Berefelt - Regeneration Problem in German Neo-Classicism and Romanticism (J Aest Art Crit v18n4...

7/29/2019 Berefelt - Regeneration Problem in German Neo-Classicism and Romanticism (J Aest Art Crit v18n4 1960)

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The Regeneration Problem in German Neo-Classicism and Romanticism

Author(s): Gunnar BerefeltSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Jun., 1960), pp. 475-481Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428114

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THE REGENERATION PROBLEM IN GERMAN NEO-CLASSICISMAND ROMANTICISMGUNNAR BEREFELT

At the time of Winckelmann's appearance about 1750, German art lacked anorganic connection with a historical past. German forms of art, whether litera-ture, music, or pictorial art, had, it is true, been awakened to a hollow life byFrench and also by Italian stimulants. But this was a condition of dependenceimpossible for a vital development of art, and it was in order to remedy thiscondition that the foremost minds in Germany, in the course of the late 18thand the early 19th centuries, set themselves to work. Winckelmann, Schiller,Goethe, Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and others, all held in com-mon the idea that European culture had entered a period of transition in itsdevelopment. It was not only a reaction against the predominating taste of thetime which led Winckelmann to react against the Rocco; Schlegel, Novalis, thepainters of the Nazarene school, against the pagan godlessness of Classicism;Philip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich against manneristic neo-clas-sicism and academic eclecticism in general, and to search for new ideals andanchorages for art. The reason was, principally, the feeling that a real traditioncapable of sound evolution was lacking. There was also a desire to create andinitiate a new tradition, either through renewing ties with older cultural phases(as Winckelmann and the painter Anton Raphael Mengs among others did withClassical Antiquity, Schlegel and the Nazarenes with medieval and Renaissanceart), or through creating the basis for a wholly new tradition in the conditions ofthe period itself (Schelling, Runge).It is significant of transitional periods of art in history that theorizing on artincreases to the same degree as self-evident and unproblematic creation accord-ing to tradition decreases. Every transitional period wrestles with the same prob-lem, namely to give expression to the intellectual content and vital ideas of thepresent, and to find an adequate form to shape the new content. Thus it hap-pens that art, so to speak, sits like the Buddha to stare upon its own navel.There are several examples of this in the history of art. During the Renaissancethe unique prosperity of art was accompanied by restless theorizing. Even ar-tists strove, in the practice of their art, for experimentally founded exactitude,giving their works sometimes an almost scientific character. The same may besaid concerning Philip Otto Runge, to name a representative of the generationsof 1760-1780, who, in his speculations on color analysis attempted to establisha generally comprehensive symbolism in the arts; and the same is true of severalartist-theorizers of the period of 1900 and the following decades, such as AdolfHoelzel and Paul Klee, to name but two in German art.

The "North" and the Future of Art.According to the conception of history dominating the late 18th century, itwas generally acknowledged that Greek Antiquity and the Catholic Middle475


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476 GUNNAR BEREFELTAges were the two historical epochs which had managed adequately to expresstheir intellectual uniqueness in their art. After Winckelmann, however, the cen-ter of interest in aesthetic theory moved more and more away from the serenityand severity of Antiquity to turn to the intensity of religious feeling of the Mid-dle Ages, and what is more important, the more clear-sighted turned to a "thirdstand-point," namely the idea that a new art must be born from the specific con-ditions of the present. But the productive artists were, as will be argued below,more or less captivated by Classical or rather by Classicist form.Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), the philosophical poet and poetic phi-losopher, envisaged a new cultural era characterized by a religious mysticism ofa medieval sort and which should renew the ancient union between art and re-ligion. The Schlegel brothers also expected a new art of general European char-acter whose impulses would supposedly come from Germany and its culturalannex Scandinavia. Friedrich Schlegel speaks of this new and future art in hisGesprdchuiberPoesie und Rede uiberdie Mythologie and notices a first and fore-most sign of this new art in Goethe's poetry. The importance of Germany for thisart-in-the-making was further emphasized in Wilhelm Schlegel's Berlin lec-tures. Even Schelling expected the awakening of the new universal culture tocome from the North, namely Germany and Scandinavia. His Norwegian friend,the philosopher Henrik Steffens, also felt the present to be a period of dissolutionand transition, but one nevertheless rich in ferments indicating the coming of anew golden age.

