Volume German

Linguistic and
C
Cultural
S
Charles E. McClelland Studies

Prophets, Paupers, or
Professionals?

A Social History of Everyday Visual Artists

in Modem Germany, 1850-Present

Peter Lang
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/prophetspaupersoOOOOmccl
Prophets, Paupers, or Professionals?
German Linguistic and Cultural Studies

Editor: Peter Rolf Lutzeier

Volume 12

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin * Bruxelles * Frankfurt am Main * New York * Wien
 Charles E. McClelland

Prophets, Paupers, or
Professionals?

A Social History of Everyday

Visual Artists in Modern Germany,
1850-Present

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin' Bruxelles' Frankfurt am Main • New York ‘ Wien
N) 72. -S6 M 38 2oom

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek

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ISSN 1422-1454
ISBN 3-03910-062-9
US-ISBN 0-8204-6878-9

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Printed in Germany
 IN MEMORY OF

Frances Dillon Hobbs McClelland (1909-2000)

Mother, Muse, Painter

Contents

Preface 9

Chapter 1: Introduction 13

Chapter 2: Who is an Artist? 27

Chapter 3: Forming Artists 57

Chapter 4: Artists’ Rewards 93

Chapter 5: Herding Cats: Organizing Artists 115

Chapter 6: Artists in Society: Myths and Realities 167

Chapter 7: Conclusion 209

Further Reading 221

Index 227

7
Preface

This is a work of social rather than traditional art history. It ap¬

proaches artists as social beings, not isolated ‘geniuses.’ It attempts
generalizations about thousands of artists living at a given time over
several generations, rather than dwelling on the career or output of a
single visual artist or small group of them, as is conventional (and un¬
derstandable) in art history.
It represents the culmination of a series of studies that began with
the question, ‘How did social forces extraneous to the German univer¬
sity system help turn it into the leading model of the modem world by
1914?’ Further questions concerning what German university gradu¬
ates did the rest of their lives led to a study of the learned professions
in the last two centuries. One of the professional groups left out of that
study, because of separate and different higher education and career
structure, was artists (including those in musical, performing, and lit¬
erary - as well as visual - arts). This book attempts to address visual
artists, although it is apparent that their experience is paralleled in
many ways by that of composers, writers, and professional perform¬
ers. Originally intended to offer European and transatlantic compara¬
tive perspectives, the end result had to be confined primarily to
Germany. Allusions appear in this work reflecting my initial research
involving non-visual artists in Germany as well as visual artists in
neighboring and nearby countries with strong arts traditions.
Clearly the experience of German professional artists was condi¬
tioned by the unique history of the German-speaking lands in the pe¬
riod under study here. The very fact that Hitler considered himself a
‘German painter’ before taking up his final occupation as one of the
most blood-drenched dictators of all time could not help shape artists’
professional destiny during and after the Third Reich, for example.
Yet I remain skeptical about a radical German Sonderweg in the arts
and hence also about the impossibility of making comparisons with
other European and extra-European art worlds. Just as there were ar¬
tistic supporters and opponents of the policies of all German govem-

9
 ments and social orders during the last century and a half, there were
also many, probably most, who merely tried to be true to their voca¬
tion, and this was largely true of other learned professionals as well.
The professional problems of visual artists were widely shared with
their colleagues in other parts of Europe and North America, irrespec¬
tive of political regimes or economic cycles. It is in this spirit that I
invite the reader to consider this study as raising issues applicable to
other countries, not just Germany.
Lacking the luxury of space for an extensive bibliographical
essay, I would like to say a few words here about sources. The major
archives and libraries having significant holdings are mentioned in the
acknowledgment section below. Footnotes give some indication of
specific holdings. Because of war losses the archives of all relevant
organizations, from state education ministries through professional
organizations and down to art academies and schools, are full of gaps
at best, completely destroyed at worst. The same is true of original
memoir literature of most of the artists active in professional affairs.
What has emerged from years of archival research is thus a restored
mosaic rather than grande machine historical canvas complete to the
last brush-stroke. As with a mosaic, however, the surviving pieces do
appear to fit a pattern. Scholars interested in the original source mate¬
rials are welcome to contact the author, who would gladly share his
knowledge of (and notes on) surviving original materials.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many individuals and organi¬
zations without whose help and encouragement this book could never
have come to be. Support for research as well as publication were
provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The Research
Allocations Committee of the University of New Mexico enabled
travel to archives and libraries in Europe. The Heinrich Heine Univer¬
sity of Diisseldorf, the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Univer¬
sity of Bielefeld all generously provided facilities for my research.
Special thanks for encouragement and support are owing to Jurgen
Kocka, Peter Lundgreen, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Hans-Ulrich
Wehler, and Heinz-Elmar Tenorth.
The archives and libraries containing the scattered remnants of
artists’ lives, schools, and organizations were particularly forthcoming
and helpful. The Bundesarchiv in Berlin, state archives of Hamburg,
North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Wiirttemberg (Karlsruhe and Stutt-

10
gart), Bavaria, Saxony, and the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer
Kulturbesitz in Berlin-Dahlem were particularly valuable for this
work. The archives of the Academy of Arts, the College of Fine Arts,
and the Werkbund in Berlin, the Academy in Diisseldorf and Dresden,
the Royal Academy in London, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam
are to be thanked as well as the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin and Munich,
the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the libraries of the Humboldt
and Free Universities in Berlin, the Heinrich Heine University in
Diisseldorf, and the University of Bielefeld.
Colleagues and friends who have listened, advised, and raised
critical questions are almost too numerous to thank individually here,
but some deserve special mention. Donna Alexander, Margaret
Anderson, David Holtby, Richard S. Levy, Vernon Lidtke, Stephen
Scher, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler read draft versions and made many
helpful suggestions. Numerous colleagues at the Universities of Berlin
(Humboldt), Bielefeld, Diisseldorf, Munich, and New Mexico, as well
as Dartmouth College and the Institute for Advanced Study (Prince¬
ton) offered me very useful critical reactions to earlier presentations of
the research project. Needless to add, the final product could not in¬
corporate all their helpful suggestions, nor are they responsible for my
own errors and conclusions.
Finally I am indebted to the many critics, curators, collectors,
connoisseurs, and historians of art of my acquaintance who have
raised doubts or at least eyebrows about an effort to view artists in the
context of mundane social history, continuing in the traditions of
Hauser and Pevsner. For them I would like to cite a bon mot attributed
to Picasso about the concerns of everyday artists, as well as ‘great’
ones: ‘When art critics and dealers get together, they talk about style
and trends, form and content; but when painters get together, they talk
about where you can get the best turpentine.’ It is my hope that this
book will reveal something of the concerns visual artists talked about
when they got together. In that sense, also, it may offer a fresh per¬
spective on the profession of visual artist in the modem and postmod¬
ern world.

C. E. McC.
Albuquerque/Berlin
July, 2003

11
-
Chapter One
Introduction

‘Art is sacred; artists, profane.’ One does not have to agree with this
sentiment to grant that it does describe a certain modem belief. With the
decline of religious faith in European societies, art has changed its role.
What formerly served to illustrate, represent, or reflect a divinely
ordained world became a revelation in itself. By about 1800, Kant,
Schiller, and early thinkers of the European Romantic movement spelled
Art with a capital ‘A.’ The real artist - the only one worth talking about
- had become a vessel for bringing Beauty to humanity, a ‘genius’
touched by the World Soul, a Seer and Prophet of the Good and the
Tme. Talent and Genius were signs of grace. In some mysterious way a
few lone visionaries became the priests of a new, secularized religion
that promised to reconcile mortal humans with an incomprehensible
universe.
Thomas Carlyle, one of the inventors of the modem cult of heroes,
did not even include artists as candidates. As late as 1840, he was willing
to admit at most ‘genuine men of letters’ as heroes. But they had existed
only for a century or so (Shakespeare and Dante were forerunners), and
distinguished themselves from ‘spurious’ men of letters by their inspira¬
tion, ‘for what we call “originality,” “sincerity,” “genius,” the heroic
quality we have no good name for, signifies that.’1 A century after him,
Sydney Hook had got around to including artists and scientists, clearly
adding the unexamined premise that innovation (Progress?) is a higher
cultural good. The ‘original patterns are created by a few great individu¬
als and imitated by the merely talented many.’ For Hook the great visual
artist even more than the man of letters or musician supplies a ‘unique
achievement’ through ‘his individual craftsmanship, his sensibility, in-

1 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

(London, 1840), p. 144.

13
 9 •
sight, and power to make us see things in a fresh light.’ Neither Carlyle
nor Hook had room for very long lists of heroes in history. Hook com¬
piled lists of eight religious founders, thirteen writers, fourteen scientists,
and sixteen visual artists. One might suspect heroism is genius annunci¬
ated; talent, merely a precondition for imitation and distribution.
At a more recent end of a continuum in discourses about artists, we
might note the ‘death of the author’ proclaimed by Roland Barthes three
decades ago in France. If the author is merely an arbitrary vehicle for
currents flowing through an impersonal prefonned field of discourse, is
the visual artist not also a function of his painting? This work will not
enter into the Decontructionist debates about the role of authors (literary
or otherwise), interesting though this might be. For that debate focused
heavily on the originality of ‘discourse founders’ (not to use the unfash¬
ionable term ‘geniuses’), and we concern ourselves more with the larger
masses of everyday artists. These had enough trouble worrying about
whether they had any or enough talent, sufficient heroism, and adequate
determination to be an artist without pondering whether they were
(metaphorically) dead.2 3
Yet even talent is, by definition, rare.4 What should become of the
legions of ‘artists’ not anointed (and mostly by posterity at that) as seers
and visionaries? Should altars, side chapels, and devotional books not be
filled with the work of everyday, competent artists working in a well-
understood vernacular? Who would design and decorate great public
(and later private) palaces with murals and statuary? Was there enough
‘genius’ to supply a burgeoning market for portraits and landscapes,
charming ‘genre’ stories of everyday life, or grand evocations of histori¬
cal and mythical pasts? Even as the idea of artistic genius took hold in
European culture, the need for merely competent, professional, and
reliable artists continued and even grew, as well. Furthermore, the vast

2 Sydney Hook, The Hero in History, 2nd. edn. (Boston, 1955), pp. 31-2. [Origi¬
nal ed. 1943.]
3 For a recent critique of this debate, see Sean Burke, The Death and Return of
the Author. Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes. Foucault and Derrida. 2nd
edn. (Edinburgh, 1998).
4 For a thoughtful assessment of the dangers of siphoning too much talent off into
the financially rewarding world of business, to the detriment of professions and
civil society, see Derek Bok, The Cost of Talent. How Executives and Profes¬
sionals Are Paid and How It Affects America (New York, 1993).

14
majority of artists later deemed marked by talent or genius began their
careers as ordinary practitioners schooled in the professional vernacular
of their time. Many of them, while gaining fame and fortune in their
own lifetimes, continued to show solidarity with their less fortunate
colleagues, participating fully in the teaching, exhibiting, or other
professional advancement of the fine arts, even as officers of artists’
organizations. In their view, the line between the talented few and the
workmanlike many was not as impermeable and absolute as many art
historians have later made it seem.
The profane, everyday aspect of art is the center of this book. Art
historians, curators, critics, and collectors usually prefer to concentrate
on ‘great’ art and artists. Indeed, they have come increasingly to define
‘great’ art, although their judgments rarely outlast a generation. Who
today, for example, could accept the one-sided and dogmatic statements
of Julius Meier-Graefe, one of the founders of modem German art
history, that ‘There have not been painters in Germany since Diirer,’ or
‘The Germans are musicians, poets; but nothing less than painters.’3
Before the rise to prominence of these arbiters of taste, artists themselves
largely decided what constituted good art.
A collective biography of all artists at any given time is, of course,
a practical impossibility. And yet, scattered evidence of artists’ everyday
activities, education, aspirations, and self-understanding does exist, some
of it barely explored. Not all, but most artists in the nineteenth and twen¬
tieth centuries passed through art schools, belonged to some kind of pro¬
fessional organization, showed their work at art exhibitions, or left some
other mark for future historians to trace. These thousands of artists, not
just the dozens privileged by the arbiters of ‘greatness,’ shaped the aes¬
thetic consciousness of their day, especially before the rise of quality
photomechanical mass reproduction and the electronic transmission of
images. Even with these innovations, one can argue that the masses of
everyday artists, such as those working in the industries of advertising
and design, have a greater impact on the public than individual celebri¬
ties enjoying, in Andy Warhol’s phrase, their fifteen minutes of fame.

5 Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 2 vols.

(Stuttgart, 1904), I, 70. See also Kenworth Moffet, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic
(Munich, 1973).

15
 Artists in modem times have not been mere anonymous workers
leaving little trace of their lives. Although some historians would
argue that artists are not ‘professionals’ at all, sociologists have come
to recognize them as such - but with many qualifications.6 Like other
‘professionals’ - physicians, lawyers, clergymen, natural scientists,
engineers, or teachers - they belonged to a social stratum marked by
special education and status. Some formed part of the ‘cultivated middle
class’ (.Bildungsbiirgertum) and were particularly articulate and promi¬
nent. As with other professions, they joined together in associations to
promote their interests and formulate their aspirations. They entered the
marketplace, selling their products and services to various types of
clients. (One of the persistent images we will investigate is ‘the starving
artist.’) Their profession concerned governments, which in Europe (and
much later in the USA) developed ‘art policies’ that helped shape the
professional landscape. As the nineteenth century wore on, more and
more artists went through formal schooling instead of apprenticeship,
leaving even more records of their activity.
Modem learned professions have all shared to some degree in
efforts to raise their economic and social status through organizing,
encouraging increasing levels of formal (especially higher) education,
certification, and licensing, restricting the number of competing
practitioners, and warning the public of the dangers of unprofessional
or pseudo-professional practitioners (e.g. ‘quacks’). In Germany, as else¬
where, the different learned professions achieved different levels of
success in this quest. Doctors and lawyers (among ‘old’ professions)
fared best overall. Many others, such as the ‘new’ professions of
engineering and school teaching, encountered greater resistance. Any¬
body could legally call himself an ‘engineer’ in Germany, despite the
best efforts of engineering professional societies, for example. Artists
were in an even weaker position, since widespread cultural norms finally
anchored in political constitutions from 1871 on declared art, like
science, to be ‘free.’ Themselves accepting that talent was randomly
distributed and not always likely to surface or be identified solely
through the educational system, artists could never bring themselves

For a recent summary by an American sociologist of professions, see Eliot

Freidson, Les professions artistiques comme defi a Fanalyse sociologi-
que,'Revue frangaise de sociologie, 27 (1986), pp. 431-43.

