Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Spotlight Essay: Franz Seraph von Lenbach, Portrait of Prince , 1884–90 March 2014

James van Dyke Associate Professor of Modern European Art History, University of Missouri

Franz Seraph von Lenbach’s Portrait of

Prince Otto von Bismarck, painted in the mid- to late

1880s, is a typical example of the painter’s work of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Like most of the pictures with which Lenbach made a fortune as Germany’s best-known high-society portraitist between 1870 and his death in 1904, the painting takes as its subject a prominent member of imperial Germany’s economic, social, and Franz Seraph von Lenbach, Portrait of Prince Otto von Bismarck, 1884–90. Oil on canvas, 46 x 36 5/8". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. political elite. In this case the sitter was the man Louis. Gift of August A. Busch, 1929. who had played an instrumental role in the founding of the imperial German nation- state in 1871, and who by 1895 had become a larger-than-life, even mythical, figure to many Germans. Stylistically, the picture reminds the viewer of portraits by Titian, one of the Italian old masters whose work Lenbach admired most, as was attested both by the numerous copies he made of Titian’s paintings and by his acquisition of several of Titian’s original works for his own personal collection, which he

1 eventually installed in his palatial house and studio in .1 Described with painterly dash, the figure of the elderly yet apparently still robust Prussian statesman emerges auratically from a dark, mysterious ground in which it is difficult to distinguish anything clearly. Light falls from the viewer’s left onto Bismarck’s hands, which are sheathed in yellowish leather gloves, folded over a walking stick, and rendered with summary virtuosity. The light even more strongly illuminates his face, which is the unmistakable focal point of the picture. Bismarck turns toward this light, looking not at the viewer but rather up and into the distance with an expression that seems to mix imperiousness and thoughtful reflection. Though he is soberly dressed, the understated elegance of the painting and the richness of its frame produce an effect of carefully controlled magnificence. This is an object that plainly speaks for, not to, power.

This picture is not a piece of modernist art, and Lenbach is not a painter associated with the canon of modern or modernist German art that begins with the work of , Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, and Paula Modersohn-

Becker. He is barely mentioned in histories of the emergence of modern artistic groups in Munich in the 1890s.2 He celebrated the wealthy, powerful people he painted, and gave them what they wanted. For instance, while a guest at Lenbach’s house, Bismarck himself wrote: “I am pleased to see myself immortalized by

1 See Rosel Gollek, “Lenbach als Kunstsammler,” in Franz von Lenbach, 1836–1904, ed. Rosel Gollek and Winfried Ranke (Munich: Städtische Galerie im and Prestel, 1987), 117–28; and Herbert W. Rott, “Alte Meister: Lenbachs Kopien für Adolph Friedrich von Schack,” in Lenbach: Sonnenbilder und Porträts, ed. Reinhold Baumstark (Munich: Schack-Galerie; Cologne: Pinakothek-DuMont, 2004), 55–71. 2 See Maria Makela, The Munich Secession: Art and Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Munich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

2 Lenbach’s brush just as I would like to be preserved for posterity.”3 Nor did the painter’s works challenge established aesthetic traditions, as did the avant-garde subculture. It should thus come as no surprise that Lenbach has never been the subject of a major exhibition or book-length scholarly study in the English-speaking world.4 In Germany, scholarship on Lenbach exists, but even there it is unusual to encounter Lenbach’s work on permanent public display in museums elsewhere than in Munich, where he lived and worked most of his life.

The general absence, or only marginal place, of pictures such as the one under the spotlight here is unfortunate. To be sure, that statement should not be construed as a call for revisionist claims about the artistic value and quality of portraiture such as this. Nor is this essay proposing critical recuperation and validation of an unjustly neglected artist, to rescue him from art historical oblivion.

Lenbach, one of Munich’s internationally acclaimed “painter princes,” was anything but neglected or misunderstood in his day. Building his career in the prosperous years of the 1870s and extraordinarily well connected, Lenbach never was in danger of sinking into the so-called “art proletariat”—that is, the thousands of artists who since the 1890s were forced to eke out an existence from hand to mouth. He never

3 Quoted in Sonja Mehl, Franz von Lenbach in der Städtischen Galerie im Lenbachhaus München (Munich: Prestel, 1980), 125. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. 4 One notable exception is the exhibition Celebrity Soul: Lenbach’s Portraits, presented by the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, in 2005; see http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/87/. It should be mentioned that the Frye is atypical in its focus on academic and juste milieu German art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

3 was and never will be absorbed into the “dark matter” of the art world.5 However,

Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck profitably can and should be examined by the historically and sociologically minded art historian as an example of how ideology can be materialized, how success and failure are measured in the field of modern artistic production, and how patronage and politics converge. These are issues that can and should, of course, be addressed in any study of art (including modernism), but they are posed particularly insistently here.

