rights of
his country in running a war described as a defence of the German culture, of
which the manifesto proclaimed the diversity and superiority. There was no
shortage of racist themes (the German army was appealed to defend the white race
from “Mongolians and Negroes”).
The "Manifesto of the 93" included
personalities from the world of culture, among which ten artists with a different
background: Franz Defregger, Eduard von Gebhardt, Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth,
Arthur Kampf, Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Max Klinger, Maximilian Lenz, Max
Liebermann, Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Trübner. Evidently, the expressionists did not
adhere, but the signatories still represented both sides of the old conflict
between academics and secessionists in painting. No painter joined to the
pacifist counter-manifesto "Appeal to the Europeans" (
Aufruf an die Europäer) [78]. The world
of painting was either interventionist or silent.
Kampf also documented as a painter the
atmosphere of intense nationalism and open support to the conflict. These were
days of enthusiasm: in the memoirs, Arthur remembered that he was ending the
fresco at the Humboldt University of Berlin (the one portraying Fichte - see Part One) when he heard cannon fire celebrating the fall of Lieges [79]
. He wanted to immortalize in his
pictures a moment of unity of the public opinion. To the issue he devoted the
painting “Berliners in front of the Royal
Castle at the beginning of World War II on August 1, 1914” and a lithograph
which appeared in the February 1915 issue of the propaganda weekly
"Wartime" (Kriegszeit),
published by Paul Cassirer. The 1914 painting seems to be one of his works which was
most influenced stylistically by German impressionism. The cooperation with
Cassirer was a further proof that artistic circles once opposed to each other had
compacted into a single propaganda effort.
A year later, Kampf went to visit the front – at
the invitation of General von Lochow, of whom he had already produced a portrait in 1909 – in
the French village of Pinon, not far from Verdun, where the German advance stopped
later on in 1916.
Pinon was the most advanced operational basis of the German Command, still
hoping for a fast advancing to Paris. Kampf depicted battle scenes (
The bomb) but also images of an army in
prayer (as the
Mass in the caves of
Soissons and
Good Friday in the
village church in Pinon). The latter were very intense and composite
scenes, essentially based on a play of lights, and clearly reminiscent of the
Dutch art of the Baroque era.
“I also
painted a sketch for a painting that General von Lochow required me. The
picture was supposed to represent the march of French prisoners before the
Emperor, and the general with his staff. The general had won the battle of
Soissons, and the prisoners were forced to march in front of emperor and
general” [80]. This opens up a question. The memories continued with the
following words: "The sketch for the
painting was ready, and I had completed the studies on the locations where one
had to represent the parade. Due to the unfortunate outcome of the war, the
image was never painted” [81].
And yet a canvas with that theme, with the date 1915, is
present on ArtNet (http://www.artnet.com/artists/arthur-kampf/vorbeimarsch-gefangener-soldaten-an-wilhelm-ii-CYyYkUR01KiS-eepJDQwJA2). It is a painting of 77 x 115 cm. Is
this the sketch described in the memoirs? In that case, it would be something
much more elaborate than a never-painted image. Or was it an unquestionable
error of the elder painter, and therefore an authentic picture was already painted
in 1915? Did Kampf produce the painting some years later on the basis of
sketches? The picture is neither quoted (let alone reproduced) by Rosenhagen in
1922 nor by Kroll in 1944. Is there a risk that it may be a fake? Or was it perhaps a studio for a larger (never realised) painting? Without any
technical ability to confirm or exclude it, great care is of the essence: we know that counterfeiters browse the memoirs of artists to look for
plausible and inspiring themes. In any case, among the French prisoners the
painting displayed troops in Arab costumes: colonial troops were certainly
present in the French army. In fact, this was also, as we have seen, one of the
most odious points of the German propaganda, emphasizing the supposed
'civilizing' role of the German empire.
