The Regeneration Problem in German Neo-Classicism and Romanticism Author(s): Gunnar Berefelt Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and

Art Criticism, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Jun., 1960), pp. 475-481 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428114 Accessed: 14/12/2010 04:49
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THE REGENERATION PROBLEM IN GERMAN NEO-CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM

GUNNAR BEREFELT

At the time of Winckelmann's appearance about 1750, German art lacked an organic connection with a historical past. German forms of art, whether literature, music, or pictorial art, had, it is true, been awakened to a hollow life by French and also by Italian stimulants. But this was a condition of dependence impossible for a vital development of art, and it was in order to remedy this condition that the foremost minds in Germany, in the course of the late 18th and the early 19th centuries, set themselves to work. Winckelmann, Schiller, Goethe, Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and others, all held in common the idea that European culture had entered a period of transition in its development. It was not only a reaction against the predominating taste of the time which led Winckelmann to react against the Rocco; Schlegel, Novalis, the painters of the Nazarene school, against the pagan godlessness of Classicism; Philip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich against manneristic neo-classicism and academic eclecticism in general, and to search for new ideals and anchorages for art. The reason was, principally, the feeling that a real tradition capable of sound evolution was lacking. There was also a desire to create and initiate a new tradition, either through renewing ties with older cultural phases (as Winckelmann and the painter Anton Raphael Mengs among others did with Classical Antiquity, Schlegel and the Nazarenes with medieval and Renaissance art), or through creating the basis for a wholly new tradition in the conditions of the period itself (Schelling, Runge). It is significant of transitional periods of art in history that theorizing on art increases to the same degree as self-evident and unproblematic creation according to tradition decreases. Every transitional period wrestles with the same problem, namely to give expression to the intellectual content and vital ideas of the present, and to find an adequate form to shape the new content. Thus it happens 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 Renaissance the unique prosperity of art was accompanied by restless theorizing. Even artists strove, in the practice of their art, for experimentally founded exactitude, giving their works sometimes an almost scientific character. The same may be said concerning Philip Otto Runge, to name a representative of the generations of 1760-1780, who, in his speculations on color analysis attempted to establish a generally comprehensive symbolism in the arts; and the same is true of several artist-theorizers of the period of 1900 and the following decades, such as Adolf Hoelzel 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, it was generally acknowledged that Greek Antiquity and the Catholic Middle
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Ages were the two historical epochs which had managed adequately to express their intellectual uniqueness in their art. After Winckelmann, however, the center of interest in aesthetic theory moved more and more away from the serenity and severity of Antiquity to turn to the intensity of religious feeling of the Middle Ages, and what is more important, the more clear-sighted turned to a "third stand-point," namely the idea that a new art must be born from the specific conditions 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 philosopher, envisaged a new cultural era characterized by a religious mysticism of a medieval sort and which should renew the ancient union between art and religion. The Schlegel brothers also expected a new art of general European character whose impulses would supposedly come from Germany and its cultural annex Scandinavia. Friedrich Schlegel speaks of this new and future art in his Gesprdch uiberPoesie und Rede uiberdie Mythologie and notices a first and foremost sign of this new art in Goethe's poetry. The importance of Germany for this art-in-the-making was further emphasized in Wilhelm Schlegel's Berlin lectures. Even Schelling expected the awakening of the new universal culture to come from the North, namely Germany and Scandinavia. His Norwegian friend, the philosopher Henrik Steffens, also felt the present to be a period of dissolution and transition, but one nevertheless rich in ferments indicating the coming of a new golden age. The Striving for Universality. Both the Classicists and the Romantics realized that the present lacked cultural unity and an ideal center upon which to found art. It is against this background that we must consider the fragmentary art conceptions of the Storm and Stress movement. Its proclamation of emotion as a transcendent organon of knowledge, of the importance of the individual as a creative unit of life, must be regarded 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 aesthetic homo-mensura conception of the Storm and Stress which Romanticism tried to overcome with all its energy in its striving for universality. The main problem of the aesthetic thinking of the period was the attempt to restore to art those qualities which had given ancient and medieval art its universal character, namely a symbolism appropriate to the age. It is no accident that Storm and Stress came to a stand-still at its very inception. The thinking of the period did not abandon itself in as high a degree to a capricious and exuberant subjectivism in regard to art as scholarly science has often pretended. These trains of thought reflect the central ideas of German speculation on art and culture about 1800. The problem of creating a new art, one having the same "universal" character and applicability as that of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was thus to a great extent the impelling force and the central problem of German Classic or Romantic aesthetic thought.