The Painting

The extent and intensity of Lenbach’s relationship with Bismarck is legendary. The Bavarian painter was an intimate, ardent, and awe-struck personal admirer of the towering Prussian politician whom he called the “monster”

(Ungeheuer).6 Lenbach organized a major public festival in Munich on the German

Chancellor’s seventieth birthday, visited him regularly on his birthdays and on holidays, and invited Bismarck and his wife to stay at his house in 1892, two years after Bismarck had been driven from office by the new Emperor Wilhelm II. To a considerable extent Lenbach profiled himself publicly and professionally as “the

Bismarck painter.” In 1909 the art critic Friedrich Naumann noted that eleven of

Lenbach’s portraits of Bismarck had been illustrated in a recent monograph and

5 See Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Marxism and Culture series (London: Pluto, 2011). 6 Lenbach, as quoted in Alice Laura Arnold, “Zwischen Kunst und Kult. Lenbachs Bismarck-Porträts und Repliken,” in Lenbach: Sonnenbilder und Porträts, ed. Baumstark, 149.

4 conjectured that not even Lenbach himself knew how many he had produced.7 More recent accounts have estimated the number to be anywhere between eighty and one hundred and fifty.8

The painting in the collection of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is a typical example of this body of work, which consists largely of a variety of busts, half-portraits, and three-quarter figures, sometimes in profile and sometimes frontal, sometimes sitting and sometimes standing, always alone. Quite a number of them depict Bismarck standing in uniform, especially after he had been forced into retirement, as though to remind viewers of his instrumental role in the foundation of the German Empire and the princely title that he had received for it. This painting, however, belongs to another type just as frequently produced by Lenbach, namely one that shows the old, yet still imperious and apparently visionary, figure wearing civilian clothes (in this case, for walking outdoors) while on the grounds of his wooded estate near Hamburg, which had been given to him in 1871 to reward his service to the new nation-state. The popularity of this representation of the

Empire’s elder statesman is suggested by the number of variations and replicas of this style that the painter made. Images of Bismarck out for a walk in the forest were apparently what Lenbach’s patrons wanted to see most.

Bismarck was one of the most prominent and powerful men in German politics from 1848 until 1890, and his activities as Prussian minister president from

1862 to 1890 and as the Reich chancellor from 1871 to 1890 earned him a central

7 Friedrich Naumann, “Lenbachs Bismarckbilder,” in Form und Farbe (- Schöneberg: Buchverlag der “Hilfe”, 1909), 76-77. 8 See Sonja von Baranow, Franz von Lenbach: Leben und Werk (Cologne: DuMont, 1986), 138; and Arnold, “Zwischen Kunst und Kult,” 152.

5 place in Germany’s art and visual culture. He was also a divisive figure, whose political opportunism and anti-Catholic and anti-socialist domestic policies earned him the lasting enmity of many. Accordingly he appears in countless caricatures published in Germany and elsewhere, sometimes showing him as a paternal (or even maternal) figure dealing firmly with unruly, childlike political parties, but often as a cynical political operator doing whatever is necessary to realize his goals. At the same time, Bismarck appears in numerous monumental pictures made by official history painters such as Anton von Werner, one of the most important artists of the

Wilhelmine Empire, who celebrated key moments in the history of the Reich during and after 1871. Among these depictions one can find Bismarck and other notables in

Versailles witnessing the declaration of the founding of the Reich, Bismarck speaking with the Emperor, Bismarck giving a speech to the Reichstag, and

Bismarck leaving the Reichstag. Finally, between 1898 and 1914, hundreds of memorials and statues of Bismarck were commissioned and built in Germany and in

German-speaking central Europe.9 These most commonly showed the statesman in the overcoat and with the sword of a Prussian officer and wearing the characteristic spiked leather helmet of the Prussian army.

Outdoor clothing was one of Bismarck’s many public guises.10 Lenbach, however, by avoiding the regalia emblematic of Prussian or German imperial authority that dominate his portraits of other similarly prominent political figures,

9 See Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth: Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 22–24. 10 See, for instance, Wilhelm Scholz, “Die Verkleidungen unseres Hofmeisters,” in the special edition on Bismarck, Bismarck–Album des Kladderadatsch, 9th ed. (Berlin: A. Hofmann, 1890), 45, http://digi.ub/uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/klabismarck1890/ 0050.

