The German Genius

canvases were reproduced in German schoolbooks and became familiar as few art works are. His Kaiser Proclamation in Versailles , which depicted the emperor and his generals toasting the foundation of the German Empire in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors, was a gift to Bismarck. Appointed president of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1875, Werner subsequently became Wilhelm II’s tutor, reinforcing the young Kaiser’s instinctive loathing for modern art.
    But though Wilhelm and Werner were a powerful minority, they were a minority nonetheless. As early as 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists invited Edvard Munch to exhibit his work there. Fifty-five paintings were planned and the conservatives duly incensed. Werner led the chorus, and the show was canceled. The old guard were not so successful with Max Liebermann. Liebermann’s very Germanic humanity was self-evident in his pictures, but Wilhelm did not think that painting should make “misery even more hideous than it already is.” 33 Accordingly, he did his best to keep Liebermann barred from official exhibitions. This did not stop the popular painter from exhibiting in private shows, and eventually he grew so popular that he was admitted to the official salon. In 1897 he won the Gold Medal, was elected to the Prussian Academy of Art, and appointed professor at the Royal Academy.
    If the Kaiser lost (for the time being) to Liebermann, he won with Käthe Kollwitz. A jury recommended in 1898 that Kollwitz, a powerful, emotional artist, who lived in a Berlin slum, be awarded a gold medal for her cycle of etchings, The Revolt of the Weavers , based on Hauptmann’s play. (The revolt of the Silesian weavers in the 1840s had great significance for the making of the German working class.) The Kaiser had to be consulted before the medal could be announced, and it was too much. “Please, gentlemen,” he complained, “a medal for a woman, that’s really going too far…Orders and honours belong on the chests of deserving men.” Coming on top of the Munch affair, this was too much for the artists. 34 In that same year Liebermann and others announced the Berlin Sezession, modeled on the earlier reactions in Vienna and Munich. Their aim was to show art they thought worth showing and without interference. They obtained backing from wealthy collectors, not a few of whom were Jewish. The Cassirer cousins, Bruno and Paul, were the chief supporters—their gallery in Kantstrasse was a leading venue for modern art. For the Sezession, they built a new gallery. 35
    The Kaiser did not disappoint. All military officers were forbidden to attend the Sezession when in uniform, and Sezession members were banned from serving on juries of the salon. Sezession artists were likewise banned from showing at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Subsequently, officials of the Cultural Ministry held out an olive branch, conceiving a plan for a Liebermann retrospective at the Royal Academy. But the Kaiser was having none of it. The painter, he said, “was poisoning the soul of the German nation.” In fairness to the Kaiser, only three artists of the Berlin Sezession have stood the test of time, Liebermann, Walter Leistikow, and Lovis Corinth. It was Corinth who coined the term “Expressionist” for a predominantly German art form he was himself at odds with. 36
    The battles between the Kaiser and the artists went on. Die Brücke, a group of Expressionist painters, was founded in Dresden in 1905, and moved to Berlin five years later. Its spokesman, Herwarth Walden, launched a magazine and art gallery called Der Sturm which, on the brink of the war, was the heart and brains of the German avant-garde. 37 The art of Die Brücke was—much more than the Sezession—an urban art. The two most important figures were Ludwig Meidner and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Both were concerned with the side of Berlin that the Kaiser thought had no place in art—Meidner focused on suspension bridges, gas tanks, express locomotives, while Kirchner’s contorted figures represented, as he put it, the raw energy in the city’s streets and taverns, the new psychology Simmel had identified, the “so-called distortions” in his paintings “generated instinctively by the ecstasy of what is seen.” 38 Static representation was impossible, he insisted, when the inhabitants of the city were in perpetual motion, “a blur of light and action. The city required of its artists a new way of seeing.” The Kaiser, it goes without