16
unanimously to deny the label of artist to men and women who claimed
it without pursuing a normal professional education and career. But as
the history of such professions as engineering and teaching also shows,
inability to enforce a rigid monopoly by only certified practitioners on
the market for services does not mean there is no engineering or teaching
profession.
The tools of social history should be able to sketch a collective
picture of everyday artists. Why should this picture interest us? In the
last quarter century, much valuable work has revealed the contours of
most other learned professions. Why not artists, too? Just as modem
scientific medicine has fundamentally changed the way we live and
engineering has liberated us from so much physical toil, so art has
saturated our visual world in ways hard to compare to previous ages. If
we include more recent art media such as photography and computer¬
generated images, television, and advertising, it is hard to escape artist-
made imagery during any single day of our lives. Both corporate moguls
intent on selling us their products and governments bent on mobilizing
our thoughts have come to recognize how powerful this imagery is. Yet
we know pathetically little about the men and women who produced,
and still produce, so much of the modem world’s imagery.
One of the simplest rules of criminal investigation is ‘follow the
money.’ This effective research tool has been largely neglected by art
historians, critics, and the clients who buy art. Following the money,
however, can explain much about the standards of the art world, includ¬
ing how it affects the public and artists themselves. No other learned
profession, especially in the last hundred years, has experienced such
manic swings and extremes of appreciation and obscurity, wealth and
poverty. True, few people think about or honor former doctors or
lawyers. Yet public honor of everyday artists hardly matches that for a
doctor with a good bedside manner or a respected counsel at law in
a local community. Artists also found dynasties, leave legacies, and
make an imprint on their fellow humans.
The spectacle of individual works of art being auctioned off at
astronomical prices while many artists cannot make a decent living
raises other important questions. Why do artists have so little control or
influence over the market for their services compared to other pro¬
fessionals? Professional organizations of doctors, lawyers, and teachers,
for example, have developed such an imposing influence. Despite

17
 variations in individual incomes, a recognizable standard forms the basis
of remuneration for non-artistic professions. Artists have complained
about poverty since they first joined together in their own professional
organizations,7 but these organizations have fallen short of the goal
of raising artists’ incomes to levels comparable with most other pro¬
fessionals. Why?
So precarious is the economic status of artists that many can sur¬
vive only by having other sources of income. Surveys in recent years
show that many artists are employed (teaching is a classic ‘day job’)
or resort to other sources, such as a spouse’s earnings. Many have part-
time jobs unrelated to artistic creativity. Such surveys do not include
amateurs. It is an oddity of the arts professions that many who exercise
them cannot devote their full time and attention to them. Medicine, the
clergy, engineering, and law require similar levels of aptitude, advanced
training, dedication, and lifetime commitment. One of the defining hall¬
marks of modem professions is their pattern of a lifelong career (even if
that pattern has begun to change in recent decades). Why should the
shape of artists’ professions be different? Since they are different, what
is the effect of the differences on the artists themselves, and on society?
If professional artists often have to moonlight to survive, people in
other fields also dabble in art. Adolf Hitler thought himself an artist;
Winston Churchill’s paintings still fetch respectable auction prices. We
face here the problem of smudged professional boundaries. This may be
more a problem of perceptions and images than of realities. And yet
‘doctor’ or ‘lawyer’ conjures up a fairly concrete image of training,
competence, and activity. When we think of ‘artists,’ do we mean men in
berets standing before easels in fine arts academies? Or also women
designing the gorgeous fabrics and elegant furniture of art nouveau?
Do we include makers of films and videos, billboards and magazine
advertisements for everything from diamonds to acne cream? What of
those who design plastic garden chairs, or even garden gnomes and other
objects many call kitsch? And then there are the Sunday painters and
pottery throwers. What about them?

For an early French example of philanthropic attempts - in collusion with art¬

ists’ organizations - to raise money for ‘starving artists’ already in the ‘hungry
1840s see Fondation Taylor, Le baron Taylor, I 'association des artistes et
Texposition du bazar Bonne-Nouvelle en 1846 (Rouen, 1995).

18
 There are no absolute answers when it comes to defining ‘art,’ or
therefore ‘artists.’ Looking over these debates and dialogues — even
among artists themselves - can illuminate our understanding better than
absolute definitions. This book, one of social history, will take a broad
view of art and artists. It will include the ‘fine’ arts - easel painting,
sculpture, some forms of architecture, and engraving. But it must also
include ‘applied’ arts. These were, in any case, virtually inseparable
from the ‘fine’ arts before the Renaissance, still had close affinity in
the eighteenth century, and reestablished their virtual equality by the
first quarter of the twentieth. Because this book is about artists as pro¬
fessionals, it will not deal much with amateurs. (They will not, however,
be ignored completely.)
As we will see in the next chapter, not only visual artists lay claim
to making art. Writers and musicians, actors and popular entertainers
also deserve the name ‘artist.’ (The French word ‘artiste’ even means a
kind of entertainer.) This book will not deal with the education, pro¬
fessional aspirations, and life situations of non-visual artists in depth. It
will, however, mention them from time to time and employ them as a
sort of informal ‘control group.’ Their professional development, run¬
ning parallel to visual artists’, helps to illuminate our central subject.
While they fully deserve books of their own, including their story here
would have been a practical impossibility.
Defining which producers of cultural objects we mean by ‘artists’ is
only the beginning. Social history has to view artists in their relationship
to their human environment. This environment has helped define their
profession, and it has changed over time. Few artists are (as the
Romantic myth has it) lonely geniuses laboring in isolation. They have
parents, friends, spouses, children, patrons, dealers, teachers, students,
tax collectors, legislators, juries, critics, landlords, and professional
organizations to deal with. A century ago some would have denied that a
‘true’ artist could be anything but an independent contractor, much like
a doctor or lawyer working for a ‘fee.’ But many - if not most - artists
then and since also have employers and even connections with labor
unions. Whether this disqualifies them as ‘professionals’ can be debated.
The central question is whether being an employee undermines the
creative autonomy and judgmental discretion that have counted among
the defining hallmarks of professionalization.

19
 In many ways - some obvious, some subtle - artists collectively
decide what art is, even when many of them work for employers. Even
when the public judges them, it does so on the basis of standards pro¬
vided, at least partly, by the artists themselves. The Romantic myth of
the stylistic innovator, canon-breaker, and lonely genius overturning the
‘establishment’ will never disappear. (For one reason, it serves the
publicity machine of ‘emerging’ artists.) But it is a myth. Not only do
‘established’ artists follow stylistic innovation with interest, they often
experiment themselves and normally have throughout history. Artists,
we must remember, are the members of juries. These in turn, from the
heyday of the Paris salon to today, select for exhibition and prizes the
‘best’ from the current crop. Only rarely (as in Hitler’s Third Reich)
have they adamantly and unanimously resisted new and interesting
approaches.
Like doctors and lawyers, then, artists have also been able to help
define the nature of their profession. Have they, however, enjoyed as
much leverage over the market for their services? Even in bad times,
other professions are considered ‘vital.’ Art, many think, is a ‘luxury.’
Unlike a properly functioning system of courts and hospitals, the art
world is hardly deemed crucial to the survival of the people or the
state. Because of that, it has also escaped much of the regulatory
attention of the state. Such freedom is especially notable in Europe,
where other professions had to struggle against official regulation, and
attempt to replace it with self-regulation (for example, ‘professional
ethics’). Artists, in contrast, have always been free to market any
product and call it ‘art.’ Consequently, there is no curse for artistic
malpractice quite as biting as ‘quack’ or ‘shyster.’ Marcel Duchamp’s
famous provocation - exhibiting an ordinary manufactured urinal
turned into ‘art’ only by the signature of ‘R. Mutt’ (incidentally a pun
on the German word for ‘poverty’) - recalls one definition of art: it
is what artists produce. Or, in the more cynical phrase of Kurt
Schwitters, ‘Art is what the artist spits.’ The mayor of New York City,
Rudolf Giuliani, allegedly articulated a more conservative view, but
surely a widespread one, in 1999. In attacking ‘offensive’ pieces in the
British art show Sensation, he proclaimed that ‘art is what I cannot
make myself.’ The implication of trained skills and an absorbed canon
of style and taste would have gladdened the hearts of conservative art
academy professors as late as the 1950s.

20
 In many important ways, a ‘market for services’ has shaped the
artistic profession. Other learned professions are also exposed to mar¬
ket forces. The rise of a mass market for medical services, encouraged
by social insurance schemes in Germany since the 1880s, is a good
illustration. Yet the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art made by
the market seems much more harsh and arbitrary than that between
‘good’ and ‘bad’ doctoring or engineering. If they follow professional
canons through a lifetime, doctors, lawyers, and engineers can usually
count on employment and sustenance in their profession. Artists
whose style or taste falls foul of the public can face ruin.
One more evident irony about artistic professions lies in the con¬
tradiction between chronic obscurity alternating with high visibility
and even public mockery. Most of the time, artists complained of a
lack of public attention. But along came the great salons and exhibi¬
tions of the nineteenth century, mass spectacle encouraging even the
‘popular classes’ to attend and - this was the amusement value - poke
o

fun at new art. The first ‘art critics’ were to be found among the ordi¬
nary ‘public,’ long before ‘criticism’ itself became professionalized in
the mid-nineteenth century. Of course not all ‘criticism’ was negative
or derisory. Many nineteenth-century creators of the literary genre of
‘art criticism’ (one thinks of Theophile Gautier and Emile Zola in
France or Julius Meier-Graefe in Germany, for example) were close
personal friends, admirers, and promoters of artists. The symbiosis,
though fraught with tension, continues today.
The ‘market’ for artists’ ‘services,’ as mentioned, influences the
arts professions. In fact, there were and remain multiple markets, as is
true for other professions. Perhaps the most important has been the
relatively ‘private’ market created by patronage. Church and state,
wealthy nobles and burghers, corporations and foundations have a

8 In London, where the Royal Academy had to finance its shows by some other
means than state subsidies, admission was charged to raise money but also to
keep out ‘undesirables.’ The French exposition payante was copied from the
British example. Dependence on the ‘public’ promised to free artists from the
strictures of dependence on patronage by the state, church, and the wealthy, but
brought its own dangers in the form of the ‘public’s’ fickleness and sug¬
gestibility. See Maximiliane Drechsler, Zwischen Kunst und Kommerz. Zur
Geschichte des Ausstellungswesens zwischen 1775 und 1905 (Munich, 1996),
pp. 11-12, 158.

21
 larger impact on the world of professional visual artists than on most
other professions. Artists’ ‘public’ markets also differ strongly from
those of doctors, lawyers, or teachers. Whereas almost every citizen of
industrial societies will have some - and often considerable - contact
with medical or educational professionals, many may never attend an
art show, and even fewer have direct contact with an artist. The
largely impersonal face of the ‘public’ art markets raises the question
of relative alienation. Are artists condemned, like capitalism's droning
workers of Marxist description, to be alienated from the products of
their labor? Have markets simply turned the fruits of their imagination
into a commodity? As we shall see, these are not just hypothetical
questions. They have practical sides, involving such issues as copy¬
right, resale honoraria, reproduction fees, and other regulations.
Inversely, many of the fruits of artists’ labor have a persistence
and an impact both deeper and longer-lasting than those of other pro¬
fessions. Not only ‘great’ works of art in museums, but everyday ones
in the form of statuary, paintings, engravings, graphics, art photo¬
graphs (and reproductions of all these), buildings, monuments, and
furniture live on to form part of a broader human environment through
generations. We may not be as acutely conscious of artists’ contribu¬
tions to our lives as we are of the medical skill that alleviates our pain
or the engineering marvels that make things more convenient. But we
have only to think of an empty house or flat, how cold and austere its
empty walls are, to realize how much even our dwellings - once
moved into - depend on artists’ skills, including ‘profane’ ones.
Ever since artists emerged from the anonymity of the medieval
guild and became glamorous objects of biography - Vasari’s Lives of
the Artists (1550) is one of the earliest examples - their stories have
always found audiences. A social history of this kind may need a fur¬
ther justification, though. I came to my own curiosity over a long path
of academic studies. After tracing the remarkable rise to prestige of
the German university system from the late eighteenth century on¬
ward, I noticed that few efforts had been made to trace what happened
to the graduates of universities. One way of gauging that was to re¬
search the many professional associations into which the vast majority
of graduates flowed.
Studying the relatively well-documented and well-defined ‘old’
professions (law, medicine, and the clergy) as well as ‘new’ ones (en-

22
gineering, chemistry, public school teaching, or dentistry) made me
aware how poorly artists’ organizations have been investigated. There
are many obstacles to discourage such a study, not least the absence or
destruction of so much of the evidence (for example by the wartime
bombing of Germany). Nobody will ever be able to write a seamlessly
documented history of artists and their organizations in modem
Europe (America is somewhat luckier). Perhaps the curious reader can
be satisfied with a mosaic, and a necessarily somewhat abstract one at
that.
This book concentrates on the German art world, although not
exclusively. I am most familiar with German professional and social
history, and the German art world is an excellent base for a social
history of artists for many reasons. Precisely its lack of a single he-
gemonial center (like Paris or London) made state and private promo¬
tion, artists’ organizations, and records of their activities surprisingly
abundant (in contrast, say, to France). Although it is largely forgotten
today, between the mid-nineteenth century and the Hitler era, German
artists were quite competitive and well known on the international art
market (and are becoming so again today). It would not be hard to
make the case that the German art scene, after that of France, was the
most important in the world in that 90-year period. However, one
must not therefore concentrate on one national scene, as so many art
historians do. The Atlantic art world (Europe and North America)
witnessed transnational influences far more profound than those in
most professions (medicine and engineering being exceptions). In
terms of social history, the similarity of conditions is more striking
than are the differences.9 The German experience, I believe, offers not
solely a unique, even tragic story conditioned by the fateful twists and
turns of German history, but a good example of developments with a
wider significance in Europe and the rest of the world. The German
story has the further advantage (at least for most readers in the
English-speaking world) of lacking the distractions of too many over¬
sold ‘geniuses’ and over-familiar ‘names’ cluttering the foreground.

