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Arnold Böcklin and the Problem of German Modernism
Suzanne Marchand
Published in Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld, eds., Germany at the Fin de Siecle:
Culture, Politics and Ideas (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2004): 129-166.
Had a nation-wide poll been taken in 1895, it is highly likely that Arnold Böcklin would
have been named the German painter of the fin de siecle. Today, Böcklin is hardly a name to
conjure with; few museum-goers (especially outside Switzerland and Germany) have seen his
work, art historians ignore him; textbooks have trouble characterizing him and explaining both
the origins of his style and the effects of his work on other artists. He may occasionally be
given credit for anticipating symbolism, or for inspiring Giorgi di Chirico and Max Ernst, but few
now recognize him, as did his contemporaries, as the German answer to Manet; fewer still list
him along with Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche as the great German cultural innovators
of the century’s end. Fritz Novotny's comment, in the 1971 edition of The Pelican History of
Art, sums up a general judgment on Böcklin: "His eclecticism left him little scope for genuine
invention."i
Why Böcklin—who, like Wagner and Nietzsche, plumbed the psyche in new, and initially
unpopular ways—now looks eclectic or kitschy rather than profound is a complicated question;
part of the answer surely lies in the success of French modernism in portraying itself as
modernism tout court, and another lies in our inability to take seriously the mythological
figures which populate Böcklin’s best-known images. Perhaps even more important, as even as
many of his contemporary admirers willingly admitted, Böcklin’s art was, quite simply, not
always very good.ii But for the cultural historian, seeking to understand the mentality of the fin
de si棠cle, this argument from quality will not do. Böcklin was, for approximately 20 years, and
during a pivotal moment in German history, the painter who struck the deepest chord, and his
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popularity—amongst the avant garde as well as the educated middle classes
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(Bildungsb棠rgertum) should tell us something critical about the cultural world of the
Wilhelmine fin de si棠cle.
It is critical to note, at the outset, that Böcklin’s popularity was in no way the result of
calculation on his part. The Swiss painter achieved fame not during the period of his maturity,
but rather in his old age; born a late romantic (in 1827), he developed his mature style and his
repertoire of oversexed centaurs and otherworldly nymphs (see Illustration 1: Centaur and
Nymph, 1855)iii while a struggling painter in the 1860s. Attacked viciously by critics in the
1870s, his apotheosis came only after he reached his 60th birthday, and occurred not in his real
or adopted homelands (Switzerland and Italy, respectively), but rather in the post-Bismarckian
Kaiserreich. Changes in Böcklin’s style are perceptible over time, with a major break occurring
around 1863; but it was not a change in Böcklin that made for his post-1885 success. It was a
change in Wilhelmine culture, and particularly a change in the cultural salience of classical
antiquity, that made Böcklin the German modernist, for an audience that included Thomas
Mann and Hugo von Hofsmannthal, the Munich Secession and Sergey Rachmaninoff, Stefan
George and Max Ernst, Paula Modersohn-Becker and (a little later) Adolf Hitler.
It is this cultural change that I want to explore, tackling the quite separate problems of
the genesis of Böcklin’s vitalistic classicism (in the 1860s and 70s) and the enthusiastic
reception of his work (in the 1880s and 90s) as a means to understand the fate of liberal
culture in the century’s last years. I take, here, changes in the interpretation and
representation of classical antiquity to be a central indicator of cultural change; as has been
shown elsewhere, classical norms, in education as well as in art, were fundamental to the selfimage of those who shaped German Kultur, the Bildungsb棠rgertum. Böcklin, I hope to show,
broke all the rules of neoclassicism, abandoning the principle of ut pictura poesis (from the
poem, or text, the picture is to be drawn), as well as Winckelmannian gravitas and grandeur; his
half-classicizing dreamscapes, by contrast, were inspired by Baroque and Pompeiian models,
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conceived in the spirit of romantic landscape paintings, and suffused with a psychological
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depth of the painter’s own invention. But he retained enough of what Ludwig Justi called the
‘Museumskultur’iv of the nineteenth century to convince the embattled Bildungsb棠rger of the
1890s and 1900s that he was the painter who would save art from modernizing debasement on
the one hand, and academic obsolescence on the other. Conjuring the more psychological
gods—Eros and Thanatos—rather than literary characters such as Athena and Heracles, B棠cklin
appealed to a German middle class still proud of their classical educations, but no longer
satisfied by the sunnier genre scenes and textbased history paintings of the previous era. In
passion-infused paintings like ‘Holy Sanctuary’ (Illustration 2) and ‘Battle of the Centaurs,’ this
postliberal middle class (as well as many members of the avant garde) found emotional (not
social!) truths with which they could identify without abandoning themselves to the urbane,
cultureless world depicted by realists and impressionists. In Böcklin’s world, they could
observe the raw human passions—lust, terror, grief, anger—while believing, still, that Kultur
mattered, and would endure.
A study of the mediocre painter Böcklin, then, may provide an intriguing way to get at
the problem Carl Schorske pointed to long ago, of discerning what in Central European culture
was moving forward, and what was moving backward.v Clearly Böcklin’s story is one of the
persistence of classical forms and of the defense of traditional Kultur against what art historian
Ludwig Justi called the ‘Museumskultur’ of nineteenth-century Europe. But it is also a story of
quite radical discontinuity, from the Gymnasium-educated critics of Böcklin in the 1870s to his
socially similar fans of the 1890s, many of whom endorsed the painter precisely for breaking
away from the stifling culture of the museum, and making antiquity relevant by democratizing
its appeal. “B棠cklin has jumped the tracks of tradition,” wrote one fan; the Swiss genius, wrote
another, "was spared the Procrustean bed of cast-classicism [Gipsabgussantike], which was so
fateful to [Winckelmann's] successors from Carstens to [Anselm] Feuerbach, for, unphilologically
and unfactually, with a sensual energy thirsting for life, he conjured up only smiling or sighing
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dreams of an ancient paradise."vi That he, like Richard Wagner, “jumped the tracks” while
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also revitalizing the world of myth is a notable peculiarity of German modernism, but one that
deserves scrutiny, not simple condemnation. For if Böcklin’s ‘escape’ now appears (to our
Picasso-oriented eyes) fusty and arcane, the acceptance of his vitalistic vision of antiquityvii did
mark a real turning point in Wilhelmine culture, the moment liberal historicism collapsed under
pressures exerted not only by the emergence of a wider, less inhibited audience but also by the
onset of a deeper, darker, cast of mind.
