New Ferment: The Berlin Secession

Between the beginning and the completion of the group portrait of the Johannes Lodge lay events that were to be of great consequence for Corinth's career. In December 1898 he traveled to Berlin, where several of his paintings, including the Crucifixion (see Fig. 65), were exhibited at the gallery of Eduard Schulte. While in Berlin, he received news that a Leipzig physician, Dr. A. Ulrich, was going to purchase the Temptation of Saint Anthony . Still more encouraging was the artistic climate then developing in Berlin under the ener-

getic leadership of Corinth's old friend Walter Leistikow. Since 1892 Leistikow and Max Liebermann had headed the Gruppe der Elf (The Eleven), an informal organization created to provide a forum for modern art through small exhibitions independent of the large shows at the Glass Palace sponsored by the Berlin Artists' Association. Without breaking with the association, the Eleven held their first show on April 3, 1892, at the gallery of Eduard Schulte and continued to exhibit there regularly each spring until 1897.

Meanwhile, the Berlin Artists' Association itself was beginning to stir with a more enterprising spirit. As part of an effort to introduce foreign artists to Berlin, the association decided to invite the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch to mount a major show of his works at the Architektenhaus. The Munch exhibition of fifty-five paintings and oil sketches, including the original version of Puberty (1886; destroyed), had hardly opened on November 5, 1892, when Anton von Werner and the Berlin Academy protested. "Formlessness" and "base sensibility" were two of the kinder epithets hurled at Munch by the conservative press.^[99] The controversy assumed such proportions that the exhibition closed on November 12. But by November 20 Munch's paintings were being shown at branches of Eduard Schulte's gallery in Düsseldorf and Cologne, and in December they were again on exhibition in Berlin, at the Equitable Palace, this time without any incident. But the affair had dealt a severe blow to the fragile relationship between the Berlin Artists' Association and the Eleven, who had vigorously defended the Norwegian painter's right to exhibit. An uneasy truce ensued until 1898, when the Glass Palace jury's rejection of one of Leistikow's Grunewald landscapes (see Fig. 40) brought about a final rift, precipitating the founding of the Berlin Secession in May of that year.

Liebermann accepted the presidency of the fledgling organization, but Leistikow, who held the office of first secretary, was its driving force. He and his fellow Secessionists saw as their first task the organization of an exhibition that could compete successfully with the next show at the Glass Palace, scheduled to open in May 1899. Fearing that the Secession was not yet ready to stand on its own, they sought additional support by promising exhibition space to artists from other cities in a gallery still to be found. When their efforts to rent suitable exhibition space failed, they decided to build a gallery, raising money from members and wealthy patrons. Many of the contributors were from prominent Jewish families, the mainstay of Berlin's cultural life in the ensuing decades. Among these early patrons of the Berlin Secession were Richard Israel, the owner of the Berlin department store, who promptly bought Leistikow's rejected Grunewald landscape and donated it to the National Gallery; the bankers Julius Stern and Carl Fürstenberg; and cultured industrialists like the young Walther Rathenau.^[100]

It was only to be expected that Leistikow would recruit Corinth as yet another supporter of the Secessionist cause. Hoping that lucrative portrait commissions might induce Corinth to settle in Berlin, Leistikow sought to introduce him to prominent members of society. But the pastel portrait Corinth painted in late December 1898 of Leistikow's student Gertrud Sabersky (Collection Lucie Mainzer, Innsbruck) was unfortunately the only commission he obtained. As a result Corinth returned to Munich about the middle of January 1899.

Meanwhile, the Berlin Secession had acquired rights to the land next to the Theater des Westens on Kantstrasse, suitable for the construction of their own building. Two cousins, Bruno and Paul Cassirer, partners in a recently opened gallery and publishing firm, agreed to manage the Secession's business affairs. In return for their services the Secession granted them privileges far beyond the customary sales commission of five percent: they held membership on the executive committee, with an advisory vote, and participated in selecting and installing works for exhibition.

The first exhibition of the Berlin Secession opened on May 20, 1899, in a quaint stucco structure made up of a short, squat tower, set aside for administrative offices, and six adjoining gallery rooms. About three hundred works were shown, a marked improvement over the mammoth spectacles at the Berlin Glass Palace. Although the exhibition was devoted mostly to German art, the open-mindedness pledged by Liebermann in his preface to the catalogue was evident in the range of painters represented.^[101] They included members of the Worpswede colony, such as Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn, and Hans am Ende; realists like Menzel, Leibl, and Trübner; and such exponents of late nineteenth-century idealism as Böcklin and Stuck. Ferdinand Holder's painting The Dispirited (1892; Staatliche Gemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich) introduced the Swiss artist for the first time to a large number of his Berlin colleagues. Max Slevogt sent his ambitious triptych The Prodigal Son (1898-99; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), and Corinth exhibited two paintings, Returning Bacchants (1898; B.-C. 154), a variation on his bacchanal of 1896 (see Fig. 62), and a more recent work, Demon (1899; B.-C. 173), a provocative three-quarter-length femme fatale . Diversity in style and conception, as epitomized by the works in this first exhibition, remained a guiding principle of the Secession throughout its existence.