The Berlin Secession

Corinth's rise to fame in Berlin was closely linked to the growing importance of the Berlin Secession as the strongest and most influential artists' association in Germany. Within a few years of its founding the group's exhibitions eclipsed the much larger shows at the Berlin Glass Palace by appealing to liberal and well-to-do intellectual circles receptive not only to new developments in German art but also to new impulses from abroad. The second exhibition, in May 1900, which paid special tribute to Hans von Marées, the nineteenth-century German painter whose experiments with problems of pictorial structure have since been recognized as milestones in the evolution of modern art and aesthetics, included works by no fewer than forty-four foreigners, among them Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, and Whistler. In 1901 the French Impressionists were again well represented, as was van Gogh. Manet made his belated debut in 1902, the year that Wassily Kandinsky exhibited with the Berlin Secession for the first time and Edvard Munch was represented by twenty-eight pictures from his Frieze of Life cycle. Toulouse-Lautrec and Cézanne dominated the exhibition in 1903. The names Max Beckmann, Hans Purrmann, and Alexey von Jawlensky were added to the Secession's membership roll in 1904.

In 1902 the Berlin Secession held the first of its annual winter exhibitions devoted exclusively to the graphic arts, an unusual undertaking at the time. These black-and-white exhibitions, as they were called, featured in quick succession the work of such diverse artists as Käthe Kollwitz and Aubrey Beardsley. Emil Nolde, Kandinsky, and Lyonel Feininger participated in the graphic show of 1903. In the winter of 1908 the exhibition was highlighted by a selection of drawings by the early nineteenth-century Berlin realist Franz Krüger and prints by the young men of Die Brücke: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Max Pechstein. By 1908 Nolde, Kandinsky, Feininger, and Ernst Barlach had become members of the Berlin Secession. By 1911 the organization had shown the work of virtually every leading artist of the then burgeoning movements of Expressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.^[1]

In its efforts to introduce modern art to Berlin, the Secession found continued and energetic support in Bruno and Paul Cassirer. The two dissolved their partnership in 1901 and henceforth each worked independently. Bruno Cassirer took over the publishing firm and in 1902 founded the journal Kunst und Künstler , which developed into Germany's leading art periodical under the editorship first of Emil Heilbut and then of Karl Scheffler. The journal also became an eloquent proponent of the Berlin Secession. Until shortly after the First World War, Bruno Cassirer continued to publish important books on art and aesthetics as well as illustrated books still acclaimed for their handsome typography and design. Paul Cassirer, in turn, assumed responsibility for the Cassirer gallery and remained the sole business manager of the Berlin Secession. After 1908 he reentered the publishing business. In addition to the Paul Cassirer Verlag, he started the Pan Presse, which specialized in luxury editions of books, graphics, and print portfolios; and he created Pan , a cultural and political periodical named for the journal founded in 1895 by Julius Meier-Graefe and his two friends the poets Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel. All of these operations came to be closely associated with the Berlin Secession.

In his gallery, Paul Cassirer mounted on the average six major exhibitions a year. He regularly featured the leading exponents of the Berlin Secession and reinforced the organization's international outlook by opening his gallery to artists from abroad. In 1903 he showed works by Munch, Bonnard, Vuillard, Degas, and Monet, and with an exhibition of paintings by El Greco he revived interest in a master whose idiosyncratic style was being revalued as younger artists pursued an analogously expressive use of color and form. In the spring of 1904 Cassirer held the first major exhibition in Germany of oils and watercolors by Cézanne. In 1908 he showed paintings by van Gogh and Jawlensky as well as a series of landscapes by Christian Rohlfs; in 1910 he organized the first major exhibition of works by Kokoschka. Soon Paul Cassirer's salon was known as the country's leading gallery of modern art and the main source for French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works for museums, galleries, and private collections in central Europe.

