[German Connoisseurs between 19th and 20th Century], edited by Francesco Caglioti, Andrea De Marchi, Alessandro Nova. Part Four

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I conoscitori tedeschi fra Otto e Novecento
[German Connoisseurs between 19th and 20th Century]
Edited by Francesco Caglioti, Andrea De Marchi, Alessandro Nova

Milan, Officina Libraria, 2018

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part Four

A photograph of Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner
Source: https://ilmanifesto.it/valentiner-lespressionismo-a-scopo-museale/

Go back to Part One

Marco M. Mascolo
Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner (1880-1958):
connoisseurship, collezionismo e museografia
[Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner (1880-1958):
Connoisseurship, Collecting and Museography] 

(pp. 273-286)

In the case of Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, we are dealing with a connoisseur who acted as an early link within the scholar community between Germany and America. The man, certainly, was a person with a broad culture, combined with equally vast interests, remembering, under this point of view, one of the main interlocutors of his youth, i.e. Wilhelm von Bode. He was, in fact, his personal assistant at the new-born Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum of Berlin. Bode had noticed Valentiner because, when the latter graduated in Heidelberg with a thesis on Rembrandt, he also made use - for the purposes of his stylistic interpretation of the artist's works - of the sumptuously illustrated catalogue raisonné in eight volumes, which Bode and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot published between 1897 and 1906. The two years next to Bode were, in general, fundamental for Valentiner’s formation, but also, much more specifically, for the biographical events of the scholar. In 1908, in fact, Bode received from the United States a request to give advice on the new director of the Department of Decorative Arts of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and suggested Valentiner, who thus began a long stay in the United States (the most representative period was, without a doubt, the twenty years in which he was director of the Detroit Institute of Arts). Long, but not uninterrupted: it suffices to say that when the First World War broke out, the scholar returned to Germany and enlisted as a volunteer in the army. It is worth mentioning those years, because it was during the war that Valentiner knew Franz Marc (who died in Verdun in 1916). With Marc he had the opportunity to discuss - right at the front - the perspectives of contemporary German art and the chaotic events linked to the birth of artistic movements immediately preceding the war (including, of course, the movement of the Blue Rider, or Blaue Reiter). Marco Mascolo published last year an interesting monograph dedicated to Valentiner [9] and it is not the case here to dwell longer on him. However, there is one aspect to bear in mind: since the time of the studies on Rembrandt, the German historian turned his stylistic analysis about ancient masters into a reflection on the 'issues' of contemporary art. Moreover, since the late Nineteenth century Rembrandt had become the embodiment of modern painting and Germanness in art. Already Bode "insisted on the need for modern artists to seek inspiration in Rembrandt to achieve a regeneration of the means of expression in an all-Germanic key" (page 281). Valentiner’s figure cannot be understood, a fortiori, if not taking into account his 'militancy' in terms of contemporary art, which resulted, in essence, with the support of German expressionism. The stay of the critic in the US was therefore fundamental on the one hand for the rediscovery of Dutch painting of the Golden Age, on the other as a bridge (until death) between US collectors on the one hand and German expressionism on the other. Finally, the fact that "thanks to his alliance with the various Morgan, Altman, Widener, Johnson before, and with the Ford and Rockefeller families later, Valentiner was able to carry their collections to the museum institutions in which he worked, according to that particular and paradigmatic 'public use of private goods' typical of the US context" (p. 286).

Giovanna Ragionieri
Il «problema di Assisi» nella storiografia tedesca, fino a Richard Offner
[The «Assisi problem» in German historiography, up to Richard Offner]
(pp. 287-296)

A view of the Lower and Uppers Basilicas of Saint Francis seen from the Lower Plaza of Saint Francis
Source: Florian Decker, Messdiener Winterbach via Wikimedia Commons

Giovanna Ragionieri (pupil of Luciano Bellosi, with whom she collaborated in the preparation of the notes of the fundamental essay on La pecora di Giotto (Giotto’s sheep) [10] and the Italian edition of Henry Thode’s Francis of Assisi, Rome, Donzelli 1993) dealt with re-reading and reinterpreting contributions of the German connoisseurs about one of the great problems of attributionism, namely the question of the authorship of the frescoes of the Lower and Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. Obviously, this was an uneven route, which did not concern all German visitors to Assisi. We can say that the beginning of the debate materialized on the pages of the famous German magazine «Kunst-Blatt», on which, in 1821 and 1827, two contributions, respectively by Johann Heinrich Friedrich Karl Witte (1800-1883) and a not better known Fr. Köhler appeared. Witte assigned to Giotto the frescoes of the Franciscan Allegories in the Lower Basilica (with a late chronological collocation), while rejecting Giotto's paternity in the Upper Basilica (where he identified the hands of three distinct artists); Köhler brought forward the date of the Allegories and did not exclude the presence of Giotto in the left wall of the Upper Basilica. The positions of von Rumohr in the second volume of the Italienische Forschungen are well known (although we do not know for sure when he visited Assisi for the first time). While reaching attributions that today would be judged to be fictitious (starting from works judged to be certain at the time, but later revealed to be not so), von Rumohr had the merit of 'thwarting' a reading of Giotto solely linked to religious spirituality and placing him on a more 'secular' path, linked to the imitation of nature, which would very much please, for example, Giovanni Previtali in the XX century.