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The Concept of Romanticism. The strained theorizing on art so characteristic of the period reflects a crisis in the evolution of art of which its contemporaries were conscious. What I have called the "regeneration problem" is thus essential for the comprehension of the theories and aims of German Classicism and Romanticism. With this as a starting point we shall see that the concepts of Classicism and Romanticism are but crude and schematic constructions. These terms are usually employed as historical concepts (indicating a certain time-unit); as generalizing terms of characterization (denoting some dominant traits of form and/or content); as concepts of style (which often can be said to be a sort of combination of the two other forms of application). "Die Vernachlassigung der Formprobleme ist der Kernpunkt der Unzuganglicheit aller bisherigen kunstwissenschaftlichen Forschung auf dem Gebiete der Romantik," argues Lehr.' Nothing could be truer. Investigations on this subject have, as a rule, been directed in far too narrow a sense to examinations of the romantic work of art as to its content at the sacrifice of pure formal considerations. Furthermore, the analyses of content have often had literary startingpoints. It was, to be sure, the contemporary poets and authors themselves who gave the term Romantic its current meaning and they applied it-which is extraordinary-to the very period of which they were themselves exponents. This is particularly true of Novalis and the Schlegel brothers. Because of this the term has been colored by its literary origins and hence it has, as a style designation within the pictorial arts, come to assume a fallacious relation to the characteristics of contemporary belles-lettres. The word Romantic has never been unequivocally defined as a concept of style and as a characterization of the art of the period of about 1800. When Wilhelm Pinder tried, in the realm of art, to state the formal characteristics which ought to be made the basis of the term Romantic as a concept of characterization, he proceeded from German literature and music of the period 1800.2 But Pinder's concept, constructed on that basis, cannot be brought to bear upon the art of Romanticism, the art of that period. His analysis led him back to a certain current of German art at the end of the 16th century, a current represented by such artists as Lucas Cranach the Elder, "Hausbuchmeister," Albrecht Altdorfer, Wold Hubert, Hans Baldung "Grien," and Mathias Griinewald. He thus associated this, let us say, expressionistic trend of German Renaissance art with Romantic literature and music of the beginning of the 19th century. Pinder's reasoning is seductive. But if we carry the analysis of style concerning the art which came into being during the Romantic period through, we do not find, inasmuch as it is possible to draw any parallels between the arts, that the form of art corresponds to the form of contemporary literature and music. If we accept Pinder's romantic concept of form, 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 consistency between the art and literature of the Romantic period; but the examples within
1Franz Lehr, Die Bliitezeit romantischer Bildkunst, p. 222. Wilhelm Pinder, "Die Romantik in der deutschen Kunst," in Das Werk des Kiinstlers (1939), Vol. I, pp. 3-41.
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art of pure Romantic artistic form are too isolated and relatively uneven for any comparison to give even tolerably definite results. We must accept the fact that the art of the Romantic period does not possess the 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 disintegration had taken place in the course of the 18th century. The most heterogenous and dispersed impression is, however, made by the pictorial arts. During the 18th century, belles-lettres had been the stronger and leading form of art and the pictorial arts were to a great extent bound to letters. The leading art theorizing of the later half of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th, was done, as we know, not by artists but by litterateurs and philosophers. It is certainly possible to name several artists during the period of Classicism and Romanticism who were inclined to enunciate theory, indeed most of them were, but they were all more or less led by literary impulses. When Lehr demanded a pure art-historical definition of the term Romantic as a concept of style for the period, he had not, it seems, clearly realized the dilemma indicated above. If we try to establish a new style intention, its progress, climax, and regression, for the art of the period, the characteristics established to qualify the term Romantic will clash with the term as applied to belles-lettres, and often also with the content of the work of art in question. Moreover, as has already been pointed out, the art of this period is too heterogenous for relevant and generally representative affinities with regard to form. We may not forget that classicist form (and here we meet an almost identical problem) is in a certain way traditional, or even pseudo-traditional ,and that Romantic art had not yet succeeded in overcoming this false tradition. To this must be added that art, to a much higher degree than literature, lacked the unity required to be subjected without violence to a universally significant term of characterization. If, on the other hand, we use the term as a historical concept with which to delineate the period of about 1800, and the unit of time is fairly arbitrary, we must not let ourselves be misled into any false analogies with the general literary concept of characterization. Naturally we need not abandon these two terms, but we must clearly realize that they are awkward generalizations and that they are used by art historians in different contexts with different meanings 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 same problem, namely that of creating a new basis for art. But the properties considered as characteristics of Classicism and Romanticism taken as concepts of style, are never found in pure form in the works of art designated by these terms. The classification of works of art in terms of trends of style is necessary for the sake of surveying the history of art, but we must keep in mind that concepts such as Classicism, Storm and Stress, Romanticism, etc., are rather arbitrary designations for phenomena which offer many different aspects, each of which is liable to be characterized by a special heading. It is not always the case that such a term of characterization can be based on or can fit all the possible aspects of a work of art. The points of view conditional on special char-

