Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin

Apollo, April, 2003 by Daniel Johnson

MENZEL'S REALISM: ART AND EMBODIMENT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BERLIN Michael Fried Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN 0 30009 219 9, $55 (cloth)

In 1938, at the height of the Nazi suppression of 'degenerate art', Herbert Read wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition of twentieth-century German art that he had just put on at the New Burlington Galleries: 'It is certainly justified to say that modern German art is totally unknown in Great Britain.' Is Read's observation still justified today, sixty-five years on? Not entirely: in recent years there have been several major shows in London of modern German art, including surveys devoted to Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Kokoschka, Nolde, Corinth and Klee. Last year, Somerset House hosted a small exhibition of German art from St Petersburg, which gave Britons their first chance for nearly thirty years to sample Caspar David Friedrich at his best, and this year a Beckmann retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern, the second in two decades. Yet it is probably still true to say that the British feel more at home with German art of the renaissance than with anything thereafter. For all that the British Museum's current exhibition of Durer's graphic work has been popular, the curators' attempt to point towards his legacy only underlines the fact that the great flowering of German printmaking during the century after 1850 remains unknown to the British public. As for German painting, let alone sculpture, it is doubtful whether the British even now have wholly overcome cultural prejudices which clearly reflect the propaganda of both wars against German 'frightfulness'. Art historians still thoughtlessly patronise German artists, as their musicological counterparts would never dare to patronise German composers.

How else does one explain the fact that Adolph Menzel, the most celebrated German artist of the later nineteenth century, is indeed 'totally unknown in Great Britain'? Though acknowledged in his day by Degas as 'the greatest living master', Menzel has never been the subject of a monographic exhibition in London. When a single early masterpiece--his Balcony room of 1845--happened to be shown at the National Gallery a couple of years ago as part of an exhibition of treasures from the Neue Nationalgalerie, it was seized on by rapturous critics, apparently astonished that so subtle and sophisticated a study of interior light and atmosphere could have been the work of a provincial bumpkin from Berlin.

Yet it is no accident that the big Menzel retrospective, 'Between Romanticism and Impressionism', which was shown in Paris, Washington and Berlin in 1996-97, passed London by. (The catalogue, also published by Yale University Press, is still the best introduction to Menzel in English.) Despite the revival of interest in Victorian art, despite Menzel's truly cosmopolitan frame of reference--from Turner and Courbet to Whistler and Munch--there is a stubborn reluctance, even among those who ought to know better, to take him seriously. Not only is he too unfamiliar to be an attractive commercial proposition, but worse yet there is no biographical drama of exile or persecution--revolutions and wars barely impinge on Menzel's work, nor so much as a hint of the sado-masochistic decadence with which a Weimar Republic show can always be spiced up. Menzel's virtues are out of vogue: technique and craftsmanship, constantly refined over many decades; eagerness to please his patrons, whether royal or bourgeois; patriotism, exemplified in his once-popular paintings and engravings of the life of Frederick the Great. An unpretentious, gnome-like bachelor, conservative by temperament, one of Thomas Mann's 'unpolitical Germans', with no exciting vices or traumas, indeed no private life of any kind, Menzel exemplifies none of the fashionable pathologies that populate the contemporary imagination. Almost the only remarkable thing about his biography was his longevity. Menzel personified the Protestant work ethic and the Prussian sense of duty. For German art, he represented Vorsprung durch Technik. It is hard to conceive of a figure less likely to appeal to the present British art establishment. Menzel, for them, is truly the shock of the old.

What Menzel has lacked hitherto is a champion with impeccable academic credentials, but who also speaks the language of the transatlantic intellectual. Enter Michael Fried.

The J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, 2002 Andrew W. Mellon lecturer, prolific critic and occasional poet, is just the man to reconcile Menzel and the Zeitgeist. And his new book does precisely that.

Fried is overwhelmed by the physical presence or 'embodiment' of Menzel's art. He is even more thrilled by the informal studies and sketches than by the major canvases, because the former capture best the tactile immediacy of the painter and draughtsman. For Fried, however, all these works--down to the merest daub--are laden with significance. Menzel's introspective self-portraits and evocations of his own hands and feet have just as much the allegorical character of a memento mori as do the luminous and sinister death masks hanging from his studio wall. Startlingly life-like pencil and gouache sketches of suits of armour or of Field Marshal Moltke's binoculars are essays in evanescence. Virtuoso drawings of a friend's bookcase, documents in an old chest, exhumed cadavers and corpses awaiting burial, derive their profundity from the very transience or triviality of their subject-matter. The 'private' paintings--sometimes townscapes of deliberate banality (a view across back-yards, bricklayers on a building site), sometimes mysterious interiors (such as the celebrated Balcony room)--receive more attention than the public works, because in the former, which he was loath to part with, Menzel could display without inhibition the exuberance of his exactitude. But Fried does not neglect the famous paintings that made Menzel's name either, for they, too, prove to be exercises in what he calls 'the autonomisation of sight', a realism that absorbs and transcends reality, from the invention of photography to the science of vision. Menzel's mastery of his material is so complete that one almost forgets how very original, daring and sometimes extremely odd his experiments are.