9 On the ‘cultural construction of the American artists,’ including the roles of

painters, illustrators, the emerging mass media, and critics, see Sarah Bums, In¬
venting the Modern Artist. Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New
Haven, 1996), esp. pp. 2-6.

23
 Even the most famous German artists were also embedded in a profes¬
sional and social network.
It is partly for that reason that many of the German visual artists
whose reputations have survived into the twenty-first century are cited
in this work. Leadership of (or opposition to) professional institutions
such as schools, academies, artists’ organizations, or museums, for
example, often qualified an artist for prominence aside from talent or
success as a painter, sculptor, or architect. The training, aspirations,
and attitudes of such leaders did not vary significantly from those of
colleagues whose careers were less fortunate or whose talents were
perhaps less marketable. Their prominence, however, often induced
them to leave fuller autobiographical information, sometimes even in
published form, than the broad mass of active artists, including those
arguably more talented and important than they. Their insights may
have been distorted by their prominence to some degree, but their de¬
scriptions of the professional world of artists do not contradict those
of ordinary practitioners that have survived. At the same time, bio¬
graphical material about ‘everyday artists’ that allows extensive
analysis and insight is notably lacking, partly because visual artists did
not tend to write much as a professional habit, and partly because
much of what they left behind was destroyed along with other ar¬
chived materials during the World War II burning and devastation of
German cities. Such art-historical reference works as Thieme-Becker
Kiinstlerlexikon and their successors were never designed for pro¬
found psychological insight or as sources for the social historian.
When appropriate, I have inserted some biographical vignettes of art¬
ists both prominent (as leaders of professional organizations, for ex¬
ample, even though they might also be known for their artwork) and
unfamiliar to all but connoisseurs of German art history.
The chosen time frame, though extensive, has a logic of its own.
Only around the middle of the nineteenth century did artists begin to
organize widely and leave records of their collective activities. About
the same time, such significant changes as rapid urbanization, the rise
of new wealth, technical innovations such as photography, and (a little
later) the intellectual upheaval stylized as Modernism caused massive
changes in the art world. Challenges to - some would say the break¬
down of - the canons of traditional art ensued. A rapid succession of
experimental styles now called romantic, realist, naturalist, impres-

24
sionist, art nouveau, expressionist, cubist, futurist, dadaist, abstract,
surreal, ‘new objectivity,’ constructivist, and art deco were, in turn,
confronted with fascist and Soviet reactions. The post-World War II
era brought renewed experimentation, with the first successful chal¬
lenge by American artists to dominate the art world. The political di¬
vision of Europe (especially Germany) by the Cold War also left deep
traces, as did continuous technical innovation (e.g., video, computers).
The social history of artists is a long and ongoing story. This
book will concentrate on only one part of that story, but one full of the
greatest upheaval and dramatic challenge. Between the 1850s and
today artists, like other learned professionals, stopped being a small,
specialized stratum serving the needs of a narrow social elite. It is the
story of expansion, diversification, and the struggle to define the pro¬
fession and gain control over how it functioned. It is a story, not of the
heroic accomplishments of lonely, inspired geniuses (the province of
art-historical biography), but of the more obscure activities and aspi¬
rations of Alltagskunstler - everyday artists. And it begins with who
exactly they were.

25
>
Chapter Two
Who is an Artist?

It is an essential characteristic of art generally

that it isn’t like an occupation. There are of
course artists who treat art like any other pro¬
fession, but I think they are bad artists. Art is
an expression of life without prescribed rules.
- Helmut Kirsch10

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, nobody

would take it as evidence of a heightened sen¬
sibility.
- Peter Medawar11

Dividing labor, including defining standards for the professions, has

been one of the main tasks of every community at least since antiq¬
uity. During the nineteenth century, that task changed in important
ways for all professions. The abolition of guilds in the wake of the
French Revolution was meant to liberate competitive market forces. In
fact, regulation was imposed by other agents, at first usually the state
(or 38 of them in the Germanic Confederation), later on with the
views of nascent professional associations.
In classical antiquity, Seneca (probably thinking of the healer
Hippocrates) wrote the famous quip, ars longa, vita brevis. Like many
long-lived aphorisms, Seneca’s was both pithy and ambiguous. The
‘art’ originally meant by Hippocrates was presumably that of the phy¬
sician. By the European middle ages, ars had come to be understood
in a more general sense as expert knowledge. The Christian suspicion
of the sufficiency of such knowledge was also expressed in an in¬
scription above the entrance to the former main lecture hall of
Konigsberg University: ars longa, vita aeterna - referring to the eter-

10 In an interview with Thomas Robke, Kunst und Arbeit (Essen, 2000), p. 155.
11 As cited in Ned Sherrin (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations
(Oxford, 1995), p. 27.

27
 nal life of believers. The English word artisan, coming out of Latin via
Italian (artigiano) and French, originally meant someone trained in
both arts and crafts, but the label sank in social significance between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; ‘artist’ rose in rank as it came
increasingly to be associated with a refined and aesthetic mentality,
rather than mere craft skills. A visitor from the Renaissance might be
bewildered by many things in today’s America, but he could immedi¬
ately see how far things had progressed in disaggregating a heightened
aesthetic sensibility from manual dexterity by successively wandering
into a ‘crafts store’ and an ‘art supply shop.’
Much of the social history of western art since the Middle Ages
can be laid out along an (imaginary) line. The attempt to distinguish
one smaller group of ‘artists’ from the larger herd of ‘craftsmen’ runs
like a red thread through hundreds of years of development. Medieval
guilds had already drawn the line excluding non-members from
working in the arts.
Would-be artists first apprenticed themselves to a master’s shop,
trained as journeymen, and could then aspire to (but not count on) be¬
coming masters themselves. Masters and their guilds - all locally
based - controlled the recruitment, training and production standards
of all artists. This closed system had the advantage of preventing
overproduction and deviation from traditional standards (the ‘canon’).
It usually set prices and guaranteed a certain level of income commen¬
surate with a recognized status. The disadvantages included a lack of
encouragement for innovation, blinkered perspectives, and the men¬
tality later sharply parodied by Richard Wagner in Die Meistevsingev
von Nurnberg.
The guilds experienced challenges to their monopoly by the late
Renaissance. There was little technical reason to entrust the training of
artists to ‘academies’ rather than to guilds. Indeed, one finds very little
argument that guilds were failing to keep up with technical require¬
ments. What then primarily motivated the founders of ‘academies of
arts,’ first the small ones in sixteenth-century Italian city-states, and
then the more ambitious ones of major monarchies such as France,
Spain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries? The most cogent argument involved the need to teach fu¬
ture artists not only to master the technical requirements of their craft,
but also to infuse them with the gentlemanly graces of a humanistic

28
(notably classical) education. Harking back in spirit to Plato’s school
in Athens’s ‘grove of academe,’ these humanist experiments included
something Plato personally held in suspicion - art. The underlying
idea was to enrich the ‘arts’ with the ‘sciences’ and raise them to a
higher level. The study of philosophy, literature, and some basic natu¬
ral science would lift the artist to levels of refinement unattainable by
the merely ‘artisanal’ guilds. Not coincidentally, Renaissance artists
were welcome in the palaces of their princely patrons. Now hoffahig,
they were ‘received at court’ as privileged men of learning. They thus
achieved some of the status of university graduates, whose higher de¬
grees functioned somewhat as a patent of nobility.
Just as academies of science owed much of their patronage and
support to the fashionability of new knowledge about the natural
world in courtly and aristocratic social circles, academies of art intro¬
duced ‘theoretical’ subjects that would enable their graduates to carry
on a dialogue in the same cultural vocabulary as the humanistically-
educated aristocracy. At the same time, the academies (themselves
selective and designed for an elite) prepared their graduates to move
easily in the social world of Baroque court life. (The Netherlands and
England provided exceptions to this generalization: the Dutch Repub¬
lic got along well enough without any national academy, and the
Royal Academy was in practice a chartered private corporation of
noted artists, only some of whom taught in its school.) In this way the
claims made by (and for) some artists in the Renaissance to be raised
above the herd of artisans found institutional and pedagogical rein¬
forcement.
The art academies founded in the sixteenth through eighteenth
centuries in Italy, France, the Holy Roman (German) Empire, Spain,
Russia, and elsewhere rested on the idea that artists required education
beyond the artisanal level of the guilds, but separate from that of uni¬
versities. The latter were in fact ill suited to take on the task, being in
most places a combination of prep school and degree mill for the pro¬
fessions of law, the clergy, and medicine, more likely to resist than to
embrace new forms of knowledge. By the eighteenth century, the
steam of Renaissance humanism, with its drive to revive antiquity and
recreate the vitality of philosophical exploration, had largely leaked
out of the academies of art. But, in the meantime, they had established
a function of another kind. They were, in most cases, state-supported

29
 institutes that not only taught art but also advised the ruler and con¬
trolled the market in ‘official’ art.'“ Successful study and adherence to
the classical idiom led to prizes and recognition vital to a successful
career as an artist to court and church patrons. Even though artists
trained by guilds still produced art, academy graduates were privi¬
leged. The Paris salon was originally open only to artists of the
academie, with the rights to exhibit in public by their non-academy
rivals suppressed or hamstrung by royal decree. The large commis¬
sions for churches, palaces and other ‘public’ venues - history paint¬
ings, allegories, and illustrations of classical myths and heroes - went
almost exclusively to academicians. Much of this art, languishing in
the storerooms of museums today, strikes many curators as so boring
that the term ‘academic art’ remains pejorative. Nevertheless, this was
the taste of the time, and it was the task of art academies to maintain
it. With the full support of other social institutions, they determined
what ‘good’ art was. Their graduates were the ‘good’ artists.
Academies were never quite able to establish a monopoly over
all art training though, nor was that their purpose. The guilds contin¬
ued in most places to turn out artists, too, and the line between ‘artist’
and ‘artisan’ remained fluid. In most western European lands, guild-
trained artists still competed on the market, but not head on in the
areas privileged to academicians, such as history painting, established
as highest on a genre pecking order. Various associations (often bear¬
ing the name of St. Luke, patron of artists) managed, as in France in
the eighteenth century, to gain permission to hold their own exhibi¬
tions. In some countries, academies were founded late or had fewer
exclusive privileges, as in Britain. The Golden Age of Netherlands
painting came and went without privileged academies.
The fact that artists could learn the basic artisanal skills of the
arts without the higher education’ provided by academies points to
one of the persistent problems of defining artists as professionals. If
the members of old learned professions — doctors, lawyers and
judges, pastors, and professors - had to undergo a university educa-

12 See Martin Wamke, The Court Artist. On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist
(Cambridge, 1993), for the argument that European courts, more than urban
Renaissance models, shaped the idea of the artist as a ‘mental worker’ rather
than a mere artisan.

30
tion, they did so because of a high ‘theoretical’ component in their
training, unavailable on a secondary school level. The difference be¬
tween an art academy and a secondary school was not so sharply
defined. The ‘theoretical’ component - involving mostly an acquaint¬
ance with classical literature - was also in practice not as arcane as,
say, Roman and canon law. One could (and some, like the German
Philanthropist movement of the late eighteenth century, did) argue that
the elite status of universities and academies had no justification. All
knowledge should be available to all. In that egalitarian spirit many
universities and a few academies sank in the wake of the French and
Napoleonic revolutions, only to return in one guise or another after
1815. Perhaps individuals could gain the necessary knowledge by in¬
dependent study. But the main interest of society lay in certifying
knowledge, however gained. As Goethe worried about artists’ training
in the introduction to his art periodical Propylaen (launched in
Weimar in 1798):

Art is practical, and the cultivation of the artist begins naturally in his earliest
years with the practical. The rest of his education is often neglected, whereas
it should be more carefully attended to than that of those who are able to
profit from life itself. Society soon civilizes the unpolished [...] while the
artist is usually confined to his solitary studio and has few dealings [...] with a
public [...].13

In the self-consciously backward and provincial world of the

Holy Roman Empire in its last years, Goethe’s new art journal aspired
to focus attention on, even begin to define, the serious artist as one
who was both carefully educated beyond the practical and confronted
with a ‘public’ whose education in taste was one of the journal’s
explicit goals. Nor was Goethe’s an isolated voice. As Kant wrote
at the beginning of the same decade, ‘The propaedeutic to all fine art
[...] appears to lie, not in precepts, but in the culture of the mental
powers produced by a sound preparatory education in what are called

13 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, ‘Introduction to the Propylaen,’ in John Gage (ed.

and transl.), Goethe on Art (Cambridge, 1980), p. 15. The passage in German
may be found in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Schriften zur Kunst, dtv-Gesamt-
ausgabe, (Munich, 1962), vol. 33, pp. 86—7.