6 presented Bismarck as an independent individual. It seems that the painter sought to provide his viewers with a vision of character rather than social rank. The painting implicitly depicts Bismarck as a sober patriarch of a bourgeois nation rather than a man defined by state functions, political events, or court life.11 This characterization is in keeping with what Friedrich Naumann wrote about Lenbach himself, claiming for the artist a kind of independence from aristocratic and imperial decorum, despite his success. Specifically, Naumann related how the painter had left a teaching position in Weimar in the 1850s because he could not adjust to court life there, and described him as later becoming an “artist who could paint aristocrats without becoming a courtier.”12

Indeed, if there are any references to imperial politics in this picture, they are almost invisible and evidently negative, perhaps to be found in scarcely discernible shapes embedded in the murky background behind the illuminated figure. Bismarck sits before a low rusticated wall; the relationship between the masonry and the man’s torso might lead the viewer to think analogically about the imperial German state Bismarck helped to found and build. His head rises above the parapet, is crowned by a bit of dark blue sky apparent in a break in the clouds, and is flanked by vinelike vegetation clinging to shadowy angular shapes that might hint at the presence of ruins. Lenbach was deeply outraged by Bismarck’s forced resignation in

11 See Arnold, “Zwischen Kunst und Kult,” 166. 12 See Naumann, “Lenbach,” in Form und Farbe, 75.

7 1890, so it is possible he wished to suggest that his dismissal by the impetuous emperor might bring ruin upon the nation.13

The Frame

The magnificent neo-Renaissance gilt frame in which the viewer encounters

Lenbach’s painting certainly adds to the aesthetic impact and potential political message of the portrait. Such tabernacle or aedicular frames were popular in Europe in the late nineteenth century, as a taste for historical styles emerged dialectically with the wealth created by the industrial revolution. They not only elevated the pictures they enclosed, as elaborate frames always had, but also referred to the elite culture of the Renaissance and thus signified a link between the patronage of the

Medici, for instance, and the buyers of paintings by artists such as Lenbach in

Germany, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton in England.14 Lenbach himself, made rich by the market for his portraits, had become a serious art collector and had placed Titian’s Portrait of Philip II (c. 1550–51)—or a copy of it—in a frame very similar to the one in the Kemper’s collection.15 The Bismarck portrait’s frame

13 Close comparison with other versions of Lenbach’s similar portraits of Bismarck is outside the scope of this essay but could prove fruitful in determining the significance and relevance of the details in this painting. 14 See Eva Mendgen, et al., In Perfect Harmony: Picture + Frame, 1850–1920 (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Uitgevers, 1995), 29–42, 75–83. For more on this in general, see the exhibition Tabernacle Frames from the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2007, http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/tabernacleinfo.shtm. 15 It is unknown whether the painting owned by Lenbach was by Titian or was a copy, possibly painted by Lenbach himself. A photograph of the painting in its frame is found in Gollek and Ranke, Franz von Lenbach, 1836–1904, 172. On Lenbach’s engagement with Titian, see also Stephanie R. Miller, “A Tale of Two Portraits: Titian’s Seated Portraits of Phillip II,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of

8 clearly corresponded at the time to the taste for opulence of the wealthy institutions and patrons who desired such pictures. It is an expression of the fortunes made during the economic boom that followed the founding of the German Empire in

1871, the so-called Gründerzeit.

At the same time, the frame also seems to advance a political message. Most obviously, the Latin inscription on the frame’s pedestal, written in the kind of lettering seen on Roman triumphal arches, describes Bismarck as the founder of the empire, as the defender of Germany, and as a man consumed by service to his country: “Princeps Otto de Bismarck / Imperii Fundator / Propugnator Germaniae /

Patriae Inserviendo Consumor.” The moldings carved in low relief to the left and right of the painting reinforce this patriotic, even triumphal message. Breastplates, helmets, weapons, shields, and banners appear as trophies of war. The frame thus bespeaks Bismarck’s role in the formation of the German Empire on the basis of military victories against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and France.

Lenbach employed variants of this frame design on several occasions. In addition to Titian’s Portrait of Philip II, a second portrait at the Bismarck estate in

Germany is mounted in an almost identical frame. A photograph of Lenbach’s house taken in the late 1890s shows one of his portraits of Field Marshal Helmuth von

Moltke in a frame that appears to be virtually identical to the Kemper’s.16 The motifs on the frame thus seem not to have been tailored specifically to Bismarck. Yet it is hard not to see them as elements of a programmatic iconography meant to

Documentation 28, no. 1 (March 2012), http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01973762.2012.653485. 16 For reproduction and photographs, see Arnold, “Zwischen Kunst und Kult,” 154; and Mendgen, In Perfect Harmony, 38–39.