Arnold B棠cklin, Swiss-Italian Eclectic
Born in 1827, and named after a character in Schiller's "William Tell," Böcklin fits
beautifully into the ‘unseasonable’ world of mid-century Basel, which Lionel Gossman has
sketched in his marvelous new study of the town’s infamous intellectuals.viii Though Böcklin
escaped from his hometown--and his father’s cloth trade--early, in 1845, he carried away with
him the city’s unique brand of iconoclastic anti-modernism and eclectic individualism. Like
Burckhardt, who played an important role in advancing the painter’s early career, Böcklin wove
his way through Prussian institutions--but came out very much his own man. He first studied
art in Düsseldorf, where he attended Prussia's second largest art academy. Here, before 1848,
classical painting, romantic and Nazarene styles as well as a Biedermeier realism apparently
coexisted.ix Though the young Böcklin stuck primarily to romantic-realist landscape painting (à
la Caspar David Friedrich), he already showed signs of being an ‘unseasonable’ student,
spending many hours lovingly copying works of Nicholas Poussin rather than participating in
the Düsseldorfers’ development, in the mid-1840s, of a new sort of socially-critical realism.x
This was neither the first, nor the last time Böcklin would turn backward, rather than
forward, for inspiration. Indeed, critical to his development was his brief, bitter experience in
Paris. Following an important visit to the Low Countries in 1847--where he learned to love
Rubens and Van Dyck--he had landed in Paris in early 1848; eking out a bohemian existence as
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a medical illustrator, he admired Camille Corot’s landscapes and Thomas Couture’s 1847
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“The Romans of the Decadence,” an enormous archaizing canvas that exemplified neoclassical
history painting at its most theatrical. Drawn along with the crowds into the Tuilleries in
February 1848, he was horrified by the bloodshed of the June Days during which, it seems,
some of his acquaintances were executed. This episode, apparently, gave him a life-long,
highly consequential, loathing for France.
He retreated to Basel in September 1848, but found its Biedermeier culture oppressive,
and elected not to return to Paris, but to go, as Jacob Burckhardt advised him, to Italy. This was
a wholly conventional thing to do; since the Renaissance, artists and architects had gone to
Rome to finish their educations, and Böcklin’s French contemporary, Gustave Courbet, was the
first to break this pattern. But, as Georg Schmidt points out, had Böcklin followed Courbet’s
lead and remained in Paris, he would have seen that painter’s epoch-making paintings in the
salons of 1849 and 1850. He missed another opportunity to experience European art’s cutting
edge when, after a sojourn in Munich and Weimar (1858-62), he returned to Rome, while in
Paris, the first works of Degas, Monet, and Manet (whose ‘Déjeuner sur l‘herbe’ dates to 1863)
were becoming known.xi
But Böcklin had found love and good light in the south, and in any case preferred the
company of the Italian old masters and the vegetative exuberance of the Italian countryside to
the cityscapes of the north. After the death of one fiancee, a rejected proposal, and a broken
engagement, in 1853 he married a 17-year-old daughter of a Papal Guard, Angela Pascucci; if
the liaison was rapidly formed, it would prove enduring, as Angela became his chief
cheerleader, his model (for the respectable females in his images), his nursemaid, and clearly
the stable center around which the moody artist revolved. It may well be that Angela B棠cklin
also provided the inspiration for her husband to see Italy through non-classicizing eyes. The
painter spent his early years of marriage exclusively cultivating his eye for landscape; though it
lacked the grand prestige of history painting, landscape was the bread and butter of starving
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young artists—and Böcklin in these years certainly fit this romantic stereotype, and suffered
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its unromantic realities. But landscape to the young Böcklin was much more than a mercenary
form of art; his earliest paintings exhibit the neoromantic tendency to infuse nature with
human passions, and in many ways, his mature style is simply a blending of emotive
landscapes, 棠 la Caspar David Friedrich, with the humor and coloristic panache of the Italian
Baroque. Though never a plein air painter, he made careful studies of rocks, seas, and foliage
(his trees are particularly expressive, though often they owe much to Corot, another great antiimpressionist). Although he associated with other German expatriot painters, he seems never to
have felt himself part of a circle or school. Nor was it ever clear, once he added mythological
demigods to his landscapes, how to characterize the genre he worked in—-in terms of the
French Academy’s hierarchy of subjects, he was something more than a portraitist and
landscape painter, but certainly neither highminded nor literary enough to be considered a
history painter. Choosing for his first studio the Italian countryside, rather than Paris, Munich,
or even Rome, B棠cklin would continue to paint in relative isolation from current trends for the
rest of his life.
It will be noted that no mention has been made of his affection for Italy as the great
showplace of classical art--and, in fact, B棠cklin long evinced little interest in antiquities.
Unlike his younger contemporary Paul Cézanne, Böcklin created no sketchbooks of ruins,
sculptures and frescoes during his sojourns in the Italian countryside.xii His first images of
nymphs and fauns seem shaped, rather, by rococo genre paintings; indeed, the semi-classical
figures may have been added to landscape to make the pictures sell.xiii And sell they did; in
1855, Böcklin sold a lurid 'Centaur and Nymph' (Illustration 1) for his highest price yet, 1,000
francs, and was commissioned to paint a second version.xiv Thus did Böcklin learn an important
lesson: classicism, with an erotic tinge, sold.
But it did not sell very well; not well enough, anyway, for Böcklin’s style to have been
motivated by mercenary considerations alone. Moreover, what he and his contemporaries
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fought over in his first classicizing pictures was not the image of antiquity he had
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portrayed, but rather, his already flashy use of color, his hyper-naturalist rendering of the
vegetation, and the potentially salacious disposition of his nymphs.xv As Klaus Vierneisel has
noted, there are no archaeological details in Böcklin’s paintings of the 50s and early 60s (‘Pan
frightens a shepherd’[1860], ‘Pan amongst the Reeds’ [1859], ‘Nymph at the Spring’xvi--and,
we could add, few thereafter. If, in his early work, Böcklin was developing a repertoire of
favorite mythological figures, he had not yet arrived at a notably new approach--in either
technical or intellectual terms--to the ancient past.
At this stage of his career, also--as indeed for a quarter-century afterwards--Böcklin
remained a starving artist. Though he sold ‘Pan amongst the Reeds’ to the Bavarian King in
1859 for the Neue Pinakothek, he was still virtually penniless. He had, in fact, nearly died of
typhus and grief in 1858-9 (his son Robert had died during the painter’s illness), and the first
catalog entry for the Pinakothek described the artist as deceased.xvii In 1860, he landed a job
as professor for landscape painting at the new art academy in Weimar—but the bleakness of the
weather and the stuffiness of the court drove the still-impoverished family back to Rome two
years later. Already by the late 1850s, he had developed what would be a life-long obsession
with building a flying machine that would take him soaring through the skies like a bird—
leaving behind, presumably, all his earthly cares; characteristically, however, he would never
agree to degrade his vision by assimilating a modern utilitarian device, and without an engine,
his planes, not surprisingly, failed to satisfy his avian aspirations.xviii
In Rome, Böcklin found new inspiration, first from Raphael's Vatican murals and then,
more powerfully, from the Pompeian wall paintings, which he saw for the first time in 1863.