The Striving for Universality.Both the Classicists and the Romantics realized that the present lacked cul-tural unity and an ideal center upon which to found art. It is against this back-ground that we must consider the fragmentary art conceptions of the Storm andStress movement. Its proclamation of emotion as a transcendent organon ofknowledge, of the importance of the individual as a creative unit of life, must beregarded as an attempt to give spirit and import to an inane formalistic art.As a matter of fact it was this chaotic emotional thinking and this aesthetichomo-mensura conception of the Storm and Stress which Romanticism tried toovercome with all its energy in its striving for universality. The main problemof the aesthetic thinking of the period was the attempt to restore to art thosequalities which had given ancient and medieval art its universal character,namely a symbolism appropriate to the age. It is no accident that Storm andStress came to a stand-still at its very inception. The thinking of the period didnot abandon itself in as high a degree to a capricious and exuberant subjectivismin regard to art as scholarly science has often pretended.These trains of thought reflect the central ideas of German speculation on artand culture about 1800. The problem of creating a new art, one having the same"universal" character and applicability as that of Antiquity and the MiddleAges, was thus to a great extent the impelling force and the central problem ofGerman Classic or Romantic aesthetic thought.


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GERMANNEO-CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM 477The Concept of Romanticism.The strained theorizing on art so characteristic of the period reflects a crisisin the evolution of art of which its contemporaries were conscious. What I havecalled the "regeneration problem" is thus essential for the comprehension of thetheories and aims of German Classicism and Romanticism. With this as a start-

ing point we shall see that the concepts of Classicism and Romanticism are butcrude and schematic constructions.These terms are usually employed as historical concepts (indicating a certaintime-unit); as generalizing terms of characterization (denoting some dominanttraits of form and/or content); as concepts of style (which often can be saidto be a sort of combination of the two other forms of application)."Die Vernachlassigung der Formprobleme ist der Kernpunkt der Unzugang-licheit aller bisherigen kunstwissenschaftlichen Forschung auf dem Gebiete derRomantik," argues Lehr.' Nothing could be truer. Investigations on this subjecthave, as a rule, been directed in far too narrow a sense to examinations of theromantic work of art as to its content at the sacrifice of pure formal considera-tions. Furthermore, the analyses of content have often had literary starting-points. It was, to be sure, the contemporary poets and authors themselves whogave the term Romantic its current meaning and they applied it-which isextraordinary-to the very period of which they were themselves exponents.This is particularly true of Novalis and the Schlegel brothers. Because of thisthe term has been colored by its literary origins and hence it has, as a styledesignation within the pictorial arts, come to assume a fallacious relation tothe characteristics of contemporary belles-lettres. The word Romantic has neverbeen unequivocally defined as a concept of style and as a characterization ofthe art of the period of about 1800. When Wilhelm Pinder tried, in the realm ofart, to state the formal characteristics which ought to be made the basis of theterm Romantic as a concept of characterization, he proceeded from German lit-erature and music of the period 1800.2But Pinder's concept, constructed on thatbasis, cannot be brought to bear upon the art of Romanticism, the art of thatperiod. His analysis led him back to a certain current of German art at the endof the 16th century, a current represented by such artists as Lucas Cranach theElder, "Hausbuchmeister," Albrecht Altdorfer, Wold Hubert, Hans Baldung"Grien," and Mathias Griinewald. He thus associated this, let us say, ex-pressionistic trend of German Renaissance art with Romantic literature andmusic of the beginning of the 19th century. Pinder's reasoning is seductive. Butif we carry the analysis of style concerning the art which came into being duringthe Romantic period through, we do not find, inasmuch as it is possible to drawany parallels between the arts, that the form of art corresponds to the form ofcontemporary literature and music. If we accept Pinder's romantic concept ofform, it is impossible to apply it in a meaningful way, formally or stylistically,to the art in question. In respect to the content one might find more consistencybetween the art and literature of the Romantic period; but the examples within

1Franz Lehr, Die Bliitezeit romantischer Bildkunst, p. 222.2 Wilhelm Pinder, "Die Romantik in der deutschen Kunst," in Das Werk des Kiinstlers(1939), Vol. I, pp. 3-41.


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478 GUNNAR BEREFELTart of pure Romantic artistic form are too isolated and relatively uneven forany comparison to give even tolerably definite results.We must accept the fact that the art of the Romantic period does not possessthe same homogenous character as does that of the Renaissance or the Baroque.Between the various arts, as well as within a particular art, a conspicuous dis-integration had taken place in the course of the 18th century. The most heteroge-nous and dispersed impression is, however, made by the pictorial arts. Duringthe 18th century, belles-lettres had been the stronger and leading form of art andthe pictorial arts were to a great extent bound to letters. The leading art theo-rizing of the later half of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th, wasdone, as we know, not by artists but by litterateurs and philosophers. It is cer-tainly possible to name several artists during the period of Classicism andRomanticism who were inclined to enunciate theory, indeed most of them were,but they were all more or less led by literary impulses. When Lehr demandeda pure art-historical definition of the term Romantic as a concept of style forthe period, he had not, it seems, clearly realized the dilemma indicated above. Ifwe try to establish a new style intention, its progress, climax, and regression, forthe art of the period, the characteristics established to qualify the term Romanticwill clash with the term as applied to belles-lettres, and often also with the con-tent of the work of art in question.

