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Marion Deshmukh on Menzel's Realism: Art And Michael Fried. Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. 320 pp. $55.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-300-09219-6. Reviewed by Marion Deshmukh Published on H-ArtHist (January, 2003) "Berlin's Salons are irregular; there is no spe‐ critics have presented simplistic dichotomies of cial exhibition hall. For some years, in fact, there French aesthetic domination and originality in has been no Salon at all. Admission is 50 centimes. contrast to German artistic inferiority and deriva‐ It would be out of keeping to speak here of Ger‐ tiveness. man art. With the exception of that extraordinary Like LaForgue, others of the time praised genius, Adolph Menzel, this art is inferior to that Menzel. For example, the important French critic, of France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Spain."[1] Edmond Duranty, wrote extensively about the Thus wrote Jules LaForgue, the French tutor artist in a series of articles detailing some of Men‐ to the Prussian Empress Augusta when he resided zel's key paintings, as Fried describes in his ac‐ in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century. His count (p. 125-39). Max Liebermann, turn-of-the evaluation of German painting of the period has century Germany's influential impressionist been surprisingly resilient. Michael Fried, J. R. painter, regarded Menzel as a great "genius."[2] So Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at Johns too, the 19th century German realist novelist Hopkins University and author of works on 18th Theodor Fontane, known for his often-sardonic century French drawing, Édouard Manet, Charles portrayals of contemporary Prussian life in Impe‐ Eakins and Gustave Courbet, has provided a bold, rial Germany, ("Frau Jenny Treibel" or "Effi even audacious, yet convincingly original per‐ Briest", discussed by Fried in chapter 10) greatly spective on 19th century Germany's foremost but admired Menzel. Fontane penned an affectionate still-obscure artist, Adolph Menzel (1815- 1905). In poem on the occasion of the painter Adolph Men‐ it, he desires not only to acknowledge that which zel's seventieth birthday in 1885. In it he queried, LaForgue observed about Menzel over one hun‐ "Indeed, who is Menzel? Menzel is many things, if dred years ago, but Fried also wishes to recover not everything; he is in any case a great Noah's some of the complexity of 19th century European ark, animal and human being"[3] We, too, can art more generally. Too often art historians and ask: who, indeed is Menzel? The vast majority of H-Net Reviews his paintings and drawings reside in German, pri‐ the 1860s to 1871. Fried's analysis of Menzel's art marily Berlin museums. Outside the Federal Re‐ begins with the works themselves and their rela‐ public his name is virtually unknown, despite an tionship to the artist's sense of reality. The painter important and comprehensive 1996- 1997 exhibi‐ physically was gnome-like and extremely short, tion held in Paris (d'Orsay) and Washington, DC probably about four and a half feet with a head (National Gallery of Art) before the traveling proportionately far larger than his body. Like the show concluded in Berlin. There has, until now, French artist Toulouse-Lautrec who also was ex‐ been no major English-language book-length biog‐ tremely small, the artist appeared to view the raphy or analysis published. While a number of world from a position of an outsider-confining his art historians and historians have written very in‐ close relationships to family members and very sightfully about Menzel, his art, and political few intimate friends. He never married. Fried's ideas, in particular Claude Keisch, Françoise central and compelling contention is that "Men‐ Forster-Hahn and Peter Paret, Americans, indeed, zel's enterprise involved countless acts of imagi‐ most non-Germans know little if anything about native projection of bodily experience" (p. 13) that the artist's vast output during his long and pro‐ the author defines as "embodiment." In other ductive life (1815-1905).[4] This is the case despite words, when viewing a painting, drawing, or the fact that when one encounters Menzel's art, gouache, Menzel is asking the viewer to project one reacts like Michael Fried, and is taken aback him or herself into the work and understand its by the sheer range of subjects, the incredible total reality and complexity as Menzel himself draughtsmanship, and the vast quantities of mar‐ saw it. This means that the act of viewing is as dif‐ velous drawings and prints the artist created dur‐ ficult and as fraught with visual problems as was ing his long life. Fried wonders why the art histor‐ the act of creating the work of art itself. For one ical community has not properly appreciated can never entirely see reality in both minute, al‐ Menzel. most