This is, I think, the trait-d'union of Ms Ragionieri’s essay. Regardless of the outcome of the attributions (and from the beginning of the Twentieth century, with the rediscovery of the works by Pietro Cavallini in Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, there was really an alternation of positions supporting a greater or lesser involvement of the so-called 'Roman school' in the Upper Basilica), all the figures taken into consideration by the author reveal a knowledge of the (visual and written) sources that must be underlined from a methodological point of view. They included Thode (whose interpretation of Giotto as a Renaissance father, if anything, is debatable) and Friedrich Rintelen (1881-1926), who expunged the Stories of St. Francis from Giotto’s catalogue. They also encompassed Suida (1877–1959), Schmarsow (1853-1936) and Richard Offner (1889-1965). The latter, on the Giotto question, affirmed the substantial extraneousness of the Stories with respect to the Florentine artist's production. These were all positions that today, in the light of Giotto’s  'recovery' of which Bellosi has been authoritative interpreter (placing Assisi’s site in the Upper Basilica in very early years), are considered outdated, but which nevertheless reveal the solidity of the connoisseurship method.

Sonia Chiodo
Richard Offner (1889-1965), appunti per una biografia: studi, pensieri e maestri prima del Corpus.
[Richard Offner (1889-1965), notes for a biography: studies, thoughts and masters before the Corpus.]
(pp. 297-336)

A volume belonging to the Corpus of Florentine Painting edited by Richard Offner

The twelve volumes of A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, published between 1930 and 1965, represent the most famous cultural heritage of the Anglo-Austrian scholar Richard Offner (see also the above essay by Giovanna Ragionieri). I would like to report here about Sonia Chiodo's attempt to identify the sources that most influenced his thinking during the years of his training, then bringing him to an idea of ​​substantially 'intuitive' connoisseurship, as explained in the essay An Outline of a Theory of Method (1927).

Offner's emigration to America was atypical, in the sense that it was precocious and not linked to war events. Richard moved to New York with his family at the age of two, in 1891, and stayed there until he returned to Europe on two occasions, first between 1912 and 1914 and then between 1920 and 1923. The period between 1912 and 1923 can be considered roughly the one in which Offner matured his interests, especially for the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Immediately afterwards he succeed in joining the University of New York, where he would remain until retirement. Looking carefully at those years, three figures or environments were crucial: George Santayana, philosopher of idealistic naturalism, Bernard Berenson and the Viennese School of Art History. Personal relations with Berenson, since the first acquaintance probably in Italy, lasted for decades, and were always marked by a tone of substantial respect and admiration even when Offner would mature different opinions in the sphere of attributions and possibly a diverging method. This was testified by the scholar's diaries and the unpublished letters that Sonia Chiodo proposed in the appendix. For example, Berenson advised Offner to go to Vienna to attend Max Dvořák courses, although (see page 304) Berenson himself had a substantial disregard for the "artistic will" and the ‘development of forms’, arguing instead that the main interest of a scholar should be the artistic artefact as such. For Offner, instead, "the real common thread was the analysis of the relationship between the expressive will of the artist and the technical and formal means used from time to time" (page 304). All this translated into a different interpretation of 'scientificity' of the discipline: for Berenson it was Morelli-inspired and was referred, without any doubt, to the 'peaks' of art, or to artistic expressions of a clearly superior quality. Offner, to the contrary, defended "the positivist-driven scientific character of his method, thus distancing himself from the tendency to focus on single personalities emerging as peaks and, on the contrary, supporting the need to allow each object artistic «to take its place solely by stylistic elements», so that also «the intermediate ground is covered, and the panorama becomes completer»" (page 312). 