31
 humaniora 14 Germany had at that time some art academies (the
young Goethe had attended one and long considered a career as a
painter), but there is little evidence they provided the kind of human¬
istic Bildung Kant and others were advocating. Nor could the Holy
Roman Empire boast anything like the salons and exhibitions of Paris
and London that showed off the products of their graduates.
To summarize changes in the social definition of artists by
Goethe’s time: The rise of organized state and aristocratic patronage,
the location of preferred access routes to that patronage through new
art academies and state-sponsored salons, and the success of such
‘new monarchs’ and ‘enlightened despots’ as Louis XIV or Frederick
II in imposing their artistic taste on a broader public all signaled the
decline of guild-organized artisanship by the end of the eighteenth
century. Guilds themselves were abolished or mortally wounded by
the era of the French Revolution.
Despite some fascinating attempts during that upheaval to revo¬
lutionize the role of the artist as well, that role (and even some of the
artists most deeply involved in revolutionary experiments) reverted
after the 1815 Restoration to a situation recognizably comparable to
that of the Ancien Regime. Only very slowly did a broader public (as
envisioned by Goethe) begin to develop and support artistic programs
not identical with those of academic production and taste. Still, the
political and socioeconomic assault on the Ancien Regime of 1789-
1815 left deep traces, unfinished programmatic agendas, and persis¬
tent questions about authority, legitimacy, and identity. As Henri
Brunschwig hypothesized, the ‘crisis of state’ (he was speaking of
Prussia) had direct links with the ‘genesis of the Romantic mental¬
ity.’15 One component of that mentality was the cult of genius, already
a topic of considerable intellectual discourse well before the French
Revolution.16 Kant had begun, for example, to separate artisanal from

14 Immanuel Kant, Kant s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, translated with seven

introductory essays by James C. Meredith (Oxford:, 1911), p. 226. Die Kritik
der Urteilskraft was first published in 1790.
15 Henri Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century
Prussia (Chicago, 1974), esp. chaps. 8 and 9.
16 Probably the first major claim in English that genius equaled exceptional talent
and that ‘born’ genius elevated its possessors above those still admitted to have
‘genius’ acquired by learning, e.g. from imitation or canonical models, was

32
 fine art: Art, so far as merely imitative, is only mechanical art;
whereas tine art is the art of genius.’17 Ironically, Goethe’s early
Sturm und Drang novel. The Sorrows of Young Werther, had fed the
genius mania of the 1770s and '80s, even though the Goethe who
founded the Propylden was well on his way to becoming an opponent
of emerging Romanticism. But successive decades would produce
many young 'geniuses’ yearning to free themselves from the complex
social hierarchy, even of an 'enlightened’ age, which ‘seemed to
promise regimentation rather than liberation [...]. The genius -
whether he realized himself in art or in deeds - defied this fate. [...].’
Great art emanating from inspiration rather than mere craftsmanship
was the highest form of action, in that it jolted mankind forward.18
The abolition of guild privileges under the impact of economic
refonn (not only in revolutionary France but also in politically
reactionary Britain and many German states) did largely survive the
counterrevolutionary backlash and produced a somewhat confused
situation for the occupation of artist in the early decades of the nine¬
teenth century. In order for Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to stroke or
lash those who offered the commodity of their labor, workers had to
be free of the constraints of traditional market regulators, including
guilds. The result was that both the ‘artisan’ and the ‘artist’ (in
Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations the ‘arts’ were still conceived as
artisanal skills)19 were permitted to define themselves. This self-
identification allowed, of course, for misrepresentation and deceit. But
laissez-faire reformers argued that the old, decayed, hierarchical and
patriarchal guild system, in practice, did also. The advantage of a free
labor market, even in professional or artistic services, lay in the
market’s theoretical capacity to sort out the good from the bad (or at
least the better from the worse bargain, since subsequent experience
has shown that the ‘best’ is often worsted in the market by an inferior,
but serviceable and cheaper variant).

made by Joseph Addison, ‘The Nature of Genius,’ in The Spectator, CXL

(1711).
17 Kant, Aesthetic Judgment, p. cxx.
18 Anthony La Vopa, Grace, Talent and Merit (Cambridge, 1988), p. 261.
19 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis, 1961), chap. 1 on the divi¬
sion of labor.

33
 One of the weaknesses of classical economic theory lay in its
heavy concentration on main areas of production and distribution
(such as agriculture and manufacturing). Scarce attention was paid to
more specialized types of labor, such as cultural production and distri¬
bution. Nor were the principles of those reforming ideas carried out
systematically on cultural markets. Although in the wake of such re¬
forms anybody could now call himself an artist, in practice ‘masters’
continued to take on pupils (even if neither had to belong to a guild),
art academies (unlike many universities) survived the assault on their
privileges and fusty ways, and most of the structure of art training,
production, and marketing carried on much as before. The first half of
the nineteenth century was notable, though, for some significant addi¬
tions, such as a growing public access to experiencing art (with the
opening of royal collections and the establishment of museums, the
popularity even among ordinary people of periodic art salons) and the
rise of private societies (e.g. Kunstvereine in German lands) combin¬
ing connoisseurs, patrons, and often artists. Adding to the confusion of
the market for artists’ services was the economic uncertainty of the
period 1815-50. A heavy burden of public debt from the Napoleonic
wars, the sweeping secularizations of Catholic church property, and
repeated slumps and crises of nascent industrial capitalism meant gov¬
ernment, ecclesiastical, and private patrons were chronically short of
funds to invest in the arts. The image of the ‘starving artist’ and ‘bo¬
hemia’ gained currency largely in this period.
It might be illuminating to cast a glance at parallel developments
among the so-called ‘traditional,’ non-artistic professions about the same
time. In medicine, law, and academic teaching, as well as in emerging
‘new professions’ such as engineering and chemistry, the quarter century
between the 1848 revolutions and the beginnings of the German Empire
(1871) witnessed numerous initiatives toward modem professionaliza¬
tion. These included demands by practitioners (with varying degrees of
success) for the foundation and recognition of professional lobbying
groups, including ones whose recmitment base transcended the local and
state (e.g. Prussian or Bavarian) level. Most of them agitated (in the long
mn successfully) for an upgrading and standardization of higher educa¬
tion and certification requirements (mostly controlled by the German
states). The goal of such agitation was to ‘raise the niveau (level) of the
profession (Stand),’ including the income and security of its practitio-

34
 ners, while also offering enhanced protection to the ‘consumers’ from
untrained practitioners, charlatans and ‘quacks.’ The outcomes of their
aspirations varied widely and depended in part on such factors as the
composition of the market tor their services (for example, primarily gov¬
ernment agencies, private enterprise and patrons, or a mixture of the
two).
Much of the story of professionalization in the nineteenth century
involves the invocation of methodological sophistication as a rationale
for certifying some varieties of expert knowledge as more important than
others. A prime example is found in the reshaping of the medical profes¬
sion. Before the systematic scientific study of illness and cure that began
to form a part of medical school curriculum in the early nineteenth cen¬
tury, surviving a mortal illness depended very little on treatment by a
doctor. Most social strata could not afford a doctor in any case. What
medical attention they might get came from non-academically trained
barber surgeons, midwives, herbalists, pharmacists, ‘wise women’ and
others unexposed to university medical faculties. As the diagnostic and
therapeutic efficacy of ‘school’ medicine began to improve, however, its
practitioners began demanding a monopoly on medical practice. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, at least in Germany, they had suc¬
ceeded in suppressing the training and licensing of barber-surgeons
(Wundarzte) and were on the warpath against other non-academic medi¬
cal practitioners, now lumped together as ‘quacks.’ The most convincing
argument for this monopoly claim was the conquest of disease by ‘sci¬
entific medicine. ’
Medical school doctors to this day still compete with ‘alternative
healers’ that can demonstrate enough therapeutic success and attract a
sufficient clientele to infringe on their monopoly claims. In the case of
most professions, a clear ‘public interest’ provides a rationale for regula¬
tion. The professions’ own interests pull in the direction of organizing in
order to influence or even dominate that regulation. With the knowledge
based professions, a claim to ‘learned’ or ‘scientific’ expertise sustains a
demand to leave regulation, certification, licensing, fee structures, and
other working conditions to the ‘experts’ themselves. Artists are clearly
experts, to be sure. But what is the ‘learned’ and ‘taught’ element? To
what extent is it based on ‘higher’ learning or ‘theoretical,’ complex
knowledge only acquirable by years of study? Put another way, does the
knowledge base of artists justify privileging them with licenses, mo-

35
 nopolies, prestige and high incomes such as doctors and lawyers claim?
And academic artists face an even bigger challenge. Unless the art mar¬
ket is strictly regulated, the public - not the profession - decides what is
art and who can call himself an artist.
The answer at one time depended on the nature of artistic training.
Much of that consists of mechanical and practical tradition (also true of
other professions). Insofar as ‘new knowledge’ intruded upon and began
to change that training, it arrived from outside the ateliers of the art
academies.
If one dares a sweeping generalization, art academies generally re¬
sisted new influences, whether technical (e.g. photography) or intellec¬
tual (e.g. Modernism) until after World War I.20 They were not alone.
Despite reforms and advances, resistance to innovation that might upset
the social order characterized most European higher education systems.
While ‘pure science’ gained a foothold in universities and ultimately
flourished, its ‘materialism’ was suspect to many professors of law, the¬
ology, or humanities faculties. Modem engineering, too, had to develop
largely outside the traditional universities, in separate technical colleges,
because ‘applied’ science appeared too close to ‘trade,’ that socially infe¬
rior bourgeois activity that university students hoped to rise above.
As a result of these developments, much of the innovation in art
education after the mid-nineteenth century occurred in non-academy art
schools. The story of reform, parallel existence, or fusion of applied arts
schools (such as the German Kimstgewerbeschulen) and art academies
will form a major theme of this book.
Academy professors then, and even some scholars today, would in¬
sist on excluding the ‘applied’ art from any serious history of art. Only
‘fine’ art, or that produced by ‘free’ (as opposed to employee) artists
should be worthy of consideration. This view might still be defensible
for hero history, but it cannot work for social history. On closer inspec¬
tion it does not even work for hero history after 1900: so many of the
prominent ‘fine’ artists trained in non-academy schools! If we accept
that graduates of both applied arts schools and academies can be
counted as artists, whom else should we include? Many recent sur-

20 The academies conservatism did not stop a growing mutual interaction be¬
tween photographers and other visual artists, however. See Otto Stelzer, Kunst
und Photographie. Kontakte. Einfliisse. Wirkungen (Munich, 1978).

36
veys of living artists have fallen back on the device of letting those
polled decide if they are artists. This remarkable lapse of social sci¬
ence rigor results from the absence of a universal qualifying principle
comparable to physician licensing or admission to the legal bar. Nor
have recent attempts to define the artists’ occupational status for pen¬
sion purposes proved very helpful, since they leave out persons mak¬
ing the bulk of their countable income in other fields but who may still
be productive artists. What of others who make art only occasionally
or as a hobby, Sunday painters or sidewalk chalk artists? Should
amateurs, ’gifted’ or ‘ordinary,’ be counted among the artist popula¬
tion?
Another way of defining artists is through their professional
commitment. Just as membership in a medical or engineering society
connotes professional engagement (and, usually, qualifications), so
can joining an artists’ organization. Few professional organizations
ever enlist all qualified practitioners (unless required by law, like the
Nazi Culture Chamber). But if they reach a significant degree of ‘in-
clusiveness’(e.g. contain 60 per cent of all practitioners) their collec¬
tive views can be taken as reflecting at least partly those of the wider
profession. Even here eccentric exceptions appear. When the English
Royal Academy of Arts obtained its charter in 1768, there were not
enough artists available to fill its 40 places. Some of those elected
would not have been considered professional artists by later standards.
A century later, the (now 42) member and 20 associates pretended to
be ‘the profession,’ but in fact there were dozens more left outside and
forced, as happened in other countries, to form new associations to
promote their interests.21
One of these chief interests was exhibiting, and also selling art¬
works. All sorts of organizations proliferated in the nineteenth century
to achieve this end. Some were almost purely formed for this purpose
by artists themselves, as a kind of marketing cooperative. Others (e.g.
Kunstvereine) involved laymen, ‘amateurs’ in the original sense of
admirers and collectors. Still others (by 1900) more resembled profes¬
sional associations devoted to the total interests of practitioners, in¬
cluding economic, social, educational, legal, and economic goals, like

21 See Royal Academy of Arts, Report from the Council of the Royal Academy to
the General Assembly of Artists (London, 1860), p. 19.

37
 the Reichsverband bildender Kiinstler Deutschlands (German Na¬
tional Association of Visual Artists, hereafter RVBKD). Yet others,
especially after World War II, chose the modified form of labor un¬
ions. One can argue whether all these types of artists’ organizations
can legitimately be called ‘professional.’ Some scholars, for example,
have deemed membership in a labor union as incompatible with the
(quintessentially bourgeois) status of a ‘liberal profession.’ I will in¬
clude them all, however, as legitimate mouthpieces of artists’ diverse
professional interests. Membership in them is one (but not an exclu¬
sive) marker of defining who is an artist. And in most cases, their
membership criteria are exclusive enough to discourage those who
feel a ‘calling’ to be an artist but lack the commonly accepted pre¬
requisites of training and professional experience.
The many part-time, amateur, hobby, and temporary artists, as
well as non-practitioner players such as dealers, critics, curators, art
historians, collectors, and the art public can be placed in another cate¬
gory. I like to call this the Interessengemeinschaft Kunst or ‘Interest
Community of Art.’ One might say there is such an interest commu¬
nity tor all piofessions: the ill and their kin for medicine, for example.
Interaction and ‘dialogue’ between professional groups and the inter¬
est community definitely shape the former, although it attempts to
maintain its autonomy from illegitimate or ill-informed lay opinion.
The arts professions enjoy (and suffer from) both a low degree of in¬
teraction with — and a high degree of dependence on — their interest
community. Indeed one of the problems with determining who is an
artist is that the interest community (including the public, journalists,
gallery owners, museum people, and foundations) can validate people
as artists whom the narrower profession would not. What is decried in
other professional groups as charlatanism, showmanship, hucksterism,
or unfair competition has had to be accepted (if often grimly) among
artists.
Having accepted a very broad standard of inclusion in defining
artists, we should also recognize some of the distinctions among them.
Just as medicine developed specialists and great gaps in prestige and
income between the humble family doctor and the ‘heroic’ brain sur¬
geon, the art world developed its own hierarchies. Among painters,
the highest prestige lay with ‘history pictures,’ oils depicting scenes
from a real or mythical past, from battles to Biblical or classical alle-

38
 gories. Such works were meant for large spaces - churches, palaces,
government buildings - and took many man hours to complete. Al¬
though descendents of this class of painting can still be seen today —
one thinks of Anselm Kiefer — it has all but disappeared in recent
decades. Landscapes, often quite large, also held a high place in the
prestige scale. Portraits, ‘genre’ scenes, still lifes, and marine painting
could be highly regarded, but were also considered less difficult.
Except for portraits, they also depended less on commissions. A com¬
mission from a wealthy patron carried more social prestige than sell¬
ing on the open market, partly because of the recognition of the artist
by the upper classes, partly because such commissions often led to a
stream of others and to financial security. Oil paintings, particularly
large ones, also registered higher on the scale of esteem because, at
least before confessed dash-off artists like Picasso, they simply re¬
quired more investment. Canvas and oils did not come cheap, even
after their production was industrialized, and the larger format re¬
quired more time (or more assistants) - many years, in some cases. A
‘history painting’ with dozens of faces could require months of sitting
by living participants, for example. The sort of oil painting popular in
a domestic setting would include individual or family portraits and
landscapes (especially of interest to landowners). Genre pictures cov¬
ered a wide range of subjects, from heartwarming, moralizing or
amusing illustrations of everyday life (the predecessors of Norman
Rockwell) and decorative still lifes. Precisely the ‘ordinary’ subject
matter or alleged ‘easiness’ of the task rendered these classes of
painting less valuable. According to classical academic canons, nobil¬
ity and gravitas of subject matter must characterize history painting,
whether depicting ancient myths, Biblical scenes, or historical events.
Other media such as watercolors, drawings, and prints (initially
from engravings or woodcuts, later from lithography, photography,
etc.) generally fetched lower market prices, partly because they re¬
quired less effort to produce and were more widely available. These
media also contributed to the popularization of successful easel
paintings. Engravings of prize-winning history paintings, for example,
could be bought to grace ordinary bourgeois living rooms, with the
size adjusted for domestic consumption. Later photography and roto¬
gravure allowed even wider distribution of reproductions of interest¬
ing paintings via art journals and ultimately newspapers. And of