In the representation of war, Kampf never
centred his attention on carnage and horror (let us contrast him, instead, with
the representation of war by Otto Dix a few years later). There was no
reference to the massacres of millions of soldiers in the trenches. Verdun witnessed
one of the most stupid and useless massacres of the Great War. For Kampf, instead,
the war was human. Also the memories seemed to confirm that feeling: "
When I then read in the newspapers about the
atrocities of our soldiers, I would have laughed. In the village of Pinon I had
seen how our soldiers walked the children around, with great correctness,
sometimes holding them, sometimes taking them by the hand, and I experienced
the best possible understanding between them” [82]. Propaganda? Reality?
Hope of a patriot? Weaknesses of an old man? Stupidity of a fanatic? The
memories refer to 1915, but they were written in 1949 and published in 1950,
when the image of the German soldiers was tainted. Did he want to assert that
there had been another war in which German soldiers had not behaved as war criminals?
It is perhaps for these ambiguities that Kampf’s memories have never been
published again in 1950: the risk was too high that they would be interpreted
as a revisionist document.
In 1917, when things started to go seriously wrong,
Kampf celebrated the readiness of the people to make a financial sacrifice to support the cause of Germany by donating gold to the homeland.
In the paintings appeared widows and grieving mothers. The painter took up a
theme that had been his own in Düsseldorf in 1894, when he had exalted the
willingness even of children to give up the little they had to finance the anti-Napoleonic
wars in 1813 (at that time, the myth was that a little girl had sold her own hair
and brought the earned money to the officials collecting donations).
The memories focused on 1914-1915, a time of
victories, and on the weeks he spent in Pinon. Here is how the words on the
First World War ended: "I would not
dwell on the last years of the war. They brought only pain. The only joy for me
was that my eldest son returned safely from the war in 1918 " [83]. In 1918 Kampf painted "The attack", a clear action scene
for which Hans Rosenhagen [84]
referred to Marcantonio Raimondi’s prints of
the cartoons made by Michelangelo for the Battle of Cascina. The war started
with a moment of stylistic innovation when Kampf painted like an impressionist, continued
with old Dutch-style paintings and ended with a very classical composition,
reminiscent of his most monumental art.
Germany during the Weimar
Republic
After the war, the first task of Kampf was to
restart the activities of the Berlin Academy, which during the war had
become a military hospital [85]. Against all that has been said above, it is certainly not surprising
that the painter did not show any sense of belonging to the Weimar Republic.
The name 'Republik' was mentioned by
him as a synonym for "to stand in
line for food” [86]; Arthur noted that in 1923, he had travelled in the
Netherlands and suffered to see how well the local population was supplied with food,
while he was still suffering from hunger in Berlin (he was a 59-year old man).
It seems useful to make a comparison with the
pages
of the memoirs of Lovis Corinth: the latter also felt no sympathy for the
new world of the Weimar Republic, but confessed (the same happened to
Paul Klee) that things were going very well from the point of his financial
situation. In fact, in the state of absolute uncertainty created by the political
and financial crises, paintings became a much required safe haven. Prices were
soaring and even beating galloping hyperinflation, while customers visited
directly the atelier of Corinth and grabbed from his hands the just concluded
paintings: to facilitate the task, the clients commissioned to the painter
views of the Walschensee, the lake where Corinth had his land residence, so
that he could quickly produce a large number of them. Many painters were thus
protected from the catastrophic consequences of the crisis, so much so that in
the early twenties the number of those who wanted to start in the profession
exponentially increased.
Kampf, instead, was paid by the public
administration, and the purchasing power of his wage - despite being the
President of the Academy - was probably ravaged by hyperinflation. For its
monumental art (murals and commemorative paintings), he also depended upon
public commissions, which probably became very rare during the crisis.
In the memoirs, Arthur cited only two monumental works in those years, linked
to religious themes (works, which were all lost during the Second World War). They
were a cartoon for a mosaic in the Cathedral in Berlin in 1923-1924 and the
frescoes for the chapel of the Borsig family in a suburb of Berlin
(Groß-Behnitz) between 1923 and 1925, i.e. during the few years of economic
stabilization of the Weimar Republic [87]
.
