Address at the Prize-Giving Ceremony

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ADDRESS on the occasion of the prize-giving ceremony on 19 July 1890.

Gentlemen!

At the close of the last academic year, in introducing my critical discussion of the College’s achievements, I referred to the currents which for some years have become noticeable in modern art: so-called Impressionism and Intentionism, plein-air painting and other related endeavours. I emphasised that our College does not wish to turn away from such currents or remain passive towards them, but strives to keep an open and attentive eye upon them, without, however, losing sight of the tasks which the nature of the matter and its own purpose impose upon it. For such currents undoubtedly depend upon changes of time and fashion, while the purpose of art and the eternal concept of the beautiful and the true are subject to no fluctuations in the fundamental views concerning them.

Thus the standards for our College’s artistic education of its students are firmly and immovably laid down; and as long as Homer

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and Schiller are not displaced in our schools by Zola and Ibsen, we shall also have to regard the aim of artistic education as offering you, alongside technical ability, that ideal cultivation of the mind which, in our cultural life, remains to this hour the rock upon which our entire educational system is built, and without which even Zola and others like him would not have become the artists they actually are.

I shall not concern myself here with the Impressionists and Intentionists, since otherwise I might perhaps light upon other curiosities too, which do not belong here. But I should like to say something about what is now suddenly elevated to a kind of gospel as plein-air painting and preached with much noise.

That landscape and animal painters make their studies from nature in the open air has surely always been the case for as long as painting has existed, and always will be. Even the most naïve painters of old and very recent times will surely have known that it is light out of doors and dark indoors. But equally, that on our palette there is only one scale from white to black, with which we are to depict the most blazing sunshine as well as the deepest darkness. I also remember that, when I first came to Paris, Meissonier’s pictures impressed me especially through their clarity of expression and their subtle atmospheric effect in outdoor light; and I do not believe anyone will ever study that more carefully or present it more convincingly than Meissonier. The same can be said of Gérôme, Breton, Rosa Bonheur and Troyon. But I do not remember anyone then making so much noise and clamour about something regarded as entirely self-evident—I mean painting in the open air—as the daily press, which enthuses about plein air, does now. Have the gentlemen reviewers ever looked quite closely at

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how the values of colour and tone relate to one another in plain daylight, in sunlight or indoors, and how and by how much they alter or vary with this or that atmospheric condition or circumstance? I hardly think so, for it is a very laborious business. What I now hear praised as plein-air painting is really quite childish compared with everything Meissonier and others achieved in this direction long ago as something entirely self-evident. Thus, confronted with the system of observing nature praised as plein-air painting, it seems to me to be less a matter of painting out of doors than a fashion; and I have least faith in the gentlemen who shout and write most about it.

There is so much to study in art and its foundations that you, gentlemen, really need not concern yourselves with such specialities or diversions, for at present you have too little time for them. Academic instruction, gentlemen, can supply you with little more than the crutches with whose help you are to learn to walk. Once you can walk, throw those crutches away and go your own ways, to right or left; jump as high or as far as you can. We can do no more than keep you from straying while you study here.

With sincere regret I must again point out this year that the competition for the Rome Prize has once more ended without a result. The competition is not intended solely for students of our College, and I should therefore really have no official reason to speak about it, all the less since the director and teaching staff of the College have no decisive influence upon the admission or rejection of candidates. Nor do I conceal that I consider the form in which this competition takes place, at least for painters, neither suited to the times nor practical, and believe that