39
 course artists in all the non-oil media created original works, exhibited
and marketed with or in competition to oils. (Many artists of course
worked in a multiplicity of media.)
Sculpture and architecture had their own distinctions. As with
paintings, large sculptures in marble, bronze, or other durable, difficult,
and expensive materials traditionally held highest prestige. It is easily
forgotten looking at modem and postmodern buildings, so bare of orna¬
ment, that decoration of internal and external spaces of buildings pro¬
vided a large market for sculptors. Such projects as the Paris Opera, but
also government, church and even commercial buildings kept dozens of
sculptors busy for years. They worked closely with architects, who con¬
sidered their profession the ‘mother of all the visual arts,’ to create a
harmonious collection of reflections of a classical or eclectic noble past.
Yet sculptors also made smaller designs — domestic-sized replicas of
large public pieces, with a range ot subject matter comparable to that of
painters. They also designed coins, medals, and other small objects. Per¬
haps because ol the relatively limited market, the high overhead for large
ateliers, and the physical^ demands of the craft, art schools turned out
relatively few sculptors.22 On the other hand, easel artists themselves
often tried their hand at sculpture. More than with painting, the challenge
of Modernism tended to blur the lines between academic sculpture and
craftwork in such media as metal, wood, stone or ceramics.
Distinctions among architects were also deeply felt. Most structures
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were ‘designed’ (if that is not
too grand a woid) by ordinary builders and craftsmen, masons, carpen¬
ters, and later plumbers and electricians. Traditional styles and materials,
tried and true, predominated. In continental Europe, the French ‘statist’
tradition prevailed, promoting large public works designed by people
(usually civil servants) trained in special ‘building schools’ (Bou¬
se hu l en). Those architects trained (in relatively small numbers) by art
academies or, by the twentieth century, polytechnic colleges could claim
a more specialized knowledge of a classical vocabulary or of recent
innovations of a technical nature (steel, glass, and reinforced concrete).

22 Some evidence from France suggests that sculptors also tended to be recruited
socially more from the artisanal strata, in comparison to the mostly middle-class
backgrounds of painting students. See Albert Boime, Hollow Icons. The Politics
of Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, OH, 1987), p. 3

40
Each group of architects in Gennany had its own professional orientation
and organization. Independent contractors (non-civil servants) were rare
until the beginning of the twentieth century, when enough were
practicing to fonn the League of German Architects (BDA) in 1904. In
Austria around the same time, an Architects’ Club emerged from the
Viennese Genossenschaft bildender Kiinstler. As one of its prominent
members, Otto Wagner, wrote, as the ‘pinnacle of artist-recognized
architects’ it should leave to the state the examination of engineering
competence, but be granted approval rights over buildings from the
aesthetic viewpoint.23 The rise of ‘free’ architects reflected the boom in
large private building projects as well as individually designed domestic
houses commissioned by an expanding and prosperous bourgeoisie. The
style battles of the 1920s, pitting neoclassical against modernist,
representational against non-representational, and functionalist against
Romantic artists, among others, mirrored to some extent the turf wars
among contending professional groups. The reform of the arts-and-crafts
schools around the turn of the twentieth century also began a process of
fusion between architecture and other forms of design, with conse¬
quences still palpable in the early twenty-first century. The Bauhaus, we
should remember, started as a school, not a style. It sought to outflank
the hidebound traditionalism of architecture as taught in contemporary
art academies and to apply more imagination to structures (as well as
industrial products) than most engineering graduates could.
Painters, sculptors, and architects belonged to the ‘fine’ arts, and
many of them were ‘free’ professionals in the sense of independent con¬
tractors. The nineteenth century made the further distinction between
them and the ‘applied’ arts (also known, in the Romance languages, as
‘minor’ arts). Here we encounter ‘artisans,’ Handwerker, craftsmen. The
distinction is not so clear if one goes back to the origins of such words as
‘artist’ and ‘artisan.’ By the mid-nineteenth century the gap in social es¬
teem between academic ‘artists’ and artisans trained in apprenticeship
could hardly have been wider. Men and women who made their living
by decorative painting, for example, certainly enriched others’ lives with
elegant ceilings, fine porcelains, or beautiful jewelry. But much of their

23 Otto Wagner, Moderne Architektur (Vienna, 1895); the citation is from the
third edition (Vienna, 1902), p. 37. Reprinted from a later edition, Die Baukunst
unserer Zeit (Vienna, 1979).

41
 work consisted of a few skills repeated ad infinitum, such as applying
flower designs to a china plate. Even when such artisans began to attend
formal ‘art schools’ that gradually supplanted the guilds and apprentice¬
ship training, they were accused of being stuffed only with rote learning.
Pupils studied Musterbucher, books cataloguing (mostly historical)
design motifs. They then ‘applied’ their memorized motifs to the task at
hand. According to nineteenth century pedagogy and psychology, this
was not Bi/dung (cultivation), with its implied active and creative
engagement of the individual mind and its noble subject matter, but just
routine development of skills requiring little imagination. The denial of
‘creativity’ to such craft trades might not result in economic deprivation:
on the contrary. But it did foster a gap in social esteem and, no doubt,
low aesthetic self-expectations among craftspeople.
By the end of the nineteenth century, a crisis in the applied arts
appeared obvious to many observers. This crisis paralleled aesthetic
objections by Modernists to the sterility of academic realism, the
oppressiveness of neo-historical pomposity, and the fettered imagination
of a bureaucratized society. In part the crisis involved the continuing
industrialization and mechanization of production processes previously
done entirely or largely by hand. As long as products in one or another
‘historical’ style remained fashionable, craftsmen could rely on models
and patterns derived from, say, the Gothic or Renaissance periods. By
the 1890s some producers were beginning to make domestic consumer
goods using industrial methods, for example electric lamps. Some
employers and consumers began demanding creativity in design. The
designs we associate with art nouveau, often with sinuous, ‘organic’
motifs based on botany, required imagination and training more akin to
that expected in art academies than in schools of commercial art. In
Germany, pressure for change came from innovative industrialists, but
also from prominent intellectuals calling for a renewal of aesthetic
values and better art education (e.g. the Kunsterziehungsbewegung or
‘Art Education Movement’ led by the director of Hamburg’s Art
Museum, Alfred Lichtwark).
The Deutscher Werkbund (German Crafts League), bringing
together industrialists, intellectuals, and social reformers, articulated a
determination to apply modem design to manufacturing processes. Its
more utopian members even hoped to reshape modem man by
improving his living quarters and environment and educating his taste

42
(and not incidentally blunting the alienation that led to support for
Marxist revolutionary ideas). It also counted among its members and
prominent spokesmen people like Hermann Muthesius, who was able to
reshape the whole Prussian art school system from his desk in the Trade
Ministry. Given such clout in the early years of the twentieth century,
whenever a director post of an arts-and-crafts school fell vacant, it was
almost sure to go to one of the insiders supported by the Werkbund or
some other like-minded group of reformers. The result was a sweeping
modernization and upgrading of the schools.
The renewal of arts and crafts and the reform of schools devoted to
them, what we might today call the arena of ‘design,’ and which is
symbolized by the products of Jugendstil (art nouveau) on through
interwar products of the Bauhaus did not come about without a struggle.
A Fachverband fur die wirtschaftlichen Interessen des Kunstgewerbes
(Trade Association for the Economic Interests of Ails and Crafts) held
its first conference in 1906 in Berlin mostly to complain - in the name of
traditional industries supplying products for domestic building and
furnishings - about the state of arts-and-crafts education. Factory owners
(sometimes at the same time members of state legislatures) and
businessmen complained that the reformed schools’ workshops were
competing with their firms, that the chief Prussian reformer Muthesius
was ‘insulting’ the industry, and that private architects were unduly
influencing their clients’ choice of decor.24
The virtual death knell of heavy Wilhelmine neo-historical decora¬
tion was rung at the Third German Arts and Crafts Exposition in
Dresden (1906), The Fachverband'’ s unhappiness with such innovations
led to a condemnation of Muthesius at its 1907 meeting. That in turn
prompted a walkout by a diverse group of entrepreneurs, designers,
educators, economists, and politicians who proceeded to found the Werk¬
bund?5 Although active artists constituted the largest group in its initial
membership (224 out of 492 in 1908), the majority of members were

24 See Berichte uber die Versammlung deutscher Kunstgewerbetreibender, 1

(1906), pp. 1-2, 74-6; 2 (1907), p. 97; 3 (1908), pp. 49-51; 6 (1911), pp. 79-
80.
25 Hans Eckstein, ‘Idee und Geschichte des Deutschen Werkbunds, 1907-1957,’
in idem (ed.), 50 Jahre Deutscher Werkbund (Frankfurt/M., 1958), p. 8. For a
good account of the Werkbund in its heyday, see Joan Campbell, The German
Werkbund. The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton, 1978).

43
 entrepreneurs and ‘specialists,’ including such political figures as Fried¬
rich Naumann, the liberal reformer and later founder of the German De¬
mocratic Party, as well as his disciple (and later president of the Federal
Republic of Gennany) Theodor Heuss. Other influential early members
included the educational reformer Georg Kerschensteiner, designers and
art school heads Henry van de Velde, Peter Behrens, Fritz Schumacher,
Walter Gropius, Richard Riemerschmid, and Bruno Paul, and innovative
manufacturers such as Karl Schmidt-Hellerau (Dresden Ateliers), Peter
Bruckmann (Heilbronn silverware), and Robert Bosch, the publicists
Ernst Jackli, Eugen Diederichs, and Fritz Hellwag, the environmentalist
and architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and many others from diverse
backgrounds and political and social views. The membership grew
quickly to nearly 1,900 people by 1913.26
What made the Werkbund unique was that it ‘rejected the back¬
ward-looking handicraft romanticism of most English and Continental
cultural critics and refused to indulge in the cultural pessimism increas¬
ingly fashionable in intellectual circles.’-7 The crisis of arts and crafts
production was bound up with a broad drive to improve the public’s taste
and quality of life as well as make German export goods more
competitive. Artists as well as craftspeople and designers were worried.
Traditional German art (the sort derided by the secessionists) had ceased
to sell well abroad as well as at home by the turn of the century. The
same was tme of the bulk of German consumer products, from the rou¬
tine stick-on ornamentation common to tens of thousands of apartment
houses and commercial buildings to furniture and kitchenware. Although
this was the province of small-scale enterprises, even large concerns
such as the Hamburg-America and North German Lloyd steamship lines
(both Werkbund members) the German General Electric Company
(AEG), and the Bahlsen biscuit concern were keen to make their luxury
liners, turbine sheds, and cookies more attractive to international
customers by introducing a new look. Thus controlling what got shown
at international exhibitions and what got turned out from the reformed

26 Deutscher Werkbund, Jahresbericht, 1 (1908/9) through 6 (1913/14), Mit-

gliederstatistik.
27 Campbell, Werkbund, p. 3.

44
Kunstgewerbeschule system were also viewed as matters of national
survival in an age saturated in social Darwinism.28
The Werkbund'’s name itself points to the organization’s common
purpose, to reintroduce aesthetics into manufacturing, and the artist into
the process of design, from ‘the sofa cushion to urban planning’ in
Muthesius’s term. Werk means both (artistic) ‘opus’ and (industrial)
‘factory,’ hence the intended ambiguity and consequent difficulty of
translating the organization’s name exactly. The exhibitions it influenced
and itself organized down to World War I became landmarks in the his¬
tory of modem design, reaching a pinnacle in the Cologne Exposition of
1914. Splits within the organization and the war diminished its high
hopes but did not end its interwar influence (including via the Bauhaus)
on German and foreign design cultures, notably in France.
Much of the initial impetus for art school reform derived from
concern about harmonizing advanced design concepts with industrial
development. What is also noteworthy about the reformed Kimstge-
werbeschulen and their modernized equivalents elsewhere: they were
now regularly training people for later careers indistinguishable from
those of academy graduates. Indeed, by the 1920s, this almost pulling
even with academies prompted many calls for the fusion of the latter
with schools of applied art, actually carried out in a number of cases
(usually over the protests of the professional academicians). It is
especially important to note the role of women in the arts professions by
this time. Women were excluded from full formal admission to all but
two smaller art academies (Kassel and Frankfurt’s privately founded
Stadelschule) until the unraveling of Imperial Germany at the end of

28 For an excellent statement of this importance, see Heinrich Waentig, Wirtschaft

und Kunst: eine Unlersuchung uber Geschichte und Theorie der modernen
Kunstgewerbebewegung (Jena, 1909).
29 See Stanislaus von Moos (ed.), L ’Esprit Nouveau: Le Corbusier und die
Industrie, 1920-1925 (Zurich, 1987), p. 15. Le Corbusier had trained in Peter
Behrens’s workshop in Berlin (1910-11) and was a convinced associate of the
Werkbund. The journal L ’Esprit Nouveau, which he edited with Ozenfant and
Dermec, sought to reconcile technology and art in France. The French version
of the interaction of art trends and design in France is discussed in Nancy Troy,
Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier
(New Haven, 1991). For a recent attempt to ‘map the discursive terrain’ behind
the Werkbund, see Frederick J. Schwartz, The Werkbund. Design Theory and
Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven, 1996).