“The impression was so powerful,” his student Rudolf Schick recounted, “that he was driven
completely out of his previous path,” and required a full year to reorient himself.xix When he
completed his transition, he emerged with a much deeper devotion to decoration, to color, and
to imaginative (rather than naturalistic) painting. Impressed, too, with Roman encaustic
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paintings, his colors become more vibrant and his contrasts sharper; Schick’s diaries, which
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cover the years 1866 and 1868-9, show Böcklin obsessed with tints and fixatives, ceaselessly
experimenting and usually failing, in his attempts to recreate the beauties of ancient and
Renaissance fresco painting. When we see him reading a book, it is a treatise on colors, not a
volume of Greek poetry or philosophy. Like the offstage Titian, in Hofmannsthal’s short play
“Death of Titian,” Böcklin engaged primarily in the craft of producing paintings, rather than the
cerebral sport (so despised by the fin de si棠cle) of philosophical criticism.xx
Simultaneously with this immersion in frescoes (and flying machines), Böcklin’s
personality began to assert itself more dramatically, and his characteristic combination of
saturnine melancholy and passionate zeal for life can be felt, in paintings like “Faun Playing for
a Blackbird” (1864-5) or “Villa by the Sea” (six versions, 1864-78). Perhaps adversity helped
forge an eccentric vision; Böcklin lost two more children in the 1860s (a total of 5 of his 14
children would die in childhood); his wife’s ultra-Catholic aunt threatened to dissolve her
niece’s marriage to a Protestant; and Basel, to which the family had fled in 1866, proved hardly
welcoming. In any event, Böcklin’s newfound confidence in his own vision was now so strong
that it produced a lifelong break with Burckhardt, whose insistence that Böcklin modify the
murals he had begun in the Basel Museum angered the painter.xxi
Fleeing Basel, Böcklin moved on to Munich, where he worked, in part, with his friend
Franz Lenbach in the employ of the lawyer-poet (and translator of Persian, Arabic and Spanish
literature) Graf Adolf Friedrich von Schack. Schack, one of the aristocrats whose patronage
sustained Böcklin through his hungry years, had begun a collection--consisting, oddly, of
copies of old masters and original works by living German artists, which he hung side by side in
his personal gallery.xxii Lenbach was employed as a copyist, and Böcklin seems to have assisted
him in this endeavor. But Böcklin was never a very good copyist, and indeed disapproved of
those who, like his erstwhile friend Anselm Feuerbach, were too concerned with painting “like
the old masters,” or realists like Adolf Menzel, who simply painted nature’s surfaces.xxiii The
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years in Munich would, in fact, actually inspire B棠cklin to produce two important works
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which would make his reputation as an iconoclastic painter of mythological scenes: “The Battle
of the Centaurs” (Illustration 3; 1872-3), and “Triton and Nereid” (two versions, 1874-5).
In these two striking paintings, the imaginary animals and demi-gods have escaped
from forest tapestries into the sunlit center of the canvas; by focusing on the figures and
reducing the landscape (which took up the greatest part of images like “Pan Frightens a
Shepherd”), Böcklin now gave his characters new psychological power--and new audience
appeal. “The Battle of the Centaurs,” which was widely exhibited, and popularly acclaimed, and
sold for 6750 francs in 1876.xxiv Schack bought the first version of ‘Triton,’ and it seemed the
National Gallery would buy a second one (see below). Impressed by the success of these two
images, he quickly produced a series of more Pan pictures, which included: 'Nymph on Pan’s
Shoulders' (1874), 'Two Fans Fishing’ (1874), 'Idyll' (1875); 'Sleeping Diana, Watched by Fauns'
(1877); and 'Centaur by the Water' (1878). Combining lessons learned from Rubens and his love
of the sea, he also began, in this period, to produce a highly amusing set of Dionysian
seascapes.
These paintings exhibited a self-confident departure from the formal serenity and high
moral tone both of neoclassicism and of naturalism. Formally, in these images, Böcklin created
a sense of intense irreality by combining naturalistic exactitude and implausible characters,
poses, or colors, by dwarfing figures in vast, spiritualized landscapes, and by erasing all
modern elements, like roads, houses, or figures in contemporary dress; applying the language
of romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich to semi-classical scenes (see for example,
illustration 2, ‘Holy Sanctuary’), Böcklin created the feel of primeval isolation, and religious
intensity.xxv In the absence, too, of historicizing details, his romantic staging of moods, not
actions turned the symbolism inward. Accordingly, the content of images is now quite clearly
psychological; we are not referred to any particular stories, but rather invited to think about
male/female relations in general (‘Triton and Nereid’) or to partake of someone else’s
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classicizing dream (‘The Isle of Life,’ Illustration 4). The ancient world itself is now either a
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source of pleasurable titillation or of distressing dreams, but it is not in any way directly
accessible, or morally instructive.
There has been much discussion of the sources of Böcklin’s psychological, bacchanalian
antiquity, and many, in search of textual sources, have followed Andrea Linnebach’s closely
argued speculations. In her excellent study Böcklin und die Antike, Linnebach notes the
painter’s knowledge of Homer, Aristophanes, Ovid, and Heinrich Heine, and adduces the
possibility that the painter read J. J. Bachofen's Mother Right and/or Nietzsche's Birth of
Tragedy. She suggests, rightly, that it is likely that Böcklin heard about Burckhardt's lectures
on Greek history as he remained a close friend of the historian until the end of the 60s, during
which time Burckhardt was preparing the lectures later published as the Cultural History of the
Greeks.xxvi There are tempting parallels to be drawn between Böcklin’s religio-Dionysian
creations and all three of these anti-liberal thinkers, and her work does a lovely job of
sketching the neoromantic undercurrents available to Böcklin and his iconoclastic
contemporaries.