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more favourable results could be achieved by a different route, as for example with the von Biel-Kalkhorst Foundation. In its freer competition in 1880, when Hermann Prell won the prize and executed the frescoes in the Architektenhaus here, the von Biel-Kalkhorst Foundation produced quite outstanding results; likewise in 1885, when Eugen Hanetzog executed the large mural ‘The Finding of Moses’ in Mr Fränkel’s villa at Neustadt in Upper Silesia. I also look forward with some confidence to a gratifying result at its next competition. Nevertheless, the results of applications for the Rome Prize have for years been so peculiar that it is worth looking at their causes. This time the task set was ‘Perseus Frees Andromeda’, a subject repeatedly represented by old and more recent masters in the most charming and poetic fashion. Surely it can hardly be assumed that even one of the competitors was unfamiliar with, for example, Rubens’s treatment of this subject in our gallery! And yet one had to believe it on seeing the extraordinarily crude, thoughtless preliminary sketches, in which the principal feature was predominantly a certain Böcklin-like element in the conception and handling of the sea monster and the landscape’s atmosphere, while there was absolutely no trace of the charming contrast between the beauty of the captive woman and the powerful masculine, heroic figure of her liberator! By its very nature the Academy really cannot set tasks in any direction other than precisely such so-called academic, idealistic ones, as long as, as I have already remarked, Homer has not been replaced here by Zola.

Under the present rules of the competition for the Rome Prize, no one should apply who has

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not at least tested his powers through several independent works in this field and therefore need not leave things to the play of chance. Even then the outcome remains doubtful, for in recent years even artists of acknowledged ability, who have long since proved their artistic capabilities, albeit in other fields, have regularly failed. I hope for all the more satisfactory results in this year’s competition for the von Biel-Kalkhorst Foundation.

The director and teaching staff of the College constantly endeavour, with a watchful eye upon changing or changed circumstances, despite the firm goals set before us, to bring teaching at the College into forms appropriate to the times, promising both the most comprehensive and thorough education possible and an economy of time and effort for your studies.

Thus we have now decided, experimentally, to alter the existing system in the preparatory class and the class drawing from the antique: henceforth all drawing instruction at the College is to be given in five equivalent sections. Each section will equally cover the whole field of figure drawing, including the drawing of drapery and exercises in composition, as indeed all five sections together have done hitherto. But now each teacher will guide the student continuously from the rudiments, if I may put it so, to drawing and artistically understanding the entire human figure. The existing method of promotion will thereby undergo a desirable simplification, and students, according to their individual aptitude and diligence, will either advance more quickly or be able to recognise in good time where they may be deficient. One of the five sections will devote itself particularly to cultivating the drawing

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education of sculptors, while one—the final—section is intended to alternate the study of antiquity with study of the nude, and to regard the execution of larger-scale drawn compositions as its particular task.

The promotions decided upon at the close of the present semester will be somewhat altered by this, but only formally, not substantively; the professors concerned will discuss such cases with you personally. The title ‘preparatory class’, which has long ceased to fit the task of these sections of artistic instruction, will be dropped and replaced by the more appropriate ‘class for figure drawing’.

Although these changes do not otherwise affect the study of anatomy and perspective, each section’s teacher will now have to insist more than before upon the proper completion of these subjects. Perhaps the fact that the syllabus no longer necessarily has to be completed in two semesters, as hitherto, will help bring about a deeper engagement with the subject or greater zeal in study. Provision has been made so that the study of anatomy, as far as its drawing component is concerned, may perhaps be accomplished in less time than before. Students who explicitly intend to become landscape painters and have demonstrated this intention are also to be granted the concession of possible exemption from anatomy instruction. Another proposed change is that the painting class hitherto led by Mr Dammeier should no longer be a preliminary class for the painting class proper, but an independent class with the full range of teaching material, like the existing painting class. The works of this section exhibited here already point in that direction.

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The achievements of the individual sections during the past academic year are on the whole so satisfactory that I can confine myself to referring to what I said about them last year, and need emphasise only those points where my criticism this year leads to different conclusions from last year.

First there is the class drawing from the antique, where last year I had to draw attention to a certain decorative superficiality, particularly in studying the nude, which was more justified in art or craft schools than here. Happily, the works exhibited on this occasion demonstrate a substantial deepening and refinement of study without any loss of the large-scale, broad manner of seeing and representation.

I would wish the same for the painting class: a somewhat more loving, deeper engagement with the subject to be represented. This is all the more necessary here because a number of the models used here, through their—how shall I put it—more robust appearance, already encourage a more superficial, decorative treatment. That this may now be fashionable as so-called painting of poor people must not influence the students, in their own interests; rather, they must strive to find, even in the apparently ugly or commonplace, that charm which raises even a study to a work of art. As is well known, Rembrandt, Frans Hals and many other masters, old and new, attempted this not without success, and I may surely direct your eyes towards these masters.

