Art: A View of The Infinite

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At New York's Metropolitan, a major show of German art

The exhibition "German Masters of the Nineteenth Century," now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is about 35 years late in coming to Manhattan; but in this case, better late than never. No such comprehensive view of German art has ever been set before an American public; from the romantic visions and esoteric metaphors of painters like Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich in the first decades of the 19th century, to the robust dash and splash of Lovis Corinth at its end, there are 150 works by 30 artists, and they help fill a gaping hole in our sense of the actual patterns of European culture. The fact, to put it simply, is that German art got left out of American taste on 19th century matters—a taste formed and dominated by Paris, from impressionism onward. Ten years ago, there was not one art course in America that would have suggested that Friedrich was a painter of comparable importance to Géricault or even Delacroix, or that the work of Wilhelm Leibl or Hans Thoma might be anything better than an able but provincial reaction to that of Gustave Courbet. It was not always so; last century, Munich influenced American artists even more than Paris. There are plenty of parallels, if not exact concordances, between the infinite longings expressed in German romantic art and the sense of pantheistic immanence, God-over-the-Hudson, that ran through American nature painting in the mid-19th century. But since World War II, for obvious reasons, the links were broken and discarded—especially by those blind savants who fell in with the idea that Nazism could, by some train of coarse free association, be traced back to German transcendentalism. So this show, in all its variety and unfamiliarity, cannot help instructing its audience. Its range is wide (and brilliantly discussed in the catalogue by Art Historians Gert Schiff and Stephan Waetzoldt).

"One might come closest to a definition of their aspirations," writes Schiff in his catalogue essay on early 19th century artists like Friedrich, Runge and Carl Gustav Carus, "by stating that 'longing' (Sehnen) was the first and almost the last word of German romanticism." These painters were men of exceptional seriousness, their sense of mission verged on the priestly, and they saw art as a powerful means of philosophic speech. As Schiff rightly remarks, one dictum of the writer Friedrich Schlegel appears to summarize their hopes: "Only he can be an artist who has a religion of his own, an original view of the infinite."