Giuliana Tomasella
Il conoscitore d’arte secondo Max Jacob Friedländer (1867-1958)
[The connoisseur of art according to Max Jacob Friedländer (1867-1958)]
(pp. 337-348)

A photo of Max Jacob Friedlander in 1934, taken by his niece Eva Neumann.
Source: http://art-now-and-then.blogspot.com/2013/04/max-j-friedlander.html

It has been said since the beginning of this long review that the world of connoisseurs can be divided, by and large, between supporters of a 'scientific' (or positivist) connoisseurship on the one hand and those of an 'intuitive' (or idealistic) one on the other. In reality, this is obviously an oversimplification, as the figures we have met so far have amply demonstrated. One point is however beyond doubt: if one accepts this subdivision for a moment, Max Jacob Friedländer would be the true champion of the intuitive connoisseurship. Of course, one cannot fail to mention at least the fourteen volumes which Friedländer devoted to Flemish painting, consecrating him as an authentic authority on the subject, and the fact that from 1904 onwards he worked in the Berlin museums, alongside with (but not in the shade of) von Bode, whose he was  successor at the top of the fine arts administration in the German capital as from 1924. Friedländer was sacked because of racial reasons in 1933, following the rise to power of Hitler. It cannot be forgotten that he remained in Germany anyway until 1939, moving to Holland and being arrested only a few months later, with the arrival of the Nazis. Friedländer was however freed, apparently over Göring's own interest, whom the scholar would have helped in his (horrible) collecting practices. The American secret services, moreover, indicated him as a collaborator of the regime. There may have been inexcusable compromises, but Friedländer owed his personal safety also to his reputation as a connoisseur, which helped perhaps turn a blind eye to the 'race issue'.

The front cover of Von Kunst und Kennerschaft (1946) published in Zurich by Bruno Cassirer and Emil Oprecht
Source: https://www.booklooker.de/B%C3%BCcher/Max-J-Friedl%C3%A4nder+Von-Kunst-und-Kennerschaft/id/A02kJi7S01ZZT

During his life, the scholar had several opportunities to explain his idea of ​​connoisseurship, since the end of the second decade of the Twentieth century, until the publication, in English, in 1942 of On Art and Connoisseurship, then followed by the German version Von Kunst und Kennerschaft (1946). The very successful work was translated into Italian in 1955 under the title Il conoscitore d’arte. For twenty years Friedländer claimed that the recognition of the author of a work must be a spontaneous fact, very similar to that of a friend whom we have not seen for some time and we meet on the street. And, I would add, if connoisseurship always presupposes on the one had the provisional nature of an attribution, on the other hand it also encompasses a dynamic idea of ​​the stylistic development of an artist which opposes to the any schematic frame of Morellian derivation. In essence - Friedländer wrote - no one can always be equal to himself, and this applies, a fortiori, to artists during their professional career; to presume to recognize his hand on the basis of the repetition of immutable elements in his works means to confine the artist's creativity (but also the influences that derive from the vision of other artefacts) inside a coercive cage. The Friedländer method, to be paradoxical, was a non-method. If anything, it was a value system to which to refer. One of these values ​​concerned precisely the approach of the connoisseur to the artefact: it was the unavoidability of the pleasure of the visual act. "The keystone of his approach to the artwork were [...] the two inseparable actions of «examining» and «tasting». The autopsy examination had always to be associated with the pleasure that the fruition of the work of art aroused; the exclusion of the hedonistic dimension ended up severely affecting the results of the study. The aim was to safeguard the humanistic nature of the art historian's profession: one should recognize an artist as a friend, whose traits are internalized; one should come closer to the artwork first of all because of the pleasure it arouses" (p. 340).

It is hardly evident that an approach of this kind ended up colliding with the academic world, where the teaching of art history was still very young and tended to be the bearer of a 'pre-packaged' (and 'scientific') reading of art developments: "The attention of the connoisseur goes first to the particular; he does not start with preconceptions, does not use a wide net, does not know a priori where he wants to arrive. As Friedländer was able to observe effectively in his memories: «Academics enter the museum with ideas, connoisseurs leave it with ideas. Academics are looking for what they expect to find, connoisseurs find something they know nothing about»" (page 345). The gap between connoisseurship and university widened dramatically. As we already mentioned, in the preface to this book Mina Gregori complained about the lack of success of the connoisseurship in today's universities and even (partly) explained it with the resounding success of Friedländer's own thesis; in fact, to take it literally, Friedländer denied the possibility of any university teaching of the art of the connoisseur.