The work in the painters’ life room last year was not satisfactory to the extent desired. This year’s result may be called all the more gratifying, and I believe I may acknowledge this year’s prize-winning nude study by aus der Ohe as a truly outstanding achievement in colour, alongside other good works. The spectre

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of mannerist representation admittedly still stands in the background from time to time, but this concerns more the external, technical side of representation, while inwardness, the endeavour to express the human figure charmingly as a phenomenon of colour in nature, predominates in my view. Only, gentlemen ought to make more extensive use in painting too of everything they have learned in drawing, and not subordinate the development and thorough elaboration of form to colour!

Of all the College’s other sections, the same can be said as I stated in greater detail last year: all are working in an almost uniformly harmonious and successful manner towards the comprehensive education of students in pursuit of the goal set before us.

The composition exercises again show gratifying results this year, and interest in them has increased considerably. In the painting classes this year, an experiment was made for the first time: to allow students to concern themselves solely with the colour aspect of a subject, tasks were set requiring them only to translate engravings or woodcuts and photographs after well-known masters into colour. This experiment will presumably prove its worth in future too, and would also help give students greater fluency in devising colour sketches, something still very much lacking.

The importance we attach to students’ own creative activity, as against studies in the narrower sense, has led us to express this in the way prizes are awarded. Accordingly, prizes will be awarded in smaller numbers than before, generally as follows: in the drawing classes proper, only diplomas as first prizes; in the class drawing from the antique and the modelling class and any corresponding

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sections, a bronze medal; in the painting classes and the sculptors’ life room, silver medals. Monetary awards, and possibly medals or art-historical works in addition, remain reserved as prizes for compositions, as well as for the painters’ life room and painting class subject to the obligation to execute a copy, as hitherto customary. If circumstances permit, the competition system will be developed further in future.

Before proceeding to distribute the prizes, I still have the painful duty of recalling to you the passing of the oldest member of our teaching staff. On 11 August last year Professor Bellermann died, after working at our institution for nearly a quarter of a century in faithful and zealous fulfilment of duty. His artistic activity indeed belongs to a time long past, but his memory will always be held in honour among us, and I ask you to rise from your places in acknowledgement of this.—

Another loss, difficult or scarcely possible to overcome, lies before us: at the close of this semester Professor Schaper is leaving the teaching work which he has carried on for a full fifteen years to the benefit of our College. We should have seen him in our midst for the last time on this occasion today, had unforeseen circumstances not prevented his presence. It is a pleasant but also sorrowful duty for me, on behalf of the College, to thank Professor Schaper for all the care and self-sacrifice he has given us in the exercise of his teaching office. We two sat together in this College’s drawing rooms and lived and strove together in comradeship and friendship in our happy youthful years, just as later, for fifteen years until now, we continued to work in the same place as teachers, in equally good comradeship and the closest agreement about the

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goals to be attained. All those works which have made Fritz Schaper’s name famous—the Goethe, Lessing, Luther and Gauss monuments, the statues of Bismarck, Moltke and Goeben, the Victoria and the other statues in the Hall of Fame, alongside a wealth of other works—were created during these fifteen years, mostly in these meagre rooms: brilliant witnesses to their creator’s untiring creative power! Alongside this extensive activity he still found enough time and energy to devote himself to artistic teaching with the fullest affection and care and all the earnestness of his nature, and to train a succession of excellent students. Let us thank him for all this and part from him with the wish that he may remain friendly towards our institution and its endeavours in future and always, continuing to be a good comrade to his former colleagues on the teaching staff and a good friend and adviser to the rising young artists!

I ask you to rise from your seats as a sign of agreement.

Finally, I regret to have to announce another loss: Mr Dammeier too has expressed the wish to devote himself entirely to his artistic activity, and is therefore also leaving the College’s teaching staff at the close of this semester. To him too I express here my thanks for the faithful and careful exercise of his teaching office. At this moment I am not yet in a position to inform you of either gentleman’s successor.