But, given the paucity of first-hand testimony (as the painter’s son explained, Böcklin
“had something of an aversion to the written word”xxvii), Linnebach’s reconstructions of
Böcklin’s reading list remain undocumentable--and somewhat beside the point. As the author
herself points out, rarely, throughout his life, would Böcklin paint major classical figures or
conventional scenes such as Achilles battling Hector or the love-making of Venus and Adonis,
preferring, instead, lower, half-heathen figures, like nymphs, centaurs, and mermaids, whose
antics were not described in any ancient sources. Historical figures and referents are entirely
missing; he did not attempt a ‘Death of Plato’ or a ‘Battle of Salamis,’ which would have
required archaeologically-accurate props--or a full-on, Klimtian, modernism that Böcklin could
hint at, but not quite envision. We know from numerous pronouncements the painter made
that he was in no way a literary or cerebral painter, and unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, did not
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peruse arcane works of medieval flower symbolism or devote careful study to poetry,
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philosophy, or music. Although considered a forerunner of the symbolists, it is by no means
clear that his images are meant to mimic the effects of poetry or music, or to draw the viewer
into a realm of mystical meanings. Indeed, it appears that B棠cklin was vaguely aware of the
pervasive fin de si棠cle problem of language’s inability to communicate clear meanings—he
allowed dealers and collectors to title his paintings, and did not mind if others saw things in his
paintings he did not. But his pronouncements to his students make it clear that he did not see
his work either positively or negatively in terms of texts; his work, he said, was about finding
the perfect balance between imagination and truth to nature, about light, about color. “A
painting,” he told one eager listener, “must be painted for the eye, and not for the reason
[Verstand].”xxviii
As a painter-craftsman, however, it is certainly clear that Böcklin saw himself as the heir
to an ongoing ‘classical’ tradition, one that was not narrowly (if at all) defined by literature but
rather sprang from the pattern books of the old masters. Böcklin was one of the first German
painters to have a full range of Italian canvases at his fingertips, and it seems helpful to
understand his mode of composition as one of assembling and combining formal elements as
well as literary ideas to create an eclectic, half-traditional, half-modern, painted world. He
carefully studied the old masters, in museums and in photographs, and his pronouncements on
art show that he studied closely at least the following: Raphael, Titian, Poussin, Rubens,
Corregio, Michelangelo, the Carracci, Caravaggio, Giogioni, Tintoretto, Rogier van der Weyden,
Guercino, Parmiagiano, Rembrandt and Giotto.xxix Even more important was his enduring
admiration (after 1862) of the Pompeiian frescoes, which he preferred, it seems, even to
Cinquecento painting.xxx Never inclined to a Winckelmannian neoclassicism, his encounter with
the colorful, decorative, and playful Pompeiian paintings drew him further away from the
highminded philhellenism of mid-century Prussia and undoubtedly inclined him to accept a
picture of the ancients (as lustful, violent, colorful, and slightly mysterious) closer to
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conceptions of Bachofen, Nietzsche and Burckhardt than to the ordinary Bildungsb棠rger of
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the day.xxxi His preference for the Baroque and for Pompeiian painting surely made his
classicism unique among his contemporaries, and probably accounts, at least in part, for his
fascination with color and decoration, and his love of light-effects.
The other source for B棠cklin’s peculiar vision of the ancient world was, unquestionably,
the contradictions within his own psyche which lent his pictures their unique (and highly
variable) “moods.” The vicissitudes of his own fortune, alone, might well have made him doubt
the liberal philhellenist insistence on Greek balance and happiness. B棠cklin was a moody man,
torn between his northern patrons and his southern tastes, his life characterized by the
contrast between the repressive Basel-business world of his father and the bohemian delights
of Italy. He could certainly express grief and longing, as well as revel in nudity, humor,
sensuousness. Quite open in his acknowledgement of the erotic element in human relations,
this apparently monogamous father of 14 both celebrated sensual pleasures as part of the
natural landscape (as in ‘Spring’1862), but could also powerfully portray repression as a kind of
tragic sublimity (for example, “Odysseus and Calypso”). B棠cklin’s paintings, Ludwig Justi
maintained, “guide one through all the peaks and valleys of life: jubilation and pain, childish
romps and pensive old age, sweet love and raw force, incense and wine, music and murder,
joyful dance and terrifying loneliness, spring passions and pestilences...”1 A painter of
passions, B棠cklin defied the liberal-bourgeois code of respectable expression, and, like
Nietzsche and Burckhardt, returned to the ancients the right to experience the full range of
human emotions.
As was clear both to his critics of the 1870s and to his fans of the 1890s, B棠cklin was
no academic neoclassicist. In one (undated) revealing rant, the painter exclaimed: "To be
Greeks! Us? Why were the Greeks Greeks? Because they created what they saw, as seemed
right to them. (The ancients did not want to make antiquity, as far as I know--only we want to
do that.). . .. The fresh water of life is what we want, and that is ever flowing for us, as it was
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for the Greeks. We will only be Greek when we grasp it in our own way."xxxii In many ways,
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this is what the neohumanists had been saying since Humboldt—but for B棠cklin, ‘grasping in
our own way’ meant abandoning the Winckelmannian, wissenschaftlich classicism of the
Gymnasium and the plaster cast for a pantheistic arcadia whose existence was (and had always
been) primarily psychological, not historical. And quite suddenly, around 1880, this became
the antiquity of choice.
Arnold B棠cklin, German Hero
If the story, so far, is that of the artistic genesis of an ‘unseasonable’ painter, the
remainder is a tale of grand success, success that came to B棠cklin not as a result of changes in
his style but rather as a result of rapid cultural changes occurring not quite around him, but
rather to the north of his usual haunts. We pick up story at about 1871, at the time of the
founding of the Wilhelmine Empire, and just as B棠cklin began to emerge from poverty and
obscurity. In this era, the liberals were triumphant both politically and culturally. Naturally, as
Peter Gay has recently underlined, the bourgeoisie did not speak with one voice, then, or
ever;xxxiii the moneyed elite (Besitzb棠rgertum), for example, by this time had begun to assert
its more urbane and utilitarian tastes against those of the educated elite, which remained
dominant in the bureaucracy, churches and schools. But in this decade, Gymnasial and
academic neoclassicism continued to set the standards for taste and the norms for artistic
production—and B棠cklin, accordingly, remained an eccentric outsider, rather than a Germanic
genius.
Interestingly, the first Germans to invest in Böcklin were bankers and particularly Jewish
collectors, based in Berlin. xxxiv Evidently, these modern-minded cosmopolitans saw something
new in the maverick artist’s pantheistic paganism, perhaps their outsider status, with respect to
the heavily Protestant cultural elite, allowed them to appreciate, as others as yet could not,
Böcklin’s explorations of antiquity’s not at all Winckelmannian psyche. In any event, as their
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admiration grew, so too did an anti-Böcklin claque increasingly emerge. In the 1870s,
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cultural conservatives ridiculed what one called his “truly shameless use of color” and another,
insightfully, his juxtaposition of “imaginary conception” and “hyper-realistic representation.”
The classically-schooled criticized the painter for departing from literary sources; where, they
asked, did the ancients record a battle of centaurs? As Lutz Tittel has shown, these devotees of
neoclassicism thought Böcklin’s work ‘bizarre’ and overly concerned with being different.xxxv
Though Böcklin had, by the mid-1870s, developed his mature style, the Bildungsb棠rgertum
was not yet ready for his brand of neoromantic classicism.