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acterization usually vary according to context. One often feels tempted to speak of classical form and romantic content with reference to the same work of art. Scholarly literature has often suggested contrasting relationships between Classicism and Romanticism with regard to German art of the Goethe period, i.e., 1770-1830. Such a contrasting tendency is, as has been argued, misleading and has resulted in a false conception, to wit that Classic and Romantic art in the period under consideration represented antithetical principles in the artevolution of the time. The fact that some art historians envisage the development of art in Hegelian terms as an oscillation between two essential contrasts called Classic-Romantic, these concepts being used as general terms of characterization, has given more nourishment to this deceptive notion. Let us now pass to more concrete examples: are the Nazarenes' paintings Romantic or Classical? In general they are regarded as Romantic; but if we consider only the form and composition they would, according to current linguistic usage, be more apt to be called Classical. Perugino was no Romantic. Since the formal properties in general contradict the designation Romantic, one may conclude that it is a characterization of the content which has given Nazarene painting this label, which, as a matter of fact, corresponds to the literary origins of the concept. It is primarily the sentimental religiosity and dreamy retrospection of a highly esteemed past which the Nazarenes' production reflects, and it is this which has been considered typically Romantic. One has thus not only defined the content, but the artistic attitude as well. As distinguished from the Nazarenes, the Classicists generally speaking excel in Antique and Classic accessories. Along with a norm of configuration which in the main was constructed on the basis of the conception of plastic art obtaining at this time, on the productions of certain Italian High Renaissance painters and, as concerns landscape, on the pattern of Poussin, they preferably dealt with motifs and themes from Classical Antiquity. But if we scrutinize this classical art we often find an unmistakable expression of sentimentality and ignorance of the world. This is in fact what distinguishes German from French Classicism with the latter's pronounced faculty for inscribing Antique themes with the pathos of current social and political content. In German art there are numerous examples of this above-mentioned sentimentality in the form of imitation Antique. We need but mention sculptors like Schadow, 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 both theme and Classical requirements. Many of the German Classicists such as Tischbein the Elder, Mengs, Hetsch, evince obvious loans from the French moralist painters headed by Greuze with their theatrical straining for effect and the confusion of maudlin and bursting pathos. In the heroic landscape, such as it was shaped by Koch and Reinhart in Rome, there is often, in spite of the severe and regular composition of the Antique accessories, an unmistakable sentimentality (see plate 3). Whether these paintings should be called Classical or Romantic depends on the point of view from which they are contemplated. If