9 distinguish between the Prussian bourgeois virtues of austerity and masculinity embodied by Bismarck (and other Prussian leaders) and the decadent eroticism of those who he had subjugated (exemplified perhaps both by the female nudes embossed on the shields on the lateral moldings and by the two couplings of satyr and nymph carved in high relief on the frame’s pedestal, below the trophies). If this line of speculation is correct, then the frame not only serves as an object in accord with the sober canvas it surrounds, exalting the mythical figure of Bismarck; it also establishes a moralizing, gendered contrast and hierarchy between the victor and the vanquished, the virtuous and the licentious.

The Definition of Success

The brewing magnate Adolphus Busch presumably acquired this portrait of

Bismarck in 1904, when it was among the five paintings by Lenbach, selected by

Wilhelm II himself, that were posthumously included in the official German art exhibition at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Given Busch’s deep and public ties to Germany, his wealth, and his taste for magnificence, the desirability of a critically acclaimed depiction of the world-renowned Prussian leader by the famous Bavarian artist is easy to imagine.17 Busch belonged precisely to the class of people to whom Lenbach’s expensive Bismarck portraits had always

17 A newspaper clipping from the time emphasizes Lenbach’s technical mastery and “almost infallible psychology” while describing the painting—or one very much like it—as “destined to become a great historical representation of the mighty chancellor.” Unidentified source, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, object file WU 2929.

10 appealed most.18 Without more research one can only speculate about what led

Busch’s son August to donate the picture to Washington University in St. Louis in

1929. Perhaps he wished to align himself and his family with a traditional conservatism far from the new, radical nationalism that marked German politics in the 1920s, taking especially virulent form in the shape of Nazism.19 Perhaps the donation was related in some way to the vituperative attacks faced by the Busch family during World War I because of its close ties to Germany.20 For instance, a number of Bismarck portraits had reportedly been visible on the brewery’s premises until 1914, but they were removed within days of the outbreak of World

War I.21

Be that as it may, the popularity of Lenbach’s work had essentially come and gone by 1929. In the decade before 1904, when Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck was among the 317 works sent to St. Louis by the German government, new artistic practices and movements had already begun to emerge in Germany, challenging the cultural establishment in which Lenbach had been such a prominent figure. The artists associated with these new trends, however, were not represented in the

German pavilion in St. Louis in 1904. As the historian Peter Paret characterized it in his groundbreaking study of the politics and polemics faced by German modernism

18 See Arnold, “Zwischen Kunst und Kult,” 163. On the prices fetched by these pictures, see Mehl, Franz von Lenbach, 32. 19 This possibility was suggested by Sabine Eckmann in her introductory remarks to the symposium “The Legacy of German Art and Culture in St. Louis,” held at Washington University in St. Louis, September 7, 2013. 20 For more on this topic, see Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey, Under the Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 97–98, 100–102, 143. 21 See ibid., 92–93.

11 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the official German art exhibition, completely disregarding the emerging contemporary art, “consisted almost entirely of mediocre and bad paintings,” of “miles of visual cotton candy.”22

However, the modernist groups that were excluded in 1904 paved the way for the eventual establishment of modernism in Germany.

For some thirty years in the late nineteenth century, the elegantly affirmative society portraiture of Franz von Lenbach, the son of a provincial

Bavarian stonemason who parlayed his artistic talent and social connections into the status of a “painter prince,” epitomized bourgeois cultural success, distinct not only from mass culture and the nascent modernism of that time, but also from the painting most closely associated with the imperial court. His work elicited the institutionalized forms of recognition—public encomia, state prizes, and high prices—that signified its respectability and prestige for people who thought in such terms. Painting for the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, he became haute bourgeois himself. However, by today’s prevalent, more-or-less modernist standards, such as the ones to which Paret gives voice in his book about the Berlin

Secession, pictures such as Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck are bound to fail. Yet it is important to recall that at any given moment multiple artistic positions, their respective discourses of quality and value, and their respective definitions of success—sometimes predicated on material wealth, sometimes on the resistance to

“selling out”—struggle for legitimacy. These rival positions are not isolated, but

22 See Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), esp. 149, 153.

12 rather structurally related to and dependent on each other, as the sociologist Pierre

Bourdieu has emphasized: “Every position, even the dominant one, depends for its

very existence, and for the determinations it imposes on its occupants, on the other

positions constituting the field.”23 Thus, if one wishes to understand the dynamics

and structures of the total modern history of art and visual culture, it is crucial to

take pictures such as Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck into account. To ignore or

dismiss them is to risk producing a distorted image of the past, as selective,

affirmative, and troublesome in its way as some might find Lenbach’s celebration of

power was a century ago.

To cite this essay, please use the following:

James van Dyke, “Spotlight Essay: Franz Seraph von Lenbach, Portrait of Prince Otto von Bismarck (1884–90),” Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Spotlight Series, March 2014, http://kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/files/spotlightMAR14.pdf (accessed on [insert date]).

23 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in his The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30.

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