Though few, if any of his admirers were describing him as a ‘German’ painter in the
years just after unification (the painter in fact resettled in Florence in 1875), Böcklin had
achieved enough notoriety to attract the attention of Max Jordan, director of the soon to open
National Gallery in Berlin. Partial to Italian Renaissance and German romantic art, Jordan
evidently hoped the artist would marry the two styles successfully, and commissioned a work
from Böcklin for the new institution. But when the Swiss painter delivered the second version
of his ‘Triton and Nereid’ in 1875, Jordan rejected it, telling the Cultural Minister: “His image
has an unmistakable parodistic quality, and has resulted in the emancipation of ugliness, a
tendency which frequently disfigures B棠cklin’s—always in their way interesting—images.”xxxvi In
1876, Empress Augusta rejected Böcklin’s bathetic “Lamentation beneath the Cross” (the nude,
plastic Christ’s eyes are open, while the two Marys evince unconvincing gestures of grief), and
Böcklin himself remained unsatisfied with his new “Pieta” sketches. The painter offered to try a
new “Triton” with more mythical mystique and less parody, but the regional art commission
asked for a different subject, a landscape with many figures (perhaps hoping to keep Eros and
Thanatos at bay).xxxvii Böcklin finally produced an image that was dubbed (by Jordan, not by the
painter) 'The Elysian Fields (Illustration 4),' a dreamscape in which a faun carries a woman
across a stream to a Poussinian garden party. The image was attacked as unintelligible, base,
and sensational, and Wilhelm I was forced to promise not to buy any more of Böcklin's
142
pictures.xxxviii
143
In 1880, the Catholic nationalist August Reichensperger blasted the painter in the
Reichstag, insisting that Böcklin’s pagan scenes, unlike the real Greek and Roman nudes,
exerted a deleterious effect on modern morals, and especially on women; one should think, he
argued, about the effects on German Geist and German identity.xxxix But Reichensperger would
be one of the last cultural conservatives to denounce Böcklin in this way, and soon after 1880,
conservatives, as well as members of the avant-garde, began lauding the Swiss painter for
precisely the sort of non-Winckelmannian penchants the previous generation had abhorred.
One critic summed up this new rhetoric nicely: “Born in a world which groans under the weight
of suffocating (zudr棠ngender) tradition, in a world of excavations and museums, where almost
every creative drive is smothered by imitation and insensitivity, [B棠cklin] remains untouched.
The dreary medium of knowledge seems not to obscure his eye. It is as if this man has arisen
directly from the original splendor of the elements, from a paradise in which men and animals
live together in brotherhood and harmony, where they understand one another and men are
free of arrogance.”xl
What gave B棠cklin’s antiquity this primeval new vitality is a question that requires much
more research, but some reflections are in order. It is surely the case that by the fin de si棠cle,
the proponents of ‘modern’ education had convinced a broad section of the population that
neohumanist, elitist, Bildung was no longer the appropriate sort of education for German
students. Moreover, even within the Bildungsbürgertum, the younger generation (those whose
formative experiences occurred after the founding of the Reich in 1871) now began to call for
new life to be breathed into German culture, and attacked the 'dry as dust’ philological
positivism of their fathers. Gustav Floerke, who came to study with Böcklin in 1881, is a typical
example of those who did indeed attend the classical Gymnasien, only to emerge as critics of
the desiccation of the neohumanist tradition. "The aesthetic dogmas and presuppositions of
our fathers,” he recalled, “were transmitted to us in flesh and blood, and after generations, they
143
still shape our popular books and our Gymnasium teachers. Those who have used them to
144
enjoy [life] or shape themselves are few."xli Böcklin, claimed Julius Langbehn in his hugely
popular Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator), claimed, was one of the few living
artists to have escaped the “anal historicism” of archaeological fetishism and accepted
Winckelmann’s obsolescence.xlii For these young men, reared in a world in which industrial,
commercial, and practical knowledge threatened to destroy the prestige of humanistic Bildung,
and feeling repressed and confined by the banal pleasantries of mid-century social life, it
seemed clear that antiquity had either to take on a new vitality--or be consigned to the
dustbin.
Perhaps without the intervention of Böcklin the dustbin would have triumphed—but the
simultaneous rising appeal of Burckhardt and Bachofen, Nietzsche’s Greeks and Richard
Strauss’s Elektra, suggests that the new generation was not yet ready to sever its ties to the
classical tradition, which gave it, among other things, leverage against a materialist and
insufficiently heroic present. A subjective and psychological understanding of antiquity, on the
other hand, appealed greatly to these younger intellectuals, and Böcklin like no other painter of
his era was able to paint the pagan psyche in suitably neoromantic tones. The sense of loss
and longing conveyed so poignantly across the channel by Walter Pater was echoed precisely in
paintings like ‘Heracles’s Tomb’ and ‘Villa by the Sea,’ about which Henriette Mendelssohn
wrote in 1901: “To us. . . the image has become a great elegy for the disappearance of ancient
splendor. In the waves, which strike the shore with ritual force, the swan song of a great past
resounds."xliii But the loss was not irreparable, Böcklin also taught; repeatedly in poems
dedicated to the aging painter Böcklin is credited with giving new life to an arcadian world that
had nearly disappeared. xliv “You, alone,” wrote Stefan George, “have prevented (thanks to you,
watchman!) this cold age’s extinguishing of the holy fire.”xlv The power of Böcklin’s paganpastoral vision had liberated the ancients from the fetters of historicizing, philological
classicism, and given German art an entrancing new authenticity. Böcklin, the great Pan of
144
painting, permitted his viewers to break with the past and yet resist the unedifying and
145
superficial culture of the present, to be mourners and modernizers all at once.
Though they praised him to the skies, the intellectuals of the fin de si棠cle often
admitted that they did not entirely understand Böcklin; it was difficult, many confessed, to find
the key to what one 1895 commentator described as “the secret magical garden of this paintermystic.”xlvi Yet what would have been, for Böcklin's admired Renaissance greats as for
nineteenth-century neoclassicists, disaster--namely, the failure of the painter to communicate
his vision clearly--is now fully acceptable, indeed part of the “life” with which he infuses his art.
The viewers of the 1890s did not want to be able to identify the literary sources or exact
archaeological provenance of B棠cklin’s scenes; the mythological figures do not need to tell a
recognizable story.xlvii The vitality of the vision, its ability to speak to the spectator’s psyche,
was now more important than the viewer’s ability to recognize and ‘read’ a traditional tale. It is
not clear why Böcklin himself broke away from the literary tradition; perhaps, like
Hofmannsthal’s generation, he despaired of the ability of words to communicate real truths, or
perhaps he believed that he was ‘reading’ in a deeper way than his predecessors. More likely,
he simply did not think that texts should constrain the painter’s vision; he frequently allowed
dealers and museum officials to title his paintings, and did not balk when the titles failed to
reflect his intentions—the words simply did not interest him.xlviii For Böcklin, this departure
from neoclassical practice seems to have been unproblematical, one could even say, naïve; but
it was, nonetheless, a momentous leap of faith. He believed, that is, that the meaning of
mythological scenes could be, quite radically, personalized, and democratized. Clearly Böcklin
had thrown a monkey wrench into the tradition of ut pictura poesis--and the elitist
presumptions of artistic classicism.