45
 World War I. A later age can deplore and ridicule the arguments used to
exclude women from higher education as unscientific and simply
expressive of power relationships between genders. Ironically this
exclusion did not mean women were considered unfit for the arts.30
Applied-arts schools allowed and encouraged female students in the
nineteenth century. Their admission to the ‘minor’ arts professions
reflects a bias not only of gender, but also of social class. Pupils at
Kunstgewerbeschulen were considered adept enough at applying ideas,
but not gifted by nature (women) and nurture (not recruited from the
Bildungsburgertum) enough to create. The complexity and notional
mental creative activity of university or academy or (later) technical
college study, and thus entry into the learned professions should be
reserved, many professors seriously argued, for males.
To underscore the monopoly of (originally all male) university
graduates on traditional learned professions, members of the latter in¬
voked the licensing powers of the state. Typically the (male) members of
‘new’ professions (such as engineers, chemists or dentists) had trouble
locking down their professional access as tightly as the ‘old’ ones (medi¬
cine, law, church). Although the arts constituted very old professions,
too, they had even greater trouble enforcing a system of educational cer¬
tificates and licenses. In most of Europe, anybody could call himself an
artist without running afoul of the law. Success of course usually de¬
pended on training. But one of the anomalies of arts education even in
the nineteenth century was its ready availability as private instmction -
even to women. Through this back door, women could and did (usually
at a high cost in fees; academy instmction was normally free) become

30 For a thorough and enlightening discussion of the situation in other parts of

Europe, see Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France
and England. Their Art Education, Exhibition Opportunities and Membership
of Exhibiting Societies and Academies, 2 vols. (New York, 1984). Yeldham ar¬
gues that professionalization of women artists only became possible after 1840.
Before then, drawing, making a likeness, and painting Powers and landscapes
were part of middle-class girls’ education, but only as an ‘accomplishment.’
The creation of a government-sponsored design school was meant at first to
train girls from the lower social orders in practical skills, but it soon attracted
more daughters of the middle and upper classes. By the end of the century
women graduates of what finally came to be called the Royal College of Art
had come to constitute over a third of the students at the Royal Academy
Schools. See ibid., I, 9^10.

46
serious and even nervously respected professional artists. But sexual
prudery often denied them full access to what was still considered the
highest level of instruction, drawing from the nude human model. The
fact that Akt means both ‘nude’ and ‘coitus’ in Gennan gives us some
idea how cautiously academies and schools had to regulate their ‘class¬
room’ and who could enter it. In even more puritanical England, art
courses involving nudes were even euphemistically called ‘life classes.’
The late and grudging admission of women to all levels of academy
training had, by then, more symbolic than practical consequences.
Women could already achieve almost the same training (although with¬
out the same prestige and access to official privileges, such as the Prix de
Rome competition in France and comparable prizes in Germany). Thus
they had entered the arts professions well before their sisters could
practice law, medicine or a professorial or pastoral career. We cannot say
what percentage of women attending art schools of all types, including
expensive private classes, later went on to launch a full-time career in the
fine arts. One can assume that those who did not do so nevertheless
remained in the Interest Community of Art. Artistic skills and sen¬
sibilities still belonged to the ‘accomplishments’ of bourgeois and ar¬
istocratic women. Some women artists achieved lasting fame (such as
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Miinter, and Kathe Kollwitz). It is
less well known that others achieved public recognition and status as
professionals, only to fall into relative obscurity in our own time. One of
the wealthiest and most successful portraitists of Central Europe under
the Empire, for example, Tini Rupprecht, earned a stunning million
marks by 1914, although by then most portraits were photographically
made (quite often by portraitists turned photographers).31
A final point about training women artists is the irony that their
exclusion from state academies provided a lucrative source of income
for numerous male professional artists. The Academie Julian in Paris
was merely one of the largest and best known of these entrepreneurial
ventures, replicated in every art center from London to Budapest.
Major German art centers witnessed the founding of private ‘ladies’
academies’ by associations of women artists themselves: Berlin
(1867), Munich (1884), and Karlsruhe (1885), with more following.

31 Robin Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850-1914 (Manchester,

1997), pp. 12,71.

47
 Not only did private instruction of female students provide a consider¬
able income to many established male artists; ironically, the instruc¬
tors, cashing in on their titles, were often the very professors of the
local art academy who would never consider admitting women! For
such individuals, admitting female students for free instruction at the
academy would mean increasing their workload at their ‘day job’
without additional compensation, and at the same time losing the fat
tees they received from the same women as private pupils.
If the question, ‘Who is an artist?’ had become more complicated
than ever by the 1920s, the answers provided by European fascism
and bolshevism were unambiguously straightforward. Just as one of
Hitler’s role models, the cynical antisemitic mayor of late imperial
Vienna, Karl Lueger, had proclaimed: ‘I determine who is a Jew,’
Nazi definitions of artists resembled those of Soviet and other totali¬
tarian regimes: ‘We determine who is an artist.’ More precisely, offi¬
cial or informal policies defined who was not an artist. Just as the
Nazis never bothered defining the term Aryan either, just ‘non-Aryan,’
their purpose was exclusion, the only sure means of control.32
These definitions were pragmatic rather than philosophically pro¬
found. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the official
name of the Nazis) had garnered more votes for its promises to restore
order and security in the economic, social, and international sphere
than for its aesthetic or even its racial ideology. Its neocorporatist
ideas about social organization lacked originality but not cynical au¬
dacity. Both fascist and Bolshevik/Stalinist dictatorships defined art¬
ists negatively: those we dislike or fear may not function as artists.
Eliminating Jews, women, foreigners, anybody with leftist or liberal
sympathies or working in a stylistic vocabulary considered ‘avant-
garde’ before the mid-1920s required no long pondering for the Nazis.
All the rest (including some women) were forced to join the Reichs-
kulturkammer. To be a professional artist of any kind - from easel
painter to last chair in the violin section of an orchestra — one had to
belong to it. To take a job or commission, one had to have its ‘union

32 For a fascinating discussion of local art scenes and the instrumentalization of

'degenerate art’ ideology even before the infamous national show of 1937, see
Christoph Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst . Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-
Deutschland (Worms, 1995).

48
card. How and why proud, independent, and organizationally splin¬
tered artists might not only tolerate but also initially welcome this
treatment will be another theme of this book.
The organizational fate of German artists under Communist rule
also concerns us. Not only the infamous style (‘socialist realism,’
‘socialist in content; national in form’) but also the regimentation of
artists left a distinct imprint in the half of Europe subject to Stalin
after 1945. As under the Nazi dictatorship, artists had to belong to the
appropriate union. Expulsion meant exclusion from work (except per¬
haps in a demeaning manual job) or worse (jail, camps, death). Visual
artists perhaps sutfered on the whole a little less than writers did, be¬
cause subversive intent is harder to read into a sculpture than a poem.
(This did not prevent a host of party-favored critics and monitors from
trying to do so.)
An example of such interference that rose to the level of public
controversy can be observed in the various attempts of Bernhard
Heisig to paint over his Paris Commune between 1964 and 1972.
Although Heisig, today one of the best known artists produced by the
German Democratic Republic, had been trying in this painting to
show the final desperate moments of the last stand of the European
left in 1871, Heisig was criticized for being too ‘pessimistic’ in
showing the defeat as - a defeat. After a party investigation and his
own public ‘self-criticism,’ Heisig lost his teaching post. Only in
1972, after painting over and modifying the original, was Heisig
rehabilitated, but two Stasi informants were secretly attached to him.
Heisig was, of course, anything but a doubter of the party and clung to
his membership in it until late 1989. Heisig’s case is cited here not to
show how artists adapted to east block regimes, but how even their
loyal adaptations could be viewed suspiciously by a regime intent
upon deciding who is an artist.33
As compensation for serving up ‘official art,’ those artists not
running afoul of shifts in Communist Party aesthetics may have en¬
joyed a degree of material security (and a chosen few even privileged
prosperity). In those parts of Central Europe with an arts tradition in¬
fluenced by Germany - Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and obvi-

33 Eckhart Gillen, ‘Der entmtindigte Ktinstler,’ in Gunther Feist et al. (eds.),

Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR, 1945-1990 (Cologne, 1996), p. 13.

49
 ously the GDR - training and qualification continued much as before
1945. For all intents and purposes, and to an even higher degree than
under the Nazis, virtually all art patronage fell to the state and the
party.
The answer to the question, 'Who is an artist?’ changed abruptly
when the Nazi and Stalinist regimes collapsed. The victorious Allies
disbanded the Reichskulturkammer, along with most other profes¬
sional organizations. In West Germany, professional artistic life
gradually reverted to the forms and definitions of the pre-Nazi
(Weimar Republic) era, with some significant differences. One in¬
cluded the breakthrough of the labor union movement into the arts
world, with many artists’ organizations affiliating with unions. An¬
other was the struggle to include artists in the national system of sick¬
ness, disability, and old age insurance covering most other citizens. A
comparable process of de-institutionalization occurred with artists
from East Germany and the other Warsaw Pact countries after 1989.
In both cases - post-1945 and post-1989 - certain artists fell into dis¬
grace; a few saw their careers or reputations restored or launched be¬
cause of political change. In both cases most artists faced poverty and
unemployment without the paternalist protection of the recent dicta¬
torship, under circumstances of ‘rebuilding’ that diverted resources
into basic infrastructure - and away from art.
By our own time, a combination of educational qualifications,
professional memberships, and such legal categories as health and
retirement benefits help define artists in Germany and most of Europe.
This is not to say that all artists are so defined. It is still possible for
anybody to claim to be an artist. The Basic Law of the Federal Re¬
public of Germany (FRG) guarantees that scholarship and art are free.
But the vast majority of artists (including writers, musicians and thea¬
tre performers) have organized professionally. Whether this degree of
structure has produced a higher level of professionals’ control over
their careers, working lives, and fortunes remains to be explored.
In the most existential sense, ‘Who is an artist?’ is answered
every day, in every generation, by an individual response: ‘I am.’ The
makeup and volume of a chorus of such responses also varies. The
society in which artists live then echoes and validates the claim, or
not. Whether in the ‘marketplace’ (from price-rigging elite auction
houses to flea markets), parliamentarians’ or bureaucrats’ desks

50
 (where public funds get distributed and welfare systems adjusted), at
the art schools, or in the streets, society gives its verdict on who is an
artist, too. The type of the individual genius producing individual
works as a small entrepreneur still exists, and a few even manage to
command ‘star’ incomes. It remains to be seen if this class of artist has
diminished. Recent surveys indicate a high percentage of prosperous
artists working as employees, for example in industries associated
with advertising, or as teachers in various levels of schools. The intro¬
duction ot mass education after World War II may have offered more
'day jobs’ to keep artists going, but it also produced more artists.
Across the whole spectrum, most of those responding to surveys nei¬
ther report incomes comparable to other learned professions nor re¬
flect the kind of full-time dedication expected in them. Many artists
report that only a part of their income derives from works of art. The
most recent German study has to plead the case, amidst a new vogue
for 'privatization,’ that artists still need help from the public sector.34
In a way the market influences who is an artist by rewarding a
successful one. In another way, artists themselves decide who is an
artist. There is virtually no other profession in which declaring oneself
to be a member suffices for inclusion. At the same time, artists select
and mark each other constantly. They begin this process at the latest in
art schools, where even as students they begin to recognize ‘real tal¬
ent’ in their own peers (and sometimes their professors do, too). Most
visual artists must reply on exhibitions to make their work known;
most of these are juried, usually by other artists. Peer recognition is an
important element in identifying ‘good’ artists,35 and in the absence of

34 Because artworks are so often unique, and because art ‘products and services’
cannot be delivered with ever greater unit efficiencies in the manner of manu¬
factured goods and many other services (such as banking or telecommunica¬
tions), they appear to grow relatively more expensive. In a completely free
market, this could lead to the complete elimination of art - a prospect most
civilized countries are not ready to contemplate, even if they do not keep pace
with the level of subsidies of the past. See Robke, Kunst und Arbeit, p. 119 and,
for one of the best economic analyses of the problem, William J. Baumol and
William G. Bowen, Performing Arts - The Economic Dilemma (Aldershot,
1993).
35 This remains true at the end of the twentieth century, despite the increased
power of non-artist judges to influence the market. For a discussion of peer rec¬
ognition as the first step to a successful career, see the observations of Tate

51
 some other professional mechanisms like licensing marks at least a
part of the professional community as within the inner circle. But the
artists’ community has never been able (at least not since the mid¬
nineteenth century) to agree on style and ‘matters of taste.’ Disagree¬
ments about the ‘right’ way to paint, sculpt, or build have always
militated against artists closing ranks in professional organizations.
The organizations that had some success scrupulously avoided issues
of style. It was therefore seldom possible for artists’ professional or¬
ganizations to threaten sanctions for not producing ‘correct’ art, the
way a medical society could expel a member for malpractice. (The
self-discrediting exceptions were the Nazi Reichskulturkammer and
Stalinist artist unions.)
The fine distinctions among visual artists include those of exhib¬
iting. An artist who has never exhibited work, like an architect who
has never built a building, is not usually taken seriously by profes¬
sional peers. The public exhibition was the classic method of drawing
attention to one’s work (and it still functions in modified form today).
The grand annual exhibitions of the London Royal Academy or the
Paris, Munich and Berlin Salons were recurring rituals that established
artistic canons and reputations. The academicians themselves juried
the works, often that of their colleagues or students. Quarrels over the
selection process were endemic. One answer was to have non-juried
exhibitions, but these also satisfied nobody. Ultimately groups of art¬
ists broke away from the establishment practice to hold their own ex¬
hibitions, as with the famous salon des refuses in Paris in 1863 and the
various ‘secessions’ from the official salons of Germany and Austria
in the 1890s. These were attempts to gain attention for a self-selecting
‘elite,’ not a defiant response to censorship. Being ‘refused’ by a jury
was neither unusual nor an insult to professional honor. (Indeed, if
anything the secessions complaint about exhibition juries was not that
they existed, but that they were not severe enough. The Munich
Secession, for example, rejected 58-67 per cent of all submissions in
the years 1907-8.)36 Many prominent painters routinely saw some of
their works accepted and others refused by the same jury. The main

Gallery curator Alan Bowness, The Conditions of Success. How the Modern
Artist Rises to Fame (London, 1989), p. 11.
36 Lenman, Artists in Society, p. 146.

