A View of The Infinite

By ROBERT HUGHES

At New York's Metropolitan, a major show of German art

The exhibition "German Masters of the Nineteenth Century," now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is about 35 years late in coming to Manhattan; but in this case, better late than never. No such comprehensive view of German art has ever been set before an American public; from the romantic visions and esoteric metaphors of painters like Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich in the first decades of the 19th century, to the robust dash and splash of Lovis Corinth at its end, there are 150 works by 30 artists, and they help fill a gaping hole in our sense of the actual patterns of European culture. The fact, to put it simply, is that German art got left out of American taste on 19th century matters--a taste formed and dominated by Paris, from impressionism onward. Ten years ago, there was not one art course in America that would have suggested that Friedrich was a painter of comparable importance to Gericault or even Delacroix, or that the work of Wilhelm Leibl or Hans Thoma might be anything better than an able but provincial reaction to that of Gustave Courbet. It was not always so; last century, Munich influenced American artists even more than Paris. There are plenty of parallels, if not exact concordances, between the infinite longings expressed in German romantic art and the sense of pantheistic immanence, God-over-the-Hudson, that ran through American nature painting in the mid-19th century. But since World War II, for obvious reasons, the links were broken and discarded--especially by those blind savants who fell in with the idea that Nazism could, by some train of coarse free association, be traced back to German transcendentalism. So this show, in all its variety and unfamiliarity, cannot help instructing its audience. Its range is wide (and brilliantly discussed in the catalogue by Art Historians Gert Schiff and Stephan Waetzoldt).

"One might come closest to a definition of their aspirations," writes Schiff in his catalogue essay on early 19th century artists like Friedrich, Runge and Carl Gustav Carus, "by stating that 'longing' (Sehnen) was the first and almost the last word of German romanticism." These painters were men of exceptional seriousness, their sense of mission verged on the priestly, and they saw art as a powerful means of philosophic speech. As Schiff rightly remarks, one dictum of the writer Friedrich Schlegel appears to summarize their hopes: "Only he can be an artist who has a religion of his own, an original view of the infinite."

Where did the infinite show itself? In nature, and all individual mythologies must be deduced from a philosophy of nature, through contemplation of the universe. One saw God in what he had made, a diffuse and vast presence behind the screen of natural facts. Thus one of the master images of romantic contemplation was Friedrich's Moonrise on the Sea, 1822, three figures on a rock, silhouetted in a loneliness as absolute (though not as flamboyant) as Manfred's, Childe Harold's or Young Werther's, gazing in immobility at the slow unfolding of light on the darkened, violet-tinged flatness of sea and sky. Like most of Friedrich's paintings, it is soaked in allegory--the moon representing Christ, the ships serving as emblems of the voyage of life, and so on--but the recent revival of Friedrich's reputation has more to do with his ancestral relationship to more modern artists: to Edvard Munch, in particular, and Mark Rothko, whose rectangular "landscape" forms and transcendentalist pessimism now seem to preserve, with striking intensity, the romantic desire for that "original view of the infinite."

The exhibition offers that desire in all its facets. It shows itself to spectacular effect in the obsessed, lyrical mysticism of Runge, a painter who was perhaps the closest equivalent to William Blake that Germany ever produced. In Runge the world is imagined in extreme detail, near and far, as a sort of metaphysical machine, a generator of intricate meanings about the life of the universe: birth, death, renewal, metamorphosis. His ambition (never fulfilled) was to do a cycle of religious murals, Four Times of Day; they would be installed in a special chapel and would form, Runge hoped, the nucleus of a new religious cult. The surviving studies for them, like Morning, 1803, are remarkably hard to decipher as doctrine. Yet that blue world of twining blossoms--Runge's amaryllises and lilies are the ancestors of art nouveau--of genii and weird, pale cherubs is so exquisitely designed and rendered with such pantheistic conviction that it attains the force of religious art. The spiritualist urge lasted far into the 19th century. Its last major bearer was Arnold Boecklin--a Swiss, but included in this show by adoption, as it were. Boecklin's painting of the Island of the Dead, 1880, had every reason to survive: theatrical it may be, but that spectacle of a white-wrapped priest, borne silently on the coffin-bearing barge toward the screen of cypresses in the unnatural raking light, remains one of the canonical images of death poetry in all art.

The image and myth of Italy presides over this show, as it must over any account of 19th century German culture. The reasons are many, but they grow from one stem: Italy offered German artists both sensuous fulfillment and an integral, traditional discipline--as it had, centuries earlier, to their national hero Albrecht Duerer. The luxury lay in nature, the stringency in culture. Goethe's "land where lemons flower" provided its Northern enthusiasts with an inexhaustible supply of prototypes and themes, marmoreal fragments of the Roman past and painted lessons from the Renaissance.

No French or English admirers of the antique would surpass in intensity Johann Winckelmann's rapturous descants on the Apollo Belvedere, and it would be hard to find any other 19th century painting that showed more adoration for cinquecento Rome than Peter von Cornelius' The Wise and the Foolish Virgins. With its fresco-pale, linear style, its hard outlines a la Signorelli and its copious quotations from Raphael, it is the kind of picture that could be produced only by a man infatuated with his sources.

Such paintings remind us that there is no simple definition of romanticism, especially in Germany. The luminous, tightly rendered religious icons done by German artists in Rome after 1810--Cornelius, Johann Overbeck, Franz Pforr and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld--are just as much a product of the romantic impulse toward fundamentalist spirituality as Friedrich's, but they approach it in a different way, through a specifically doctrinal channel. Faith, not philosophy: these Nazarenes, as the Italians nicknamed the long-haired German idealists in the Roman artists' colony, believed it was their mission to bring back the direct and ardent Roman Catholic faith of old Germany. They would be medieval guildsmen, reborn--a fantasy that runs through German art history, and incidentally gave the Bauhaus a good deal of its impetus. Reacting against a "modern" Germany they saw as spiritually depleted, they tried to return art to the "primitive" vitality of the Renaissance, to the purity of vision which they attributed to all presecular, biblically addressed painting. In fact, their best work--which once looked merely quaint to Francocentric taste--now seems to have acquired a peculiar dignity with the years. In its queer, pedantic way, it is very much more than pious pastiche of Botticelli or Raphael. It has the integrity of absolute conviction, although the grand hopes and moral assumptions behind it --like so much of the spiritual fabric that formed romanticism itself--now seem lost, a matter of cultural archaeology, as remote as the moon over Friedrich's flat sea. --By Robert Hughes

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