Perhaps this democratization of meaning explains why Böcklin, by the 1890s, had
become not just a hero to the intellectuals, but also the darling of the Bildungsbürgertum as a
whole. The exhibition at the Berlin academy in honor of his seventieth birthday drew 60,000
145
visitors in one day; in Munich, a celebratory dinner attracted so many fans, from so many
146
walks of life, that the card room of the royal Hofbräuhaus could hardly hold them.xlix
Reproductions of his work circulated widely, and were easy to obtain; the ‘Isle of the Dead’
(Illustration 5), it is said hung in every bourgeois living room, and had made the island of
Pondiconissi (the so-called ‘false’ model for the painting) something of a touristic attraction
already by the turn of the century.l His paintings sold for an average of 16,000 Marks, four
times what he had earned in the 70s and early 80s.li When one of Freud’s patrons hinted that a
Böcklin might be secured for the Modern Gallery in Vienna, the Austrian Minister of Culture
moved quickly to promote the psychoanalyst to a university professorship.lii The Swiss artist
became a household name, even a household necessity—and, in all tributes (and even in Julius
Meier-Graefe’s scathing polemic, The Case of Böcklin [1905])—the German painter.liii
The question of Böcklin’s Germanness is not easily handled—though it is quite clear that
he was no passionate Germanophile--even after 1890.liv As noted above, he revolted early
against the conventions and expectations of bourgeois Basel; he married an Italian woman and
spoke Italian at home for the rest of his life; the couple lived in Germany as infrequently as
possible. Although he perpetually looked to Germany for his market, he felt he had been
swindled by German dealers and treated shabbily by Basel society; he disliked Berlin almost as
much as he disliked Paris. It has proved impossible to read into his 'Battle of the Centaurs' a
hurrah for Germany's victory in the Franco-Prussian war; his post-1890 Dürer-esque
apocalyptic paintings, as Andrea Linnebach notes, cannot be seen as positive reflections on
Germany's rise to world power.lv But he clearly preferred German styles (Nazarene; Romantic) to
French ones; of Impressionism’s claim to represent the world as the eye really sees it, he
scoffed: "My houseboy 'sees' too."lvi Nor, though he loved the Italian countryside, could
B棠cklin conceive himself as an Italian; he wanted a German education for his children, and
apparently formed few friendships with Italian nationals. Gustav Floerke claimed, perhaps
rather rashly: "He believed that with Italians--without exception [presumably including his own
146
wife]--one could, at best, have the same sort of relationship one has with a lovely pet."lvii
147
Thus, he was not entirely resistant to Germanization, or to be being made the middle-brow
alternative to Max Liebermann, his work representing a sort of ‘pillars of Hercules’ beyond
which German modern art could not go.lviii If the connoisseurs abandoned him in the wake of
art critic Julius Meier Graefe’s devastating attack on Böcklin’s inept draughtsmanship, absurd
eclecticism, and retrograde ideas, the painter retained the sympathies of petty bourgeois
nationalists, like Adolf Hitler, who had fallen in love with images like ‘Isle of the Dead’
(Illustration 5).lix Though the painter would surely have detested the dictator’s nationalist cant,
I am not at all sure that, aesthetically, B棠cklin was vastly more sophisticated than his most
infamous fan.
But the nationalists, Hitler among them, did lose sight of one very important aspect of
Böcklin, and that was his humor. The painter’s post-1885 fans, intellectuals as well as middleclass viewers, greatly preferred his ‘serious’ and classicizing pictures, to his pastoral
landscapes and comic scenes; it was this group of pictures, especially ‘Isle of the Dead’ and
‘Holy Sanctuary, which seemed worthy of counting as truly ‘German’ modern art. When the
conservative critic Ferdinand Avenarius produced a Böcklin-Mappe in 1901, it contained
framable copies of these two images as well as “Silence of the Forest,” one of the painter’s few
Germanicizing paintings; it also included copies of “Maria tending the Corpse of the Savior,” the
hystrionic picture Burckhardt had objected to, and two now little discussed images, “The
Attack” and “Poetry and Painting.”lx For Avenarius, who described Böcklin as a major weapon in
Germany’s fight against French art,lxi these paintings, not the light-hearted or erotic ones,
represented Böcklin’s best. And it was precisely popularizers like Avenarius and the Wagnerian
Henry Thode who gave the Swiss-Italian painter a reputation for Germanic chauvinism and
bathetic seriousness. He became, in a popular expression, the equivalent in art to Richard
Wagner in music, a comparison which obscures entirely the more Mozartian pastoralism and
puckish humor of many of Böcklin’s canvases.
147
Thus was Böcklin’s post-liberal, vitalist neoclassicism largely highjacked by German
148
nationalists, and the painter shared Nietzsche’s fate: his comedic, ironic side was stripped
away, and his cosmopolitanism suppressed, greatly to the detriment of his current reputation.
But there is another line of descent from Böcklin, in which his humor was appreciated, namely,
the surrealist school of Giorgio di Chirico and Max Ernst, whose relationships with Böcklin were
recently and wonderfully explored in the exhibit Voyage into the Unknown (Reise ins
Ungewisse). Here we see Böcklin’s combination of the solemn and the titillating, his
playfulness and his melancholy, given full scope; here we find a parodistic and playful, rather
than a somber or bombastic, Böcklin. This is an important, and little appreciated, side of the
Swiss artist’s work, evident in paintings like ‘Sleeping Diana, Watched by Two Fauns’
(Illustration 6). But as with the conservative reception, it is clear here too that Böcklin’s central
contribution lay in his revision of the classical tradition, in underlining the psychological and
surreal, not the factual or historical, presence of ancient forms and myths in modern culture.
His sunny, non-classical landscapes, however beautiful—and reminiscent of the surreal world
of Rene Magritte (Illustration 7: Summer’s Day, 1881)—have been forgotten.
If calling Böcklin a ‘modernist’ amounts to a dubious, and ultimately pointless playing
with terms, it can be said with certainty that Böcklin’s vitalist classicism made it impossible for
the Wilhelmine world to return to Winckelmannian and Humboldtian neoclassicism. Heirs to his
vision, most notably Franz von Stuck and Max Klinger, continued to explore the classical
psyche, often creating images which brought the subtle eroticism of Böcklin’s world starkly to
the surface—and a good study of ‘decadent’ gender roles in these three painters would
certainly be welcome.lxii Independently, it seems, Gustav Klimt was following the same
trajectory--though he surely had seen some of Böcklin’s work by the time he made his turn
inward in the mid-1880s. "Thank God," Gustav Floerke exulted in 1901; "with Böcklin we have
finally escaped from art history."lxiii Surely Böcklin was not the sine qua non of German modern
art—but his own, rather naïve, revolt against neoclassicism undoubtedly set the scene, and
148
offered one important road into the (non-French) open. His eclecticism may now make him
149
seem kitschy, but if kitsch is simply the combination of trite forms, this can sometimes be
culturally revolutionary, as it was in the case of “D棠jeuner sur l’herbe” and Andy Warhol’s soup
cans, and, I think, in the case of paintings like “Holy Sanctuary.”lxiv Having now really lost the
thread of the classical tradition, we may not be able to recognize the modernness of Böcklin’s
artistic vocabulary, or appreciate the Dionysian transports to which his paintings gave rise. But
we may yet conclude that Arnold Böcklin was, at least in his cultural effects, indeed the
‘German’ Manet.
