Liebermann’s success did not signal a definitive or uncontested triumph for modernist art in Berlin. In 1898 a jury on which he sat recommended that a small gold medal be awarded to Käthe Kollwitz for her brilliant etching cycle The Revolt of the Weavers, based on Hauptmann’s naturalist drama. Such awards could not be presented without approval of the kaiser, who vetoed the prize with the words, “Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that’s really going too far. That would amount to a debasement of every high distinction. Orders and honors belong on the chests of deserving men.” Another chest, albeit male, that the kaiser deemed un-suited for a medal belonged to the brilliant landscape artist Walter Leistikow; Wilhelm insisted that as a hunter he knew more about nature than a painter who colored his trees blue.
The Kollwitz affair was the last straw for painters like Liebermann and Leistikow, who had long been frustrated over the attempts by the kaiser and his advisers (especially von Werner) to control the local art scene. In 1898 they launched the Berlin Sezession (Secession), a revolt of disaffected artists modeled on earlier secessions in Vienna and Munich. Their chief purpose was to organize exhibitions in which they could display the art they respected. For financial support they relied on donations from wealthy patrons, many of them Jewish. Their most important backers were the Cassirer cousins, Bruno and Paul, who owned a gallery in the Kantstrasse that specialized in modern art. As the Secession’s business managers, the Cassirers built a new gallery in 1899 that displayed works by the Berlin group and other leading modernists.
Official Berlin responded predictably to the dissidents’ initiative. The kaiser ordered military officers not to attend Secession exhibitions in uniform. He also barred Secession members from serving on juries of the official salon. In alliance with the Association of German Artists, Wilhelm managed to exclude the Secession from Germany’s exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. When the Cultural Ministry tried to make peace with the Secession by proposing a retrospective show for Liebermann in the Royal Academy’s new quarters, the kaiser vetoed the idea. The painter, he said, was “poisoning the soul of the German nation.”
Preparations for the Berlin Secession exhibition in 1904. Members of the exhibition committee (from left to tight): Willy Do’ring, Bruno Cassirer, Otto Engel, Max Liebermann, Walter Leistifow, Kurt Herrmann, Fritz Klimsch
Fortunately for the fate of modern art in Germany, such measures did not prevent the Secession from becoming a viable enterprise, one that helped to make the unorthodox and the innovative more culturally acceptable. As Liebermann himself boasted in 1907: “Yesterday’s revolutionaries have become today’s classics.”
But this was precisely the problem for a group of younger artists who had moved to the capital in the early years of the century. Finding the Secession played out and sterile, they embarked on a new artistic path known as expressionism, the first modernist school to be predominantly German. Die Brücke, an expressionist group founded in Dresden in 1905 shifted to Berlin five years later. Its chief spokesman, Herwarth Walden, launched a magazine and art gallery called Der Sturm, which became the focal point of the German avant-garde on the eve of the war. Unlike the major Secessionists, these artists turned their attention to the big cities, above all to Berlin. The most important figure here was Ludwig Meidner. The critic Karl Scheffler had argued that it was impossible to love a place as ugly as Berlin, but Meidner insisted that he loved it, and urged his fellow artists to love it as welclass="underline" “We must finally begin to paint our homeland [Heimat], the metropolis, for which we have an infinite love.” What Meidner found to love in Berlin was precisely the “unnatural” and “ugly” environment of sprawling tenements, bustling streets, and barely contained chaos. As he wrote in his Directions for Painting the Big City: “Let’s paint what is close to us, our city world! The wild streets, the elegance of iron suspension bridges, gas tanks which hang in white-cloud mountains, the roaring colors of buses and express locomotives, the rushing telephone wires (aren’t they like music?), the harlequinade of advertising pillars, and the night . . . big city night!” Meidner was so fond of metropolitan chaos that many modern critics have interpreted his prewar Berlin studies as an anticipation of the cataclysmic destruction to come.
Another expressionist artist who has been classed retrospectively as a prophet of the apocalypse is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His interpretations of Berlin before the war, which feature contorted figures seemingly desperate to escape the confines of the canvas, are said to be “immediately recognizable as pictures of an unnatural, thoroughly dehumanized world.” But Kirchner himself saw his Berlin work as a celebration of the raw energy he found in the city’s streets and taverns. He said that the “so-called distortions” in his paintings were “generated instinctively by the ecstasy of what is seen.” Static representation was impossible, he added, when the subject was in perpetual motion, a blur of light and action. The city required of its artists a new way of seeing, and Kirchner was determined to capture the frantic movement of metropolitan life by abandoning traditional naturalistic, or even impressionistic, techniques.
While at the turn of the century Berlin was just beginning to gain an international reputation for its creative contributions to the visual arts, the Prussian capital had long been known as a solid museum town. In 1830 Karl Friedrich Schinkel had completed the Altes Museum on the small wedge of land flanked by the Spree that came to be known as the Museumsinsel (Museums Island). The Neues Museum, designed by Schinkel’s pupil Friedrich August Stüler, was added in 1855, followed by the new National Gallery in 1876. According to Georg Brandes, at the time of national unification the city’s museums “played for edification-seeking Berliners a role similar to cathedrals in Gothic countries.” In the Wilhelmian era Berlin’s museums profited greatly from the efforts of one of Europe’s most brilliant collectors, Wilhelm von Bode, who became director of the new Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum when it opened on the Museums Island in 1904. (Two years later Bode was named director-general of all the royal museums, a position he held until 1920, when the museums were no longer royal.) Adept at tracking down hidden treasures around the world, Bode brought to Berlin an amazing collection of Old Masters, including Rembrandt’s Man in a Golden Helmet and Dürer’s Hieronymus Holzschuher. For once the kaiser did not interfere; on the contrary, he fully shared Bode’s ambition to make Berlin a major repository for the certified classics of European art. To help the curator raise funds, Wilhelm offered titles to wealthy burghers who made sizable contributions to the royal collections. Bode helped his own cause by making allies with anyone who was influential, including Max Liebermann, who painted his portrait.
Berlin’s collections, particularly in the realm of classical art, profited also from Germany’s belated entry into the international race to loot the Mediterranean and Near East of its remaining ancient treasures. As a latecomer in this field, the Reich was desperate to bring its antiquity collections up to the standards of the great western European museums, especially the British Museum. Fortunately for Berlin, one of the most zealous pillagers of classical art was Heinrich Schliemann, a grocer’s son from Mecklenburg who in the early 1870s located and excavated the site of Homer’s Troy in western Turkey. It was by no means apparent from the outset that Schliemann would deed the treasures he had found at Troy—most notably a collection of gold articles he claimed had belonged to King Priam—to the German capital. As a self-taught archeologist with no formal degrees, Schliemann had been derided as an impostor by Berlin’s classical scholars when he first announced his discoveries. (It was later to be established that he had indeed fabricated details of some of his finds.) Profoundly hurt by this rebuff, he announced, “If I leave it [the Troy collection] in my will to a German city, it can never be Berlin, for I have never had a single word of appreciation from there and have always been treated with the most odious hostility.” Only after he had gained credibility abroad did Berlin finally accept him as a genuine article and launch a campaign to win his loot for the royal collections. Pleased by the attention, Schliemann relented and in 1881 formally willed his Trojan horde to the new Berlin Ethnographic Museum, where a special wing was built to display it.