Remarkably courageous, the Berlin Secession and Paul Cassirer opposed not only the official Berlin art world, embodied in Anton von Werner and his fellow academicians, but also the aesthetic precepts espoused by the political regime. Indeed, the imperial court took more than a passing interest in such matters. Wilhelm II liked to think of himself as a monarch under whom the arts could prosper. He himself painted, designed monuments, composed music, and occasionally even directed rehearsals at the Royal Opera and the

Royal Theater. His taste was conservative, and—chauvinistic to the core—he delighted in any artistic effort celebrating the achievements of the house of Brandenburg-Prussia. A comment in the conservative Reichsbote of February 14, 1897, in which the "ridiculous fad for the foreign" is thoroughly disparaged, aptly echoes his suspicion of any cultural influences from abroad: "The wealthy, educated circles in Germany still have to understand far more clearly than they do at present that they owe it to the Fatherland and to their honor to favor German art and thus spur it on to great achievements."^[2]

Wilhelm II even liked to foster the illusion that Germany had been appointed the sole guardian of Western civilization. "To us Germans, great ideals, more or less lost to other peoples, have become permanent possessions,"^[3] he proclaimed in a speech of September 18, 1901, inaugurating the Siegesallee. This broad avenue, which leads through the Berlin Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate, was lined with thirty-two larger-than-life-size statues of his Hohenzollern forebears carved in Carrara marble under the direction of Reinhold Begas. He envisioned the lower classes, after a day's hard work, uplifted by art, by the contemplation of beauty and the ideal. But he reviled all art that—in his view—descended to the gutter (he called it Rinnsteinkunst ) by depicting misery as more wretched than it really is. A number of writers and artists had by this time already felt the sting of his criticism. When Gerhart Hauptmann's working class drama Die Weber opened on September 25, 1894, at the Deutsches Theater, Wilhelm II registered his displeasure by canceling his subscription to the royal box. When Hauptmann was subsequently recommended for the prestigious Schiller Prize in 1896, the kaiser decided to grant the award to Ernst von Waldenbruch, his own favorite, who wrote historical plays in the manner of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell . Moreover, the emperor vetoed the gold medal proposed in 1898 for Käthe Kollwitz in recognition of her print cycle The Weavers' Revolt (1893–1897), a work inspired by Hauptmann's drama. Regis voluntas suprema lex was one of his favorite expressions; and there was no doubt that he meant what he said.^[4]

By deliberately dissociating itself from the Glass Palace, an institution that enjoyed the emperor's personal patronage, the Berlin Secession aroused the kaiser's annoyance. By showing, especially in the early exhibitions, works by Liebermann and Uhde that, though by no means anarchistic, dealt with working-class themes, the Secession seemed to encourage the kind of art Wilhelm II dismissed as Rinnsteinkunst . And since the work of several Secessionists so obviously tended toward Impressionism, whose French origins were known even in imperial circles, the Secession quite openly defied the kaiser's claim that only a genuinely German art had value. The astonishing

success and popularity of the Berlin Secession in the face of such opposition can be explained partly by the political and ideological dimensions that inevitably colored the cultural life of both the German capital and the country as a whole at this time of rising nationalism. As Peter Paret has observed, the opening exhibition of the Berlin Secession resembled "an early election victory by a new political party, which arouses strong positive and negative reactions merely by the fact of its existence."^[5]

Lovis Corinth profited immensely from his association with the Berlin Secession. By 1902 he was a member of the executive committee and had signed a contract with the Cassirer Gallery. After Paul Cassirer started up his press, he published two books by the painter: a teaching manual, Das Erlernen der Malerei (1908), and a biography of Walter Leistikow (1910). Corinth also illustrated for Paul Cassirer the Book of Judith (1910; Schw. L54) and the Song of Songs (1911; Schw. L82), both published with the Pan Presse imprint. In 1909 Bruno Cassirer's press brought out Corinth's autobiographical account Legenden aus dem Künstlerleben .

From a technical point of view, Corinth's new environment had a liberating effect on his style. As a result of his growing familiarity with French Impressionism, his brushwork became more vibrant, his colors lighter. The same development can be seen in the work of Max Slevogt who, like Corinth, had been a member of the Munich Secession and its rebellious offshoot the Free Association. Slevogt, too, was elected to the executive committee of the Berlin Secession in 1902 and signed a contract with Paul Cassirer. Prior to the arrival of Slevogt and Corinth in Berlin, Max Liebermann had been the most potent artistic force in the Secession. After 1901 the leadership of all three painters was recognized.