Illustrations
1. Centaur and Nymph, 1855
2. Holy Sanctuary, 1882
3. Battle of the Centaurs, 1872-3
4. Isle of Life, 1886
5. Isle of the Dead, 1880
6. Sleeping Diana, Watched by Two Fauns
7. Summer’s Day, 1882
iFritz
Novotny, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780-1880 (The Pelican History of Art)
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1971), p. 319.
ii
In a letter of 1900, Thomas Mann describes Böcklin’s “Madonna Enthroned in the Clouds’ as
“…odd, primitive and so ugly as to almost be comical; I think the old master is simply playing a
joke.” Mann to Paul Ehrenberg, 29 June 1900, in Thomas Mann: Briefe, 1948-1955 und
Nachlese (?. 1965), pp. 424-25.
iiiIt
has been estimated that allegories and motives taken from classical antiquity make up one-
half of Böcklin?s paintings as a whole; a total of 32 treat his favorite figures, Pan, fauns, and
nymphs. Klaus Vierneisel, “Archäologisches bei Arnold Böcklin,” in Guido Magnaguagno and Juri
149
150
Steiner, eds., Arnold Böcklin, Giorgio di Chirico, Max Ernst: Eine Reise ins Ungewisse (Bern,
1998), p. 88.
Ludwig Justi, “Arnold B棠cklin: Ein F棠hrer zur B棠cklin Sammlung der National-Galerie (Berlin,
iv
1927), p. 25.
v
Schorske here posed the problem by quoted Robert Musil. See Carl Schorske, Fin de Si棠cle
Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981), p. 116.
Carl Neumann, “Zu Arnold B棠cklin’s siebenzigstem Geburtstag,” in Kunst für Alle 13
vi
(1897/98), p. 6; Franz Hermann Meissner, Arnold Böcklin (Berlin, 3rd edition, 1898), p. 87.
Vitalism is a notoriously slippery term; nonetheless, it seems to describe a real tendency in
vii
late nineteenth-century culture, a strain of thought, or better simply a cast of mind, that valued
experience over erudition, healthy emotions (and action, often for its own sake) over pallid
thought, primitive drives over ‘civilized’ manners—the unbourgeois, that is to say, over the
bourgeois. For a subtle and engaging discussion of the many forms of this cast of mind, see
August K. Wiedmann, The German Quest for Primal Origins in Art, Culture and Politics, 19001933; Die ‘Flucht in Urzust棠nde’ (Lewiston, 1995).
viii
Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago, 2000); Rolf Andree, Arnold Böcklin:
Die Gemälde (Basel, 1977), p. 16.
ixJoachim
Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum: Leben und Arbeit von Maler in Preußen,
1786-1850 (Berlin, 1994 ), p. 71).
x
Giorgio di Chirico, “Arnold B棠cklin,” trans. Floriana Bernasconi, in Andree, Böcklin: Die
Gemälde (1977), p. 49
xi
Georg Schmidt, “B棠cklin heute,” in Rolf Andree, Arnold Böcklin: Die Gemälde (Basel, 1977),
54-56.
xii
Vierneisel “Archäologisches bei Arnold Böcklin,” 87.
xiiiSchmidt,
“B棠cklin heute,” p.54.
150
151
Ferdinand Runkel, ed. B棠cklin Memorien: Tagebuchbl棠tter von B棠cklins Gattin Angela
xiv
(Berlin, 1910), p. 55.
xv
The original version of Böcklin?s ?Nymph and Centaur? could not be exhibited in Rome on
?moral grounds??until Böcklin supplied the nymph with a veil. Andree, Böcklin: Die Gemälde
(1977), p. 20. A later image (1866) was apparently rejected by the Basel Museums as “too
naked.? Rudolf Schick, Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1866 1868 1869 棠ber
Arnold B棠cklin, ed. Hugo von Tschudi (Berlin, 2nd ed., 1902), pp. 80-81.
xvi
Vierneisel, “Archäologisches bei Arnold Böcklin,” p. 89.
xvii
Runkel, B棠cklin Memorien, p. 83.
xviii
On B棠cklin’s flying aspirations, see Ferdinand Runkel and Carl B Tagebuch-
Aufzeichnungen, Neben meiner Kunst: Flugstudien, Briefen und Pers棠nliches von and 棠ber
Arnold B棠cklin (Berlin, 1909), p. 37.
xix
Schick, Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen, p. 171.
xx
Hofmannsthal added a new preface to this play (originally written in 1892) so that it could be
performed as part of the funerary rites for B棠cklin in 1901. See “Der Tod des Tizian: Ein
dramatisches Fragment,” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, S棠mtliche Werke III, ed. G棠tz Eberhard
H棠bner, Klaus-Gerhard Pott, Christoph Michel (Fischer Verlag, 1982), pp. 221-235.
xxiSchick,
xxiiSee
Tagebuch-Aufzeichungen, pp. 265, 281; Runkel, B棠cklin Memorien, pp. 127-132.
Andrea Pophanken, “Graf Adolf Friedrich von Schack und seine Galerie: Anmerkungen zur
M棠nchener Sammlungsgeschichte,” in Ekkehard Mai and Peter Paret, eds., Sammler, Stifter,
und Museen: Kunstf棠rderung in Deutschland im 19. Und 20 Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1993), pp.
114-134.
xxiii
See his comments quoted in Adolf Grabowsky, Der Kampf um B棠cklin (Berlin, 1906), p.
187, 185.
xxiv
Runkel, B棠cklin Memorien, p. 252.
151
152
xxv
Cf. Robert Rosemblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to
Rothko (New York, 1975. Many thanks to Lionel Gossman for directing me to this wonderful
book.
xxviAndrea
Linnebach, Arnold B棠cklin und die Antike: Mythos, Geschichte, Gegenwart (Munich,
1991), pp. 21-35; 68-72.
xxvii
Runkel and B棠cklin, Neben meiner Kunst, p. 13.
xxviii
B棠cklin quoted (from Lasius, p. 115) in Grabowsky, Der Kampf, p. 148.
See Ibid., pp. 178-188. B棠cklin mentions a number of German moderns here—Menzel,
xxix
Piloty, Makart, von Marees, Feuerbach, Dreber and von Werner—all negatively (pp. 184-88).
xxx
Quoted in Schick, Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen, p. 101.
xxxi
Unlike many of his contemporaries, B棠cklin rejoiced to find confirmation that the ancients
had painted their statues. He followed closely the excavation of a painted statue of Augustus in
1863 (one of the clearest proofs to a culture accustomed to viewing white plaster casts that the
ancients were not Winckelmannian lovers of pure form) and even took over the painting of a
cast of the entombment of Christ as a means to investigate further the effects of polychromy.