In the memories, the only reference to the
speculative bubble that led to the explosion of the prices of contemporary
artists was, indirectly, the flowering of the market for counterfeited art:
Kampf wrote of a naive collector, ruined by the fact that he had invested all
his money in a collection which had been completely put up by criminals with
the help of skilled copyists [88]
.
In 1924 Kampf left the Academy, and it is clear
from his paintings that he also changed the nature of his art works: not
historical representations with many figures any more, but paintings that one could
sell to private customers. In truth, he was allowed to keep his publicly paid atelier at the Academy until
1933; then, in that fateful year (with the seizure of power of the Nazis), he
decided to move to a completely private studio. "Since then I have used a private atelier and created a so high number
of large and small paintings, that I could not name them one by one" [89]. And in fact, about the years following the
abandonment of the Academy, he told us only one episode, linked to Turkey.
In those years, the unique opportunity for him to
earn was to create two portraits (one in tailcoat and the other in uniform) of Kemal
Ataturk [90]
in Ankara, commissioned by
the Turkish government in 1925. The portraits were executed in 1927 and became
the basis for all official iconographic images of the Turkish stateman, of
which numerous versions were later on produced by other artists. The memoirs are
rich in detail on those days (including the fact that Ataturk had, in fact, a
private harem). It was the only episode recalled between 1925 and 1944, apart
from a highly enigmatic sentence: "In
the years 1942-1943 I had the joy to produce three large paintings,
commissioned by the State for a ministry whose construction was planned, but
which was, later on, not built anymore because of the war. The paintings were
ready, were retired and have disappeared. I painted these works, making them
rich of figures in the space of nine months and I think that one could not
notice any decline in my artist's strength despite my 79 years” [91]. Were they
perhaps the paintings with a clear propagandistic nature that were celebrated
in the book by Bruno Kroll in 1944?
Bombed Germany
After the break between 1924 and 1944, the memoirs
started again with May 1944, when Kampf left Berlin to repair in a village of
Lower Silesia (now the region of Poland around Wroclav, then that around Breslau),
carrying with him paintings, library and memories to escape from the bombings (as
'Gottbegnadete', authorities had a duty to support him to avoid hw would suffer any damage from the war; civilians in Berlin, instead,
were prohibited to evacuate to the countryside).
In Lower Slesia, he first lost his wife because
of a simple traffic accident [92], and then the entire collection of paintings
and books, having to escape the advancing Red Army. Then he repaired in the
castle of Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, where the collapsing regime had prepared
"a haven for artists" (it
is known that Hitler lived in Berchtesgaden, when he wanted to rest from the
labours of government). Kampf stayed there for a few months in a community of
elderly academic painters; among them, he cited Erich von Perfall (1882-1961), Ludwig Hohlwein (1874-1949) and Carl Ederer (1875-1951). The memoirs did not explain that, in
addition to old age, they all shared the fact to have supported the regime. The
painter recalled instead the destruction by the Americans of Hitler's residence,
in a huge cloud of dust [93]. It was the last episode narrated in the short text of 64 pages.
The text concluded with two pages on contemporary art:
"The miserable era we live finds its
most accurate expression in the new artistic orientations” [94].
The statements of the elder
painter left no doubt. Contemporary art was not only incomprehensible, but also
inferior. In his view, abstract art was of much lower quality than expressionism
(which, despite its flaws, had however its grotesque character of vitality).
Abstract expressionism was instead the result of propaganda and childishness
[95].
What has been kept
unsaid in the memoirs?
It is truly amazing that the item on Arthur
Kampf, drafted by Otto Zirk for the Biographical
Dictionary of the Germans in 1977 [96], suffered exactly
the same informational gaps as the 1950 memoirs: a hole between 1925 and 1945.
Evidently, also Zirk refused to admit that Kampf was a Nazi.