52
 problem lay in the gargantuan size of exhibitions by the last third of
the nineteenth century. Artists with an established reputation -
whether starting with shock, as did the Impressionists, or by more
conventional paths to fame, as with most of the secessionists - pre¬
ferred to show their work in smaller, more dignified exhibitions with¬
out the somewhat camival-like atmosphere of the traditional salon.
Of course between exhibitions artists were free to sell their work
privately. Art dealers had long offered their services in major cities.
What were often used furniture shops or art supply emporiums in the
early nineteenth century had developed a more specialized and elite-
oriented function by century’s end.’7 Gallery owners exercised a
growing power to define who is an artist by whom they chose to show
and represent. While a century ago most artists would not have had a
connection to an art dealer, lacking one today is a serious handicap.
By the same token, curators of art collections (e.g. museums), more
likely trained as art historians than as artists, came to wield con¬
siderable power not only through what they bought, but what they
relegated to storage or even ‘deaccessioned’ (sold or traded to get
something they liked better). Finally art critics - a fairly new branch
of the journalistic profession - exercised a growing influence in
defining art. Their role became particularly critical with the rise of
non-representational art forms which, unlike the classical canon, could
not easily be grasped or appreciated by the lay public.
Last but not least, the legislator, tax collector, and statistician oc¬
casionally try to determine who is an artist. The classification of artists
(along with other liberal professionals) as commercial entrepreneurs in
the late nineteenth century and the application of ‘luxury taxes’ to
their products during the Weimar Republic are just two early exam¬
ples When not employees, artists were traditionally regarded by the
German authorities as independent entrepreneurs. For illness, old age,
or disability, they had to rely on their own resources (or those of their
families, friends, patrons, etc.), the very inadequate funds set up by
local or national artists’ organizations, special government handouts to
the worthy poor among artists, or simple welfare. As employees, like
others, artists gradually came to be included in the social security

37 For a brief but insightful recent survey of dealers and auctioneers in the German
Empire, see ibid., pp. 147-51.

53
 system as it expanded to take in ever larger socioeconomic groups.
Independent artists, or those who were only part-time or occasional
employees, still lay outside the social security network as late as the
1970s. Up to 60 per cent of all visual artists lacked coverage.38
The French government in the 1970s began to redefine artists by
embracing them into already existing social security systems. France
abandoned its original inclusion test - more than 50 per cent of an
artist’s professional income must derive from the sale of his works or
the rights (reproduction etc.) to them - in 1975. Instead it allowed
anybody to apply for inclusion who had, over the previous three years,
earned the equivalent of 1,200 times the hourly minimum wage, even
if as a part-time employee, through artistic activity. In cases of doubt
about what constitutes artistic activity, a tripartite commission of six
artists plus five civil servants and art distributors decide. Since artists
form the majority, one could call its decisions to include claimants as
a ‘certificate of professionalism.’ The artists on the commission in
turn represent the French professional associations of artists.39
Following the lead of France, the Federal Republic finally set up
a special social security fund for artists (KSVK or Kiinstlersozialver-
sicherungskasse,) starting in 1982. Artists of all kinds (including
performance, musical, and literary) who meet the minimum income
requirements have to pay half the social security tax, like employees,
but the other half is paid partly by a special levy (Sozialabgabe, cur¬
rently four per cent of turnover) on the sums paid out to artists in a
given year by the companies and institutions that process them (e.g.
publishers in the case of authors, galleries and museums in the case of
painters). The remaining part of the contribution that would otherwise
be made by an employer comes through a subsidy of the federal gov¬
ernment (20 per cent of the total tax in 2000). The number of insured
artists has been rising rapidly since the first full year of the KSVK,
from under 13,000 in 1983 to over 107,000 in 1999, over 820 per
cent.40 This fiscal nightmare resulted partly from the unification of the

38 Karla Fohrbeck and Andreas J. Wiesand, The Social Status of the Artist in the
Federal Republic of Germany (Bonn, 1980), p. 40.
39 See Raymonde Moulin, ‘De Partisan au professionel: I’artiste,’ Sociologie du
Travail, 4 (1983), pp. 396-7.
40 See Carroll Haak and Gunther Schmid, Arbeitsmdrkte fur Kiinstler und Publi-
zisten (Berlin, 1999), pp. 24-7.

54
country, but also because of the rapid increase in the number of artists
over the past two decades. Of the insured, visual artists comprise
about 40 per cent, by far the largest group. Nearly a quarter of those
are artists launching their careers in their twenties and thirties.41
Of course not all artists qualify to enter the German fund. Those
who earn little or nothing from art (or are welfare recipients), or those
who earn a great deal, are not forced to join or pay contributions.
Regularly employed artists remain covered like other employees. The
point to recall is that in both the German and French social security
‘definitions’ of artists, it is the criteria of professional organizations
that have been taken over in the legislation: income from artistic ac¬
tivity, attendance at or a degree from an art school, shows, prizes,
memberships in professional organizations, or clear recognition by
other professional artists.42

41 See www.kuenstlersozialkasse.de for statistics since 1983.

42 Moulin, ibid.

55
.
Chapter Three
Forming Artists

The development of an artist’s individuality

is something that cannot be taught. Artistic
individuals - like others also - are formed in
the school of life, experience, and struggle,
not in art school [...].
- Anton von Werner43

‘Artists are bom, not made.’ This phrase is such a cliche that it may
seem to many a self-evident truth. If it is true, though, how can
expensive and arduous years of training in art schools, conservatories
or (for writers) universities be justified?
In all professions one can identify a ‘natural aptitude,’ even a
‘vocation’ that seems to lift the careers of some practitioners onto a
level of brilliance that commands the respect of their peers. Having the
‘knack’ or the ‘gift,’ taking to a discipline like a fish to water - these
platitudes describe the gratifying ‘fit’ between personality and chosen
sphere of work. In the arts world, the platitude is ‘talent.’ In the view of
most art teachers, art education exists chiefly to nurture and encourage
talent. By implication, students with little or no talent should stay away,
but this rarely happens. There has never been a time, at least since the
eighteenth century, without complaints, largely unchallenged, about the
overproduction by art schools of mediocre artists.
Similar complaints abounded in other learned professions, too.
Mediocre physicians and lawyers graduated in large quantities, since
neither talent nor aptitude, but only an Abitur or comparable secondary
school diploma was required to attend German universities, as well as

43 Anton von Werner, Erlebnisse und Eindriicke, 1870-1890 (Berlin, 1913), p. 380.
Werner, although director of the Prussian Arts Academy’s visual arts teaching unit,
the Akademische Hochschule fur die bildenden Kiinste in Berlin for four decades,
nevertheless believed strongly that the ‘crafts and special knowledge’ essential to
being an artist could and should be taught in schools.

57
 being male (until the beginning of the twentieth century). Admission
to art academies was not even linked to formal school certification,
however. Instead, candidates usually had to submit samples of their
work, judged by the professors for promise of talent. (Adolf Hitler, for
example, failed to qualify for the Vienna Academy because his drawings
lacked such promise.)
At least since the weakening or elimination of guild privileges by
about 1815, anybody could legally ‘practice’ art. Autodidacts in the arts
could and sometimes did pick up enough skills through informal study
and experience to make a career. The Modernist revolution, by under¬
mining the canon of representational art, allowed - in the eyes of its
enemies - the ‘dabs of madmen’ to be taken seriously. It should also
have spelled the end of formal art education. But the cruder enemies of
Modernism went wrong in thinking that just anybody could take up
artists’ tools and produce incomprehensible trash. Even among the
most famous self-taught painters, from the ‘Douanier’ Rousseau to A. R.
Penck, genuine autodidacts prove the exception to the rule. The Mod¬
ernist rule retained formal arts training but then encouraged rebellion
against the aesthetic canon it still promoted, while keeping the skills it
transmitted. Picasso’s background may serve as a telling and typical ex¬
ample. Perhaps the best known European artist of the twentieth century,
Picasso not only attended a formal art school in Spain before leaving for
Paris and experimentation. He was also the son of an art professor and
grew up absorbing the classical canon. To cite a German example, three
of the most prominent members of Dresden’s Brticke group of avant-
garde painters - Schmitt-Rottluff, Heckel, and Kirchner - claimed, like
many rebels, that they had taught themselves to paint. Maybe, but they
also attended the Technical College in Dresden as architecture students,
not a far leap from the basic studies common to academy students. All
the Blue Rider painters in Munich had attended art academies, although
not with enthusiasm. August Macke had hated the Dusseldorf Academy,
but instead of dropping out he started attending the local Kunst-
gewerbeschule as well in 1905.44 Schmitt-Rottluff and Heckel even

44 Lothar-Giinther Buchheim, Der Blaue Reiter und die Neue Kiinstlervereinigung

Munchen (Feldafing, 1959), p. 178. As Macke himself wrote, ‘Everybody [all
artists] curses the long years they wasted at the Academy. [...] Where are the
people who give us the means to learn by seeing? Not the Academy professors.
It is rather museum directors, art dealers, and art historians^..]. There are truly

58
experienced the same classical Gymnasium education in Chemnitz.
Untutored talent and raw genius are very seldom enough.
We should also recall that even autodidacts - like many non-artists
- were exposed to drawing, music and the classical vocabulary in the
course of their secondary schooling. Drawing became firmly entrenched
in most European schools in the nineteenth century, not merely as an
aesthetic exercise or time-filling hobby for members of the leisure
classes, but for its economic and even military utility. The military forger
of Bismarck’s Reich, Count Moltke, had considerable drawing ability,
and the Pmssian tradition encouraged general staff and other officers to
lavish time and attention on maps and battlefield mockups. Even after
the invention and popularization of photography, drawing instruction
remained widespread, at least in Central Europe. In our own tune, par¬
ticularly in the United States, public schools stand under pressure to
reduce or eliminate art and music instruction as ‘luxuries’ in favor of so-
called ‘basics.’ This rampant philistinism may make it hard for many
readers to imagine how widely art education spread through school
systems in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its presence
helps explain both the phenomenon of the ‘autodidactic’ artist and the
existence of a sizeable Interest Community of Art, an educated audience
initiated into the basic artistic techniques and values.
Naturally some children prove better at some subjects than others,
and their teachers notice this. Many an artistic career has begun with the
encouragement of the humble drawing teacher, who can identify that
elusive quality ‘talent.’ We have noted the commonplace belief among
most art teachers encountered in this study: training in the absence of
talent was doomed. Education could only refine talent, not create it.
Repeatedly artists have emphasized the importance of ‘nature’ (talent)
over ‘nurture’ (skills development) to an artistic career. Of what talent
consists, however, or how one identifies and measures it, appear beyond
rational determination and have been for at least two centuries.
The root of the word talent (in Latin and Greek) ironically meant a
sum of money or weight. By the beginning of the Romantics’ dominance
of artistic and intellectual dialogue, the term took on a flavor of idealistic

not many Academy professors among the true masters of German painting. We
need a lot of freedom and no district sergeants in art. dm Kampf um die Kunst
(Munich, 1911), pp. 82-3.

59
 reverence. As we saw earlier, Immanuel Kant set the tone in his aes¬
thetics, arguing that ‘genius’ was essential to the production of art. That
‘Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,’ was in the words of the English poet
John Keats, ‘all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ While
ordinary people could be taught to appreciate and recognize both, only
the talented, touched with ‘genius,’ could capture the beautiful in an
enduring work of art.
Based on such shaky and empirically uncertain (but widely ac¬
cepted) concepts, art education laid heavy emphasis on the self-direction
of the student. A tired old joke in the American music world reflects this.
Visitors to New York ask a Manhattanite encountered on the street,
‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ The answer: ‘Practice, practice,
practice!’ The typical art academy curriculum structure placed relatively
little emphasis on formal lectures, readings, or a body of theoretical
literature, such as were normal for university-based professions. Many of
the major works in European philosophy from Kant and Hegel forward
were first conceived as professorial lecture notes. Nothing comparable
developed out of any formal lectures given in art academies. Their
professors lectured, of course, on such subjects as art history, classical
mythology, and color theory. But from the first day, art students’
primary task was sketching, and the professor’s, ‘instructing’ by
correcting mistakes. Through these informal and relatively unstructured
encounters - almost none recorded as a matter of course - older artists
‘educated’ the adepts, very much in the traditional manner of guild
masters and apprentices. The central difference in academy education lay

in the theoretical dignity of the liberal arts.’ The artist was no longer an artisan,
but a creator, a sort of alter deus shielded from common norms [...] with an
aristocratic image of the work of art, unique and irreplaceable 45

Art academy curriculum aimed to bring students into contact with

the basic drawing and theoretical subjects in the first years of study.
After repeated acts of drawing from casts (for example, ancient statuary),
the student proceeded on to the level of drawing from nature (usually in
wanner weather), from memory, and finally from the nude human
model. Students then advanced beyond drawing to specialize in painting

45 Moulin, ‘De Partisan au professionnel’, p. 390.

60
(which in academies meant chiefly oils), sculpture, engraving, or (in
some schools) architecture. After completing several years of this, the
advanced student might then enter one of the ateliers to work toward his
own masterpiece under the loose guidance of a single professor. Prizes
were awarded along the way, some of them with considerable prestige or
financial reward, comparable to the Paris Academy’s Prix de Rome. The
art academies of Berlin, Munich, Dresden, and Stuttgart, for example,
offered traveling scholarships for up to two years, normally (but not al¬
ways) in Italy. This was still true on the eve of World War I, by which
time most young artists seeking foreign experience on their own re¬
sources looked more to Paris for ‘finishing’ their studies. But so, too, did
the Prix de Rome, around 1900, continue sending young French acad¬
emy graduates away from the world’s most interesting art city to one of
its most old-fashioned.46 For German academy graduates, too, a period
of months or years abroad, usually in Paris or Rome, was considered
desirable.
Art academies required no formal examinations and offered neither
terminal degrees (such as an MD or a PhD) nor other certification proce¬
dures, as with most other learned professions. Where records of student
performance were kept and have survived (such as the Hochschule of the
Berlin Academy), they do not show much evidence of grading and
marking, only the rare comment by a professor. Admission to the acad¬
emy, rather than ‘graduation,’ represented the only marker of belonging
to an elite. Students could and did leave academies before completing a
full course of study and still call themselves artists. Once accepted,
though, students tended to identify with their school, unlike the common
habit of German university students of attending two or more institutions
during their education.
Art academies were smaller and more intimate than universities,
especially after the latter began expanding from the 1860s on. The larg¬
est and most prestigious German academies, for example, had only a
couple hundred students and a dozen professors. A few select figures
will give an idea of the size of art schools. The Munich Academy
(founded 1766) had only 32 ‘pupils’ in 1801. (The tenn ‘student’ be-

46 Dresslers Kunstjahrbuch, 1 (1906), pp. 303, 312-14. The stipends were as

much as 3,000 marks per year, not a fortune, but still more than the income of
an entire industrial worker’s family.