Hans Holenweg, “Arnold B棠cklin (1827-1901),” in Arnold B棠cklin (Catalog for the exhibition
“Arnold B棠cklin: Eine Retrospective,” Basel, 19 May through 26 August, 2001; Basel, 2001), p.
343.
xxxiiQuoted
in Gustav Floerke, Zehn Jahre mit B棠cklin: Aufzeichnungen und Entw棠rfe (Munich,
1901), p. 127.
xxxiii
Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914 (New
York, 2002).
xxxiv
Angelika Wesenberg, “B棠cklin und die Reichshauptstadt,” in Arnold B棠cklin (Basel, 2001),
p. 76.
xxxv
Comments from reviews for the Zeitschrift f棠r bildende Kunst, 1873 and 1872,
152
153
respectively, quoted in Lutz Tittel, “Die Beurteilung Arnold B棠cklins in der Zeitschrift f棠r
bildende Kunst von 1866 bis 1901,” in Arnold B棠cklin, 1827-1901: Gem棠lde, Zeichnungen,
Plastiken (Ausstellung zum 150 Geburtstag, Kunstmuseum Basel, 11 June – 11 September
1977), p. 125, 124 [123-130].
xxxvi
Quoted in Wesenberg, “B棠cklin und die Reichshauptstadt,” p. 78.
xxxvii
Justi, “Arnold B棠cklin: Ein F棠hrer, p. 17; Wesenberg, “B棠cklin und die Reichshauptstadt,”
pp. 78-81.
xxxviii
xxxix
Kenworth Moffett, Meier Graefe as Art Critic (Munich, 1973), p. 52.
Andrea Linnebach, “Antike und Gegenwart: Zu B棠cklins mythologischer Bilderwelt,” in
Guido Magnaguagno and Juri Steiner, eds. Arnold B棠cklin, Giorgio did Chirico, Max Ernst: Eine
Reise ins Ungewisse (Bern, 1998), p. 196; Wesenberg, “B棠cklin und die Reichshauptstadt,” p.
82.
xl
Neumann,“Zu Arnold B棠cklin’s siebenzigstem Geburtstag,” p. 5 (see note 6, above).
xli
Floerke Zehn Jahre mit B棠cklin, p. 194.
xlii
[Julius Langbehn], Rembrandt als Erzieher (Leipzig, 39th ed., 1891), pp. 30-35.
xliii
Quoted in Linnebach, Böcklin und die Antike, p. 132.
xliv
Wie durch Pfeifen seines Rohres
Pan sein Liebesleid verr棠t,
Und im Sturme, m棠cht’gen Chores,
Um ihn her das Schilfrohr weht,
Wie mit Weibern sich ein trunkner
Kriegsknecht in der Schenke neckt
Lebend hast aus langversunkner
Zeit du alles das erweckt.
Schack quoted in Nikolaus Meier, “B棠cklin-Ges棠nge,” in Arnold B棠cklin, 1827-1901 (as Tittel
153
154
essay, note 31), p. 134.
xlv
George quoted in Ibid. (Meier), p. 142.
xlvi
Quoted (in another context) in Tittel, “Die Beurteilung Arnold B棠cklins,” p. 123.
xlvii
B棠cklin once himself argued that paintings do have something to tell, but not necessarily a
story. Floerke Zehn Jahre mit B棠cklin, p. 69.
xlviii
Here Böcklin was not as naïve (or as inept) a painter as he is sometimes made out to be.
When a visitor identified the lonely woman in “Villa am Meer” as Iphigenia, Böcklin responded:
?It is right that everyone should think of the image in the way it speaks to him. It is not
necessary that this is exactly the same as what the painter conceived. I did not think of
Iphigenia in [creating] the image.? Runkel and Böcklin, Neben meiner Kunst, p. 144.
xlix
Beth Irwin Lewis, “Kunst f棠r Alle Das Volk als F棠rderer der Kunst,” in Mai and Paret, eds.,
Sammler, Stifter und Museen, p. 190.
Franz Zelger, Arnold B棠cklin: Die Toteninsel. Selbstheroisierung und Abgesang der
l
abendl棠ndischen Kultur (Frankfurt, 1991), p. 54; Gerd Roos, “Giorgio die Chirico und der lange
Schatten von Arnold B棠cklin,” in Magnaguagno and Steiner, eds. Reise ins Ungewisse, pp. 2089.
Robin Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850-1914 (Manchester, 1997), p. 162.
li
lii
Schorske, Fin de Si棠cle Vienna, p. 245.
liii
Alfred Julius Meier Graefe, Der Fall B棠cklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten (Stuttgart, 1905).
liv
Georg Schmidt describes him as a fan of Bismarck, while Norbert Schneider calls him an
‘enlightened Republican.’ Schmidt, “B棠cklin heute,” pp. 55, 57; Schneider, “B棠cklins
‘Toteninsel’: Zur ikonologischen und sozialpsychologischen Deutung eines Motivs,” in A.
B棠cklin, 1827-1901 (Catalog for the 150th birthday celebration in Darmstadt, 1977), 116-17.
lv
Linnebach, B棠cklin und die Antike, pp. 138-44.
Böcklin quoted in Floerke, Zehn Jahre mit Böcklin, p. 115.
lvi
154
155
lvii
Ibid., p. 10.
lviii
Meier Graefe snidely summed up Böcklin’s appeal to this class: “We admired Böcklin, Klinger,
Rops and Gustave Moreau only because they weren’t Liebermann, and we would have resoundly
thanked Munch for our liberation, even if he had been a bungler.” Meier Graefe quoted in Dieter
Honisch, “Der Fall B棠cklin,” in A. B棠cklin, 1827-1901 (Darmstadt 1977), p. 18).
Hitler would purchase 11 of B棠cklin’s paintings, and exhibit his favorite the ‘Isle of the
lix
Dead,’ in the Reichskanzlei. Interestingly, it was in standing on the piazza Michelangelo in
Florence, and gazing toward Fiesole, that Hitler claimed that he had, finally understood
B棠cklin. Wesenberg, “B棠cklin und die Reichshauptstadt,” p. 86.
lx
Gerd Roos, “Giorgio die Chirico,” pp. 206-07.
lxiPeter
Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany
(Cambridge, 1980), p. 172.
lxii
Bram Dijkstra has done pioneering work in this area in his insightful overview, Idols of
Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (New York, 1986).
lxiiiFloerke,
lxiv
Zehn Jahre mit Böcklin, p. 128.
I owe this insight about the similarity of Böcklin’s eclecticism, and that of Manet’s “Dejeuner”
to a set of comments Hal Foster made about an earlier version of this essay at a conference on
“Model Systems” at Princeton University in April 2000.
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