Whither the Study of German Art?

Art historians in German studies face a contradiction. On the one hand, our field is thoroughly Germanic. The founding intellects of art history as a discipline are virtually all German or German-speaking: Erwin Panofsky, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl, and the list goes on. No student at the undergraduate or graduate level can escape contending with the methodological and theoretical insights these founders offered to the field over a century ago. Moreover, their works continue to be mined even as the objects of study and questions that motivate art history have become interdisciplinary and global in recent decades: Panofsky is still invoked in studies of Peruvian iconography, Wölfflin is still relevant to analyses of formal change in the art of Waziristan, and Riegl still offers insight into the material culture of Romania and its connections to broader international and transnational flows of artistic production and reception.

So the field is root and branch Germanic. But while art history relies on the theoretical insights of its German-speaking founders, it perennially proves itself less interested in the study of German art. For large swaths of its history, the discipline has negatively assessed Germany’s premodern and early modern artistic achievements as “barbaric,” or in less incendiary terms “unclassic.” Dürer usually stands out as an exception to this assessment. It should be noted, however, that his redemptive status frequently owes a great deal to his Italianate artistic leanings.

When we turn to Germany’s artistic achievements of the modern era, the charge is typically that they are “derivative.” Liebermann, so it goes, is Monet with a time lag. Expressionism might be exempt in this regard, given its wide recognition as Germany’s most original, vanguard contribution to the history of modern art. Even here, though, the work of Kirchner, Nolde, and others fails to escape the pall of the derivative entirely. In its long historiography, some have adjudged Expressionism (rightly or wrongly and usually as part of a nationalist agenda) as simply a more angst-ridden variant of the subjective subject matter and bravura use of color seen in the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Fauves. And what about Germany’s other artistic heritage of the modern era—its imperial, Nazi, and East German manifestations? Despite years of revisionism, art history remains hard pressed to consider this other heritage as anything more than “nonart” propaganda. As a result, the discipline tends to rule it out of court entirely.

I exaggerate, of course. There are myriad examples of publications, conferences, and college art association panels that prove to the contrary that German art has a viable place in the discipline. But in this moment of curricular “streamlining,” “rubrics,” and “outcomes assessment”—not to mention the shuttering of German departments—the case has become if anything harder to make that students should devote more time to Beckmann than to Picasso. One could claim that Beckmann’s vivid palette and sonorous imagery rival or surpass similar endeavors in the art of his School of Paris contemporaries. But few would argue that Picasso’s meditations on space and the building blocks of representation were anything other than seismic in their impact on art, perception, and what we have come to think of as “the modern.” From an art-historical standpoint, Picasso is simply more important than Beckmann. If one has to choose, Beckmann is therefore more likely to get the axe.

In 1993, Hans Belting explored Germany’s historically “troublesome relationship” to its art.¹ “Troublesome” is also a good term to use in describing art history’s relationship to German art in general. And why is this? The standard favoring of Italian, French, and American contributions to (Western) art’s history over German ones naturally has a good deal to do with history writ large. To state the obvious, the value ascribed to German art has not been enhanced by the country’s instigation of two cataclysmic world wars. The significance of Germany’s culture in general has proven difficult for the world community to perceive and to countenance as a result. At various times and in various ways...