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we consider form and composition alone, we might at first want to call them Classical; but if we take hold of the figures in the foreground and their relation to nature, we might want to resort to the term Romantic. German heroic landscape painting as well as German Classical art in general is often characterized by this discrepancy: on the one hand an intended magnanimity which is the result of the subject matter, the form, and the composition; on the other hand, an unintended sentimentality expressed through the emotional attitudes of the figures. One often finds the Classicists theatrically posing figures in high-flown postures along with lachrymose or slightly coquettish figure-types, all of them put against a background of idealized nature or of an Antique interior (see plates 1 & 2). An organic, or better, a psychological connection between the figures or between the figures and the milieu is too often lacking. For this reason the different motifs will stand as abrupt contrasts to each other, which makes it impossible to define the pictures unitarily in terms of the 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 the moralizing and often sentimental deviations from the originally Antique-Heroic theme or the confused emotional attitudes, then this term must be misleading, particularly if we compare this Classicism with that treated by Wolfflin under the heading of Classical Art. The discrepancy between the expression of content and form, and between the qualities of expression among themselves, is the result of what we may call a nonorganic principle of conception. Different formal and thematic categories from different pictorial types have been made paragons in order to be amalgamated into a new compound to a supposed synthesis. The painter A. R. Mengs codified this eclecticism in his publication Thoughts on Beauty and Taste in Painting (1762) which has appositely been called a "New Testament of Eclecticism."3 Here Mengs, as is known, lays down four different prototypes for the painter: Classical Antiquity for beauty's sake; Raphael for the sake of import and expression; Correggio for harmony; and finally, Titian for the sake of "truth and color." This eclecticism not only characterizes the Classicists, but other artistic groups as well, and was fanned by several earlier precursors. Merck, Lavater, the young Goethe, Wackenroder, Novalis, and others, called attention to the prefigurativeness and greatness of the German late Gothic and to Diirer. And Friedrich Schlegel exhorted artists, in an article in his magazine Europa (Nachrichten von 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 eclecticism which Schiller, then Goethe, Schelling, and the painters Ph. 0. Runge and C. 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-conscious), of his Naive and Sentimental Poetry to bear upon the art of this period,
8Wilhelm Waetzhold, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, I, 84.

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then we must regard even Classical Art as sentimental and not as naive, which is Schiller's criterion for pure Classical art. Schiller and Schelling among others used these terms as corresponding to each other, Classic-naive, Romantic-sentimental, and they characterized their contemporary art as sentimental. The problematic 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 of sentimental, but these are properties which are often characterized as Romantic. This yearning for the past is just as significant of and fundamental to the Classicists, the Romantic-Gothic enthusiasts, and the Nazarenes. With reference to the Quattrocento enthusiasm of the Nazarenes and the high esteem for medieval culture there has been talk of "flight from reality" and the concept of "escapism" has been taken as significant of Romanticism. Undoubtedly the Romantic experience of history gives expression to a psychotic fear of the present and an attempt to escape into the past.4 But we may easily see that what Hauser and many others consider as typically Romantic, namely the attempt to escape into the past, is fundamental also to German Classicism. It is my opinion that this gazing into the past, characteristic of the period in question, is not to be explained in terms of any panic-stricken fear of present actuality, but in terms of a slowly awakening consciousness of a lack of tradition and of a firm basis for a vital artistic evolution, the consequent striving for precisely such a new basis for a future art, in short, in terms of a desire for regeneration. The German Classicists as well as the Romantics looked backwards not for the sake of bygone times, but for the sake of the future.
4Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, II, 657.