microscopic detail and, simultaneously, in His creative evocation of Menzel's artistic ge‐ broad, sweeping outline. In his attempt to grasp nius offers much food for thought and reflection. the totality of detail, Menzel's work, according to Rather than offer a traditional biography, Fried Fried, achieves a sort of unity which most critics proceeds from an important vantage-point in his heretofore discounted or neglected. Whereas analysis by dissecting, surveying, and in innumer‐ many critics, contemporary to Menzel and more able ways intensely looking at the art and at Men‐ recently, have seen his realist portrayals of con‐ zel's methods of painting and drawing. In his orig‐ temporary history as busy, fussy, and much too inal approach to the works, Fried's also departs cluttered with details, Fried counters with the from recent and even 19th and early 20th century view that Menzel's art requires "the primacy of critics and art historians who have analyzed Men‐ empathic projection in the making and viewing of zel's oeuvre. his art." (p. 17) He also argues that "the mode of temporality.is basic to Menzel's art," (p. 144). Menzel's art has often been viewed through the lens of 18th and 19th century German politics. Thus, given Fried's assertion that Menzel's This has been the case because many of the "feats of projection" are central to an understand‐ painter's works dealt with the life of the 18th cen‐ ing of his art, the author then argues that his his‐ tury enlightened Prussian ruler, Frederick the torical paintings and drawings of the life of Fred‐ Great. Menzel also witnessed and recorded his‐ erick the Great, or his contemporary paintings of toric events of his own time-from the revolutions recent Prussian history, such as "The Departure of of 1848 to the wars of German unification during Wilhelm I", (1871), are no less important in the comprehension of Menzel's conception of "depic‐ 2 H-Net Reviews tion" than Menzel's critically-acclaimed "private" What Fried asks the reader to do is to actively pictures of family and 'buergerliche' life. Most re‐ and carefully scrutinize Menzel's paintings and cent commentators have attempted to 'read' extra remove the burdensome preconceptions of aesthetic ideas into Menzel's painting. Fried wants French visual modernism as well as contextual the reader and viewer to re- experience the visual German political developments during the artist's conundrums Menzel faced when approaching a lifetime. He thus wants us to use fresh eyes to un‐ subject - be it a moving train, futtering curtains derstand one of the most prolific and interesting gently blown by a breeze, Frederick the Great en‐ painters of the 19th century. He makes very couraging his soldiers before battle, or Prussian telling points about the differences between Men‐ aristocrats gamely attempting to balance their zel's angle of vision in very literal sense, and the buffet plates at a glittering ball. French classicizing mode of depiction: "French Fried's discussion counters much of the anal‐ painting throughout the nineteenth century re‐ ysis of nineteenth French painting and its contrast mained essentially classical in its mode of con‐ to German art of the same period. Many art histo‐ structing an illusion of spatial depth, by which I rians have traditionally analyzed French painting mean that in the works of generations of major of the mid-century by formal internal description. painters.this was done by delineating a succession In the last two decades have art historians in‐ of planes all of which ran parallel to the picture creasingly read extra aesthetic "narrativizing" plane and were stepped back into the distance by ideas into the paintings (one thinks of Robert Her‐ measurable degrees" (p. 81). The conclusion Fried bert's "Impressionism Art, Leisure and Parisian draws is that the French model has "effectively Society" or Patricia Mainardi's "Art and Politics of determined the basic pictorial expectations of the 2nd Empire"). Given the burden of German countless viewers of paintings [from Poussin history climaxing during the Nazi era, art histori‐ through Seurat].with the result that Menzel's fun‐ ans writing about German painting, even painting damentally disparate approach to the pictorial of the 19th century, have often privileged politics representation.runs the risk of appearing eccen‐ before formally analyzing works of art on their tric, marginal, minor, but without deeper signifi‐ own terms. Or, inevitable comparisons to French cance" (p. 82). Fried's important contribution, art of the period have rendered German art want‐ among many, is therefore to conflate Menzel's pri‐ ing, represented by the observations of Jules vate and public paintings-the latter often praised Laforgue, or, at the turn of the century, by the art while the public, historical canvases were fre‐ critic Julius Meier-Graefe.
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