The German Genius

lodgings with colour-sketches…Little shops that sold picture-frames, sculptures, and antiques there were in endless number…the owners of the smallest and meanest of these shops spoke of Mino da Fiesole and Donatello as though he had received the rights of reproduction from them personally…You might see a carriage rolling up the Ludwigstrasse, with such a great painter and his mistress inside. People would be pointing out the sight…Some of them would curtsy.”
    This is Thomas Mann, in “Gladius Dei,” a story published in 1902 that in part compares contemporary Munich with quattrocento Florence. 1 Mann was himself just one of the artists drawn to Munich, where the beer was famous, the architecture and landscaping incomparable, the opera, theater, and university likewise renowned and where, the breweries apart, there was no real industry and the poverty associated with it.
    Elsewhere in his work Mann was not always so positive about Munich’s position but there is no question that, at the turn of the century, the arts community was integral to the city. A municipal committee set up in 1892 to inquire into the Sezessionist Controversy (which we shall come to) confirmed that “Munich owes its outstanding importance among German cities to art and artists , however highly one may rate other factors in its development.” 2 The poet Erich Mühsam described Schwabing, the cultural quarter of Munich, as Germany’s “Montmartre.” The Café Stephanie, known as Café Megalomania, was where the poets and artists met, played chess, borrowed money, and tried not to lust after Lotte Pritzel, “the most endearing amoralist ever known.” 3
    The other jewel in some ways was the Neue Pinakothek, which Ludwig I (1786–1868) built for his collection of contemporary art (even today it houses only art produced since 1800). At his death in 1868 nearly half of his pictures were by non-German artists. Munich also boasted the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, “by mid-century the pre-eminent teaching institution in Central Europe.” This drew students from all over the world. “An entire generation of American realists studied in Munich in the 1870s, as did many Scandinavian, Russian and Polish students.” 4
    A final aspect of the Munich art world that was unique was its exhibition space. Unlike other cities in Germany, by mid-century Munich had two buildings large enough to host shows of significant size. The first was the Kunst-und Industrieausstellungsgebäude, used for exhibitions of local art, and second the Glaspalast, designed by August Voigt to house the Allgemeine Deutsche Industrie-Ausstellung (German industrial exhibition) of 1854 and subsequently used for major shows of both historical and contemporary art, including foreign artists.
    These exhibitions were mounted by the Munich Artists Association (MAA), established in 1868, which held shows of both German and foreign artists every three years. To begin with they were insignificant affairs, but after it was granted a royal charter, the association began to use some very imaginative techniques to interest the general public in art. One device was a torchlight parade in which 800 artists walked through the streets of Munich behind a horse-drawn float showing four allegorical figures of genius. In 1892, just before the Munich Sezession occurred (see Chapter 27), the association consisted of 1,020 artists and was an eclectic mix of established—even famous—artists, together with their much less successful colleagues, and students. The association’s regulations were strict, limiting the number of paintings any one artist could exhibit in their shows to three, but the exhibitions were marked by the same imaginative devices as the torchlight parade. Beer gardens were installed in the exhibitions, and lotteries were arranged with paintings and drawings as prizes. 5
    Following 1871, says Maria Makela, Munich entered a golden age for the arts. Besides its lower cost of living, Munich was seen as a more relaxed city than most, with looser morals, benefiting from its proximity to the Alps and Italy, and as a rail crossroads on the way to the Orient. By 1895 some 1,180 painters and sculptors were registered there, 13 percent of the total in Germany, and more than were registered in Berlin (1,159), which had a population four times that of Munich (Dresden had 314 registered artists, Hamburg 280, and Frankfurt 142). The English painter John Lavery, who visited Munich in the