Moreover, as has already been pointed out, the art of this period is too heter-ogenous for relevant and generally representative affinities with regard to form.We may not forget that classicist form (and here we meet an almost identicalproblem) is in a certain way traditional, or even pseudo-traditional ,and thatRomantic art had not yet succeeded in overcoming this false tradition. To thismust be added that art, to a much higher degree than literature, lacked the unityrequired to be subjected without violence to a universally significant term ofcharacterization. If, on the other hand, we use the term as a historical conceptwith which to delineate the period of about 1800, and the unit of time is fairlyarbitrary, we must not let ourselves be misled into any false analogies withthe general literary concept of characterization. Naturally we need not abandonthese two terms, but we must clearly realize that they are awkward generaliza-tions and that they are used by art historians in different contexts with differentmeanings which must unconditionally be held clearly separate.With this reservation in mind we may say that Classicism and Romanticism,as applied to German conditions, are two proposals for solving one and the sameproblem, namely that of creating a new basis for art. But the properties con-sidered as characteristics of Classicism and Romanticism taken as concepts ofstyle, are never found in pure form in the works of art designated by theseterms. The classification of works of art in terms of trends of style is necessaryfor the sake of surveying the history of art, but we must keep in mind thatconcepts such as Classicism, Storm and Stress, Romanticism, etc., are ratherarbitrary designations for phenomena which offer many different aspects, eachof which is liable to be characterized by a special heading. It is not always thecase that such a term of characterization can be based on or can fit all thepossible aspects of a work of art. The points of view conditional on special char-


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GERMANNEO-CLASSICISMAND ROMANTICISM 479acterization usually vary according to context. One often feels tempted to speakof classical form and romantic content with reference to the same work of art.Scholarly literature has often suggested contrasting relationships betweenClassicism and Romanticism with regard to German art of the Goethe period,i.e., 1770-1830. Such a contrasting tendency is, as has been argued, misleadingand has resulted in a false conception, to wit that Classic and Romantic art inthe period under consideration represented antithetical principles in the art-evolution of the time. The fact that some art historians envisage the developmentof art in Hegelian terms as an oscillation between two essential contrasts calledClassic-Romantic, these concepts being used as general terms of characteriza-tion, has given more nourishment to this deceptive notion.

Let us now pass to more concrete examples: are the Nazarenes' paintingsRomantic or Classical? In general they are regarded as Romantic; but if weconsider only the form and composition they would, according to current lin-guistic usage, be more apt to be called Classical. Perugino was no Romantic.Since the formal properties in general contradict the designation Romantic, onemay conclude that it is a characterization of the content which has givenNazarene painting this label, which, as a matter of fact, corresponds to the lit-erary origins of the concept. It is primarily the sentimental religiosity anddreamy retrospection of a highly esteemed past which the Nazarenes' productionreflects, and it is this which has been considered typically Romantic. One hasthus not only defined the content, but the artistic attitude as well.As distinguished from the Nazarenes, the Classicists generally speaking excelin Antique and Classic accessories. Along with a norm of configuration whichin the main was constructed on the basis of the conception of plastic art obtain-ing at this time, on the productions of certain Italian High Renaissance paintersand, as concerns landscape, on the pattern of Poussin, they preferably dealt withmotifs and themes from Classical Antiquity. But if we scrutinize this classicalart we often find an unmistakable expression of sentimentality and ignorance ofthe world. This is in fact what distinguishes German from French Classicismwith the latter's pronounced faculty for inscribing Antique themes with thepathos of current social and political content.In German art there are numerous examples of this above-mentioned senti-mentality in the form of imitation Antique. We need but mention sculptors likeSchadow, Dannecker, and Ohmacht, painters like Tischbein the Elder, Mengs,Hetsch, Tischbein the Younger, Koch, and many other (see plates 1 & 2).Among these artists we often find a sentimental keynote, as opposed to boththeme and Classical requirements. Many of the German Classicists such asTischbein the Elder, Mengs, Hetsch, evince obvious loans from the Frenchmoralist painters headed by Greuze with their theatrical straining for effect andthe confusion of maudlin and bursting pathos. In the heroic landscape, such asit was shaped by Koch and Reinhart in Rome, there is often, in spite of the se-vere and regular composition of the Antique accessories, an unmistakable senti-mentality (see plate 3). Whether these paintings should be called Classical orRomantic depends on the point of view from which they are contemplated. If


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480 GUNNAR BEREFELTwe consider form and composition alone, we might at first want to call themClassical; but if we take hold of the figures in the foreground and their relationto nature, we might want to resort to the term Romantic.

