The German Genius

his distance. His paintings still contain some sharp observation. 11
    T HE O THER D ACHAU
     
    Unlike Max Liebermann, Fritz von Uhde’s interest in art was supported by his father. President of the Lutheran Church Council in Wolkenburg, Saxony, Uhde’s father was himself a part-time painter and was married to the daughter of the general director of the Royal Museums in Dresden. Born in 1848, Udhe was thus encouraged to enter the Dresden Academy. Like Liebermann, he went to the Netherlands to paint en plein air to gain first-hand experience of the unusual light the Dutch landscape had to offer. This produced a looser, lighter style, which he used to depict mainly lower-class life in the 1880s. As part of this, Uhde and his fellow artists used the unusual landscape and light of the moorlands northwest of Munich, at Dachau. This served more or less as the German Barbizon, and was widely known as such before it became indelibly linked with the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The marshy topography and watery landscape of Dachau fascinated several other painters besides Uhde, in particular Adolf Hölzel and Ludwig Dill who, though not widely known in the twenty-first century, were both—in their landscapes—using the peculiar climate to grope their way toward semiabstract forms that anticipated what Kandinsky would realize a decade later. 12
    Franz von Stuck was a brooding sensualist from Tettenweis, a village in Bavaria; he was the son of a miller who had little feeling for art and assumed his son would take over the family business. Fortunately for the boy, his mother helped ensure that Franz was sent to a Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich where he learned the principles of design and architecture. In his early work he produced prints based on the work of some well-known Austrian and German artists—Max Klinger and Gustav Klimt among them. 13
    Stuck’s own style began to emerge, well described as an amalgam of the erotic and the sinister, the naked female torso featuring in such works as The Hunt (1883), and Sin , which dominated the first Sezession show (in fact, according to Heinrich Voss, fully three-quarters of Stuck’s paintings involve the erotic). While this sounds like a lot—while it is a lot—it was not so unusual in Europe at that time, when many artists—Fernand Khnopff, Paul Gauguin, Ferdinand Hodler—began to express visually their pent-up frustration with the repressions of “civilized” society. 14
    Stuck has also been seen as one of those leading the way to abstraction, in that the psychological component of his works is achieved by the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical lines and forms, by strongly contrasting color schemes that, in effect, render the actual figures secondary to the overall effect. Kandinsky, who arrived in Munich in 1896, chose Stuck as one of his teachers, working hard for a year to be accepted into his class. 15
    J UGENDSTIL : R EDUCING THE U GLINESS OF M ODERNITY
     
    Richard Riemerschmid was born in Munich, studied painting at the Munich Academy, where his early works presented nature—as those of Caspar David Friedrich had done—as a form of religious substitute (trees with halos, for example), landscapes as profane altarpieces. He was condemned as blasphemous.
    The crucial episode in his life turned out to be his marriage to the actress Ida Hofmann. After searching for furniture for the marital apartment and failing to find anything suitable, Riemerschmid designed some for himself. He hit upon a style in which the decoration used motifs taken from nature, with flowing lines that recalled leaves and fronds. 16 Others liked what they saw and he received a number of commissions, the motifs of which soon caught on. Other Germans—Bernhard Pankok, Hermann Obrist, and August Endell—all began to design a wide variety of objects (light fixtures, cooking utensils, even clothing), replacing an exclusive concern with the “fine” arts. Like other artists they felt that Germany’s rapid industrialization and urbanization was robbing the world of something precious, where even Munich, much less industrial than other Grossstädte , had nearly tripled its population, from 154,000 to 415,500 between 1868 and 1896. Their idea was that the disagreeable aspects of modernity could be erased by the arts, that, in the words of Hermann Obrist, the ugliness and misery of modern life might be alleviated, “that life in the future will be less toilsome than now.” 17
    The fact that the