One aspect that should not be underestimated - and to which Friedländer payed particular attention - was the linguistic one. If the attribution was intuition, if it was like recognizing an old friend, how could one 'communicate' it to others? The scholar was perfectly aware that language "at most can approach the work, and contain the damage of its inevitable betrayal" (p. 37), revealing itself by its very nature insufficient. In this sense, against the drawbacks of a particularly long-winded ekphrasis, he preferred an utterly 'banal' prose, the result of an exhausting work of subtracting the superfluous in order to identify the basic elements of a style in a few words. "Language is poor and insufficient, yet it is the only means at our disposal, an obtuse instrument, which we must try to refine tirelessly. We think, it is true, that it is easy to nick knives too sharp. Feelings are like butterflies that lose their life pierced by the pin of the word"(page 347).

Max Seidel
Adolph Goldschmidt (1863-1944)

(pp. 349-366)

A photo of Adolph Goldschmidt
Source: https://www.pinterest.it/pin/462604192945511610/?lp=true

Among the many German connoisseurs who were forced to come to terms with Nazism, that of Adolph Goldschmidt is probably one of the saddest stories. On closer examination of the personal data, Goldschmidt had finished, at least officially, his professional career in 1932, retiring that year and thus leaving the chair of History of Art at the University of Berlin before Hitler came to power. He was therefore not dismissed, simply because he no longer held a position (even if he had been appointed professor emeritus). His had been a life devoted to study and teaching. More than two hundred publications documented the cultural depth, addressed above all to the examination of medieval art. In this sense the appointment of Goldschmidt as an ordinary professor in Berlin (we are in 1912) marked a manifest change with respect to the methods of the predecessor Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who had a more philosophical and theoretical approach. Goldschmidt, on the other hand, was an expert connoisseur, although he was absolutely aware that the stylistic reading of the works was only one of the approaches with which one could approach the study of art. And yet, one of his characteristic aspects was that he was basically loved and respected by everyone. It was Wölfflin himself who insisted that his successor be Goldschmidt, and one cannot forget the mutual esteem with Wilhelm von Bode; and, with respect to the community of artists, he was friend with Liebermann and Munch.

Obviously unintentionally (in the sense that at that time it was difficult to imagine how things would have ended), Goldschmidt was a key figure in the diaspora of German professors and art historians (and Jews) in America once Nazism came to power. The first trip of the German medievalist to the United States was in 1927, when the man was already very famous in university environments. It was a sabbatical year that was soon replicated in 1930-31 and followed by a further journey in 1936-37. The success of Goldschmidt in America was enormous; I would say, it went far beyond the narrow circle of art historians. In addition to the competence, in short, what played a decisive role were his joviality, courtesy and availability. In his memoirs, the German historian gave us, for example, an eloquent account of his visit to Henry Ford's car factories in Detroit; but there were also trips to Hollywood and photos taken next to the great movie stars of the time, who already knew his name and were pleased to meet him personally. In any case, Goldschmidt helped to overcome the prejudices against German professors and pushed institutions to invite them when they need to leave Germany. Erwin Panofsky, for example, found a place in America on his recommendation.

If anything, the real question is: why, with such success and with requests that came to him continually, did Goldschmidt never relocate to America? We have seen that his last trip to the USA is from 1936-37. The man knew very well to be spied on by the Nazis and certainly made everything he could to make it known that he, Jew, had been able to get an enormous success on the other shore of the ocean. But then he came back. And he returned because, before feeling a Jew, he felt genuinely German; and because all his interests of study concerned objects and archives that were in Germany. In short, he pretended nothing would happen and tried to maintain a semblance of normality in a situation that was not normal. In April 1939, after endless pressure and the direct interest of the German-American scientific community, Golschmidt finally decided to leave for Switzerland. With him, the Nazis let him carry only ten German Marks. He had a visa for the United States, and the condition of the expatriation was that he would move to the States. Goldschmidt, a bachelor, without a wife and children, let the visa expire: "What would I ever do, at 76, in America? As a scientific activity there I could not do anything more comparable to the past, and it is equally doubtful that I would really exploit their rich libraries" (p.386). While he did not miss friends also in Basel, it was clear that something had broken. Adolph Goldschmidt committed suicide in his home kitchen on January 5, 1944.

End of Part Four
Go to Part Five 

NOTES

[9] See Marco M. Mascolo, «Un occhio finissimo». Wilhelm R. Valentiner (1880-1958) storico dell’arte tra Germania e Stati Uniti. [«A very fine eye». Wilhelm R. Valentiner (1880-1958), an art historian between Germany and the United States], Rome, Viella, 2017.

[10] See Luciano Bellosi, La pecora di Giotto [Giotto’s sheep], Turin, Einaudi, 1985.