1 Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Washington University in St. Louis
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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 Otto von Bismarck, 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 Munich.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 Max Liebermann, 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 Lenbachhaus 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 (Berlin- 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.