A series of omissions is making it really hard
to find out what the painter did after leaving the Academy, and until the
arrival to power of the Nazis (1925-1933). In fact, the volume of Bruno Kroll,
for opposite reasons to those of Zirk, ignored any reference to what happened
during the Weimar Republic. We are therefore facing an incredible situation:
the artistic production of Kampf at that time was impressive in terms of
quantity, and displayed almost everything and its opposite (portraits, scenes
of everyday life, sacred painting, exotic and mythological themes) but there is
no record of what happened to him in those years. In stylistic terms, it seems that
the artist oscillated between an intimate and thoughtful style for portraits
and a much more assertive one for his genre scenes.
Paradoxically, it is easier to reconstruct what
happened after the seizure of power by the nationalism in 1933. Kampf
immediately became a member of the party. There is no doubt that historically
Kampf has been one of the most revered painters by Hitler. Kampf must have been
one of his official portraitists, if are true the words commenting the picture
above, as verified by the Getty Foundation: nothing is known, however, when the
portrait was composed and who the person looking at the picture was. In 1939
Kampf was decorated on the occasion of his 75 years. In 1944 he was even
included, by Hitler himself, in the 24 personalities of culture who, as
mentioned above, were called in a stilted way as the "Gottbegnadeten", or the "Blessed by God". For them,
it had to be guaranteed that they would continue their work undisturbed by the
war, for their contribution which according to the Nazi regime they gave to
German culture. There were only four painters belonging to the list [97].
In 1938 Kampf painted a commemorative picture of
January 30, 1933, the date of Hitler's seizure of power, with the Brown Shirts
marching under the Brandenburg Gate between two wings of jubilant crowd doing
the Nazi salute. We can see this picture exposed in the next photo, along with
other works by the artist. It is a picture whose colour image I decided not to include
in this post, because I found it published in several sites, which are clearly
celebratory of Nazism. I would like to avoid here any ambiguity: it is
impossible to consider a work like that from of an aesthetic point of view
only. In 1939, blood was displayed in his paintings for the first time, to
celebrate the role of women in battle, with the painting "
The young lady from Hemmingstedt":
it celebrated an episode in 1500, when the inhabitants of a village in Northern
Germany managed to defeat an invading Dutch army. During Nazism, the village of
Hemmingstedt became a sort of sanctuary of national identity.
In the same year, the seventy-five old artist was
celebrated in an exhibition called Große
Deutsche Kunstausstellung (the "Exhibition of the Great German Art") which was
held every year in Munich from 1937 to 1944, and was exactly the
antithesis of the exhibition on degenerate art: it exposed Nazi art to public.
The governmental research project on the exhibition (www.gdk-research.de) offers a very detailed set of information. It also testifies that
several paintings were purchased by Hitler himself (like Venus and Adonis,
acquired by him for 10,000 marks).
In the years following the war, Kampf’s art took
tones of religious penance. In the memoirs, instead, he did not spend any word on all wrong done by the Nazi at power. He preferred to forgo, both in the reconstruction of events both in terms of style, everything concerning his life since 1925, in an attempt to preserve a less controversial memory of his own art. However, it is obvious that, when August Gotzes published his memoirs in 1950, the time when he was celebrated by the Nazi regime as one of the main living German artists was too recent. So the painter’s attempt to ensure his art work would be freed by the weight of the past failed. His art work was forgotten, like his autobiographic text. Still, his memoirs “From my life” allowed us to reconstruct important pages of German art in the first fifty years of the twentieth century.
NOTES
[79] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben (From my
life), Introduction by August Gotzes, Aachen, Verlag Museumsverein Aachen,
1950, 64 pages and 16 black and white pictures. Quotation at page 41
[80] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 43
[81] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 43
[82] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 44
[83] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 44
[84] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 97
[85] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 44
[86] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 45
[87] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 46
[88] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 45
[89] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 45
[90] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), pp. 46-48
[91] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 49
[92] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 50
[93] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 50
[94] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 60
[95] Kampf, Arthur - Aus meinem Leben … (quoted), p. 61
[97] Three other artists belonged to the group:
Hermann Gradl (1883-1964), Willy
Kriegel (1901-1966) and Werner Peiner (1897-1984).
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