German heroic landscape painting as well as German Classical art in generalis often characterized by this discrepancy: on the one hand an intended mag-nanimity which is the result of the subject matter, the form, and the composi-tion; on the other hand, an unintended sentimentality expressed through theemotional attitudes of the figures. One often finds the Classicists theatricallyposing figures in high-flown postures along with lachrymose or slightly co-quettish figure-types, all of them put against a background of idealized natureor of an Antique interior (see plates 1 & 2). An organic, or better, a psychologicalconnection between the figures or between the figures and the milieu is too oftenlacking. For this reason the different motifs will stand as abrupt contrasts toeach other, which makes it impossible to define the pictures unitarily in terms ofthe concepts of Classicism or Romanticism. It is not a question of an "either-or,"but rather of a "both-and."If we thus consider the grouping of the particular elements of form and motifs,the characterization of Classical is not far-fetched; but if we consider themoralizing and often sentimental deviations from the originally Antique-Heroictheme or the confused emotional attitudes, then this term must be misleading,particularly if we compare this Classicism with that treated by Wolfflin underthe heading of Classical Art.

The discrepancy between the expression of content and form, and between thequalities of expression among themselves, is the result of what we may call anonorganic principle of conception. Different formal and thematic categoriesfrom different pictorial types have been made paragons in order to be amal-gamated into a new compound to a supposed synthesis. The painter A. R. Mengscodified this eclecticism in his publication Thoughts on Beauty and Taste inPainting (1762) which has appositely been called a "New Testament of Eclecti-cism."3 Here Mengs, as is known, lays down four different prototypes for thepainter: Classical Antiquity for beauty's sake; Raphael for the sake of importand expression; Correggio for harmony; and finally, Titian for the sake of "truthand color."This eclecticism not only characterizes the Classicists, but other artistic groupsas well, and was fanned by several earlier precursors.Merck, Lavater, the youngGoethe, Wackenroder, Novalis, and others, called attention to the prefigurative-ness and greatness of the German late Gothic and to Diirer. And FriedrichSchlegel exhorted artists, in an article in his magazine Europa (Nachrichtenvon den Gemdhlden in Paris, 1803), to elect the Italians before Raphael's time,first and foremost Bellini and Perugino, as examples. It was this codified eclecti-cism which Schiller, then Goethe, Schelling, and the painters Ph. 0. Runge andC. D. Friedrich, attacked.If we bring Schiller's distinction between the "naive" (in the sense of original,natural) and the "sentimental" (in the sense of affected, artificial, self-con-scious), of his Naive and Sentimental Poetry to bear upon the art of this period,

8Wilhelm Waetzhold, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker,I, 84.


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GERMAN NEO-CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM 481then we must regard even Classical Art as sentimental and not as naive, which isSchiller's criterion for pure Classical art. Schiller and Schelling among othersused these terms as corresponding to each other, Classic-naive, Romantic-senti-mental, and they characterized their contemporary art as sentimental. Theproblematic and self-conscious feature of the artistic creativity of the period,its yearning for the past, its gaze into the distant past, underlay the concept ofsentimental, but these are properties which are often characterized as Romantic.This yearning for the past is just as significant of and fundamental to the Classi-cists, the Romantic-Gothic enthusiasts, and the Nazarenes. With reference tothe Quattrocento enthusiasm of the Nazarenes and the high esteem for medievalculture there has been talk of "flight from reality" and the concept of "es-capism" has been taken as significant of Romanticism. Undoubtedly the Ro-mantic experience of history gives expression to a psychotic fear of the presentand an attempt to escape into the past.4 But we may easily see that what Hauserand many others consider as typically Romantic, namely the attempt to escapeinto the past, is fundamental also to German Classicism.It is my opinion that this gazing into the past, characteristic of the period inquestion, is not to be explained in terms of any panic-stricken fear of presentactuality, but in terms of a slowly awakening consciousness of a lack of tradi-tion and of a firm basis for a vital artistic evolution, the consequent strivingfor precisely such a new basis for a future art, in short, in terms of a desire forregeneration. The German Classicists as well as the Romantics looked back-wards not for the sake of bygone times, but for the sake of the future.

4Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, II, 657.

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