61
 came more common later as academies came to be recognized as having
the same standing in the state educational system as universities.) At the
height of its international fame, Munich’s student body could nudge to¬
ward 600 (545 in 1909/10) or sink (in wartime) toward 100 (124 in
1916/17; 141 in 1940). From the last third of the nineteenth century
through the first third of the twentieth, enrollments generally stood at
300-400, with about fifteen professors. Munich’s great rival, the fine arts
college (.Hochschule) of the Prussian Academy in Berlin (founded 1696),
rose from a mere seventy-six students when Anton von Werner took
over the moribund unit in 1875 to 200-250 in most of the years of his
directorship (down to 1915). Thereafter it declined to around a hundred
or less until it was merged with the Kunstgewerbeschule in 1924. The
largest Austro-Hungarian academy in Vienna usually had a few more
students than Berlin, but not as many as Munich. Still, the Berlin Acad¬
emy’s school kept as many as fifteen professors on its staff. The Dresden
Art Academy usually had even fewer students than Munich and Berlin
during the German Empire, but often more than Berlin in the 1920s (an
average of 180, with a dozen professors).47 Whereas a course of univer¬
sity study (at least until recent decades) might take only three years,
academy students generally took six or more.
Let us look a bit more closely at one of the academies less well
known today than in its heyday. Founded in 1764 on the basis of a
drawing school, the Saxon art academy in the ‘Florence on the Elbe’ (the
residence of the ruling Wettin dynasty as well as seat of its considerable
art collection) was meant, in good enlightened-despotic fashion, to
stimulate commerce as well as deliver luxury goods for the court. As the
statutes of 1814 stated its pragmatic purposes (rather typically for the

47 Sources: Ekkehard Mai, ‘Problemgeschichte der Munchner Kunstakademie bis

in die zwanziger Jahre, in Thomas Zacharias (ed.), Tradition und Widerspruch
(Munich, 1975), p. 108; Wolfgang Ruppert, Der Moderne Kunstler. Zur Sozial-
und Kultnrgeschichte der kreativen Individuality in der kulturellen Moderne
im 19. und fruhen 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M., 1998), pp. 493, 507;
Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munchen, MK 14155, 40907, 40908, 51433;
Archiv, Flochschule der Ktinste Berlin, Jahresberichte der koniglichen
Akademie der bildenden Kunst [...] 1875-1914; ibid., Bestand 6/49, Tabell-
arische Ubersichten, 1915-1924; Sachsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden,
III.3.6.1.1., Kunstakademie Dresden, 110, Matrikel 1882-1903; ibid., III.3.6'
Sachsisches Ministerium fur Volksbildung, 18019, Kunstakademie-Unterricht
1923-8; Archiv, Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst Dresden, Akte 1221.

62
 time), there were three: (1) to promote the study of the arts; (2) to shape
and awaken good taste in the public; and (3) to support the art and crafts
industries.
The curriculum changed little over the nineteenth and early twenti¬
eth century, although the elementary training for craftsmen envisioned in
1814 had yielded by 1881 to a strict admission by application limited to
graduates of eleven years of Gymnasium or equivalent schooling. All
students went through elementary classes in drawing by copying, then
from plaster casts, and finally (with painting added) from live models.
Such auxiliary subjects as perspective, anatomy, and the history of art,
architecture, literature, and civilization were required. After seven se¬
mesters passing students went on to advanced study in the painting class
or the ateliers for woodcuts, engraving, landscape painting, or sculpture
and/or a ‘master atelier’ directed by one of the painting professors. There
was also a course in architecture. A full course of study was ‘limited’ to
ten years (eleven for sculptors). In 1895, for example, there were fifty-
seven students in the basic course and sixty-seven in the ateliers, divided
among four for painting (twenty-six students), two for sculpture (nine
students), and one each for graphic arts (one student) and architecture
(thirty-one students). This vertical and complicated curriculum model
was replaced after 1918 by a more individualized one, at first with no
common classes (1919-25), then back to a system of common basic
courses and lectures followed by affiliation with one professor, and a
reduction of the number of years students could stay at the academy.
Other attempts to rejuvenate the academy included the opening of a
new building on the banks of the Elbe, grandiose (if typically ill suited to
its purpose) like other new academy buildings in Dusseldorf (1879) and
Munich (1884), and the appointment of new professors with experi¬
mental approaches, such as Bantzer and Sterl around the turn of the
century.
In contrast to the Prussian Academy of Arts, the Saxon Academy
(like most other German academies) was almost purely a teaching insti¬
tution, although with honorary members and advisory functions to the
government. From 1814 on its director was chosen on a rotating basis
from among the faculty members (‘rectoral constitution’), who in turn
were accorded the same rank and privileges as university professors.
Structurally little changed by the Nazi and GDR regimes, the academy
nevertheless suffered two major restaffings, losing most of the intema-

63
 tionally recognized teachers it had in 1933, and again after 1945 to
comply with ideological litmus tests. Its most famous faculty members
included Caspar David Friedrich, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Gott¬
fried Semper, the Reichstag architect Paul Wallot, Heinrich Tessenow
(originator of the Hellerau Garden City), and the Weimar painters Otto
Dix and Oskar Kokoschka.4s
The vicissitudes of the academy under differing regimes may also
be illustrated by the career of one of its graduates and later professors,
Wilhelm Lachnit (1899-1962). Having attended first the Dresden
Kunstgewerbeschule (1918-20), then the academy (1921-3), Lachnit
was strongly influenced by his teacher Otto Dix and associated with
other students active in the Dresden Secession and the German Commu¬
nist Party. He was a central figure in the local ASSO artists’ association
linked with the KPD. Although arrested in 1933 and repeatedly watched
and harassed by the Nazi authorities, he survived the Hitler period, being
drafted into the army in 1944, and the loss of most of his artworks in the
fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. (Such losses of a lifetime of work by
bombing were not unusual for German artists of this generation.)
He was one of several reputable pre-1933 leftist German artists
(with Hans and Lea Grundig, John Heartfield, and others) recruited by
the Soviet-zone regime to rebuild art education in their version of a ‘de¬
mocratic’ sense. He was appointed professor at the reopened Dresden
Academy in 1947, but resigned in 1954 after falling increasingly afoul of
the socialist-realist’ line of the East German Communist Party (SED).
He was allowed to eke out a living thereafter maintaining a small private
art school until his death.
How academy instructors were selected differed from the method
used at universities. Particularly in Germany, with its ‘rectoral constitu¬
tion,’ the senior professors chose a list of candidates (usually three) from
which the education ministry traditionally picked one. University profes¬
sors generally also elected, from their midst, the administrative officers
of the university, such as deans and the rector, for rotating and limited
terms. This self-governing system came to be accompanied by intense
competition, a spur to both heightened scholarly achievement and con-

48 Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst Dresden (ed.), Von der koniglichen Kunst-
akademie zur Hochschule fur Bildende Kiinste, 1764-1989 (Dresden 1990)
esp. pp. 179, 629-59.

64
 siderable institutional mobility. Advances in scholarly and scientific
fields could thus be incorporated relatively swiftly into university cur¬
riculum.
Art academies could be both educational institutions and honorific
bodies. The members were generally chosen by co-optation, but outside
influences (except perhaps in the case of the English Royal Academy),
particularly by the government, also came to bear. Given the limited
number of members and slow turnover, election most often reflected age
and fame rather than innovative thinking. In most academies, members
had the right to teach; in some, even the obligation to do so. In others,
like Berlin, a clear separation existed between the honorific and teaching
functions. German academies, on the teaching side, generally resembled
schools more than universities in their administration. A director chosen
by the education ministry administered the school and hired the teachers
personally. Very few nineteenth-century German academies (Dresden
was the most significant to do so) developed anything like a ‘rectoral
constitution,’ whereby existing faculty members could choose the lead¬
ing candidates for any opening. Furthermore, new professors did not get
hired for their excellence in some specialty, as became the norm in uni¬
versities by the late nineteenth century. The careers of many show them
moving from teaching one specialty to another, even in the same institu¬
tion. Like university professors, however, they could after a time achieve
permanent civil service status and thus ‘tenure’ in office. But many in¬
structors could remain for years as untenured and poorly paid drones.
Collegial meetings and discussions among the faculty members about
hiring, promotion, or educational needs did not occur in most cases. The
director (perhaps after informal discussions with colleagues) made major
decisions.
This pattern of professorial recruitment is significant because of its
relative absence of collegial input and distance from government influ¬
ence. Picking the politically ‘safe’ history or theology professors was a
matter of deep concern to German governments at all times. The visual
arts, while they might sometimes upset governing personalities, rarely
carried messages capable of leading to revolution, as literature some¬
times did. While German university history is full of‘cases’ of removal
or other punishments of opposition-minded professors, art academies
and schools were relatively free of such interference. Since art professors
did not require a certificate of competence to teach or venia legendi (as

65
 did university professors), even if removed from a state academy or
school, they could theoretically still teach privately.
True, professors at nineteenth-century art academies could and did
entertain outside offers (like university professors), either taking a better
position or using the threat of leaving to extract better conditions from
their own institution. But mobility among art academy professors (and
resulting strategies of competition) appears much more limited than in
the knowledge-fields associated with universities and technical colleges.
England and France at the time had only one ‘serious’ academy of arts.
Although the German-speaking lands had several rival ones, academy
members tended to stay with their own institution and often identified
with its style or ‘direction.’ Especially in Germany, universities ratcheted
themselves, their reputations and their budgets upward by competing for
professorial bearers of new scholarly and scientific ideas. By World War
I, this had led to a marked Verwissenschaftlichung or ‘scientization’ of
university life. Except for a few breaches made in the walls of art acad¬
emies in the first half of the twentieth century, one looks in vain for a
similar dynamic producing growth, differentiation, and specialization.
Art academies, instead, clung steadfastly to the old ways, which in
the view of most directors and the majority of professors seemed to need
no major innovations. As other areas of higher education changed, their
conservatism came in for increasingly vocal criticism from inside and
outside the Interest Community of Art. Largely ignoring such technical
innovations as photography, for example, signaled a ‘fossilized’ attitude
in the eyes of critics. To this the academies’ defenders responded, typi¬
cally, that the classical canon was eternal and above passing fashions.
Rhetoric aside, as even some academy members openly stated, the chief
purpose of academies was to turn out the kind of ‘monumental’ art pa¬
tronized by the state. The director of the Diisseldorf Academy, Fritz
Roeber, complained during World War I about plans to transform the
Kunstgewerbeschule into master-classes and thereby into a ‘competitor
of the art academy.’ The latter had as its objective ‘bringing together
visual artists for the resolution of monumental assignments.’49 Over-

49 Fritz Roeber, Director, Diisseldorf Academy, letter to provincial government, 2

Sep 1915, pp. 13-14, Nordrhein-Westfalisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Diisseldorf,
BR 1021—42, Angelegenheiten der Kunstakademie, 1913-26.

66
 decorated courthouses and customs houses in neo-Renaissance or neo-
Gothic styles, and overlarge ‘history' paintings or sculptures to fill them,
constituted precisely what graduates of art academies were expected to
produce right down to World War I. This held true not only of Imperial
Germany and Austria-Hungary (where emperors and kings took a per¬
sonal interest in ‘their’ academies) but of republican France and par¬
liamentary Britain, too.
Let us look briefly at the career of one academy director who be¬
came caught in the cross-currents of art education reform, Arthur Kampf
(1864-1950). Originally from Aachen, Kampf followed his older brother
Eugen to study at the Dusseldorf Academy (1879) with Peter Janssen,
whose master pupil he became in 1883. Specializing in large scale his¬
torical paintings, he became known early for his very naturalistic depic¬
tions of scenes from the national past. In order not to compete on the
same terrain as Adolf Menzel, Kampf worked in the somewhat neglected
historical period of the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, reaping
increasingly important private and public commissions for large oils and
wall frescoes.
Hired as an assistant at his alma mater in 1887, he advanced to the
rank of professor for the beginning painting and nature class (1893). The
1890s witnessed a marriage (to the sister of one of his painter col¬
leagues) and educational trips to Italy and Spain (he had already visited
Bastien-Lepage in Paris in the mid-1880s.) These trips led Kampf to¬
ward genre paintings (Spanish bullfights, peasants harvesting, workers in
ironworks, etc.). As a result of a pathos-filled large painting of the lying-
in-state of Kaiser Wilhelm I (1888), he received fashionable portrait
commissions, including several from Wilhelm II. As a tmsted painter of
nationalist art, Kampf was called to head one of the master ateliers for
figure painting at the Berlin Academy in 1899. He went on to be elected
a regular member of the academy (1901) and for two tenns as its presi¬
dent (1907-1912). He won numerous medals at art expositions during
the Empire. Like Anton von Wemer, his fellow academician, he bene¬
fited from numerous public commissions to do large historical murals.
Nevertheless, even as an ‘official artist’ Kampf could not avoid contro¬
versy, as when he (as jury chairman) tried to reduce the number of paint¬
ings shown at the annual Berlin salon or maintained personal contacts

67
 with secessionists, which may have cost him a sale to the Berlin National
Gallery.50
Kampf claimed in his memoirs that he disliked the autocratic way
in which Wemer directed the fine arts college of the Prussian Academy;
enjoyed the freedom of being responsible (as head of one of the seven
master ateliers) only to the minister of culture; and liked the luxury of
being able to pick up to six master pupils (each with his own studio).
Nevertheless, with Werner’s death in 1915, Kampf accepted the time-
consuming job as Director of the Hochschule until 1924, when he was
forced out as a part of the controversial amalgamation of the fine arts
college with the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule into the Vereinigte Staats-
schule. He traveled to Turkey to paint the official portrait of Atatiirk.
Although certainly no friend of modem art (‘colorftil geometry’ as he
called it in his memoirs'’1), Kampf was perhaps too traditional for the
Nazis, despite his evident acceptance of the regime; he resigned his post
as master atelier teacher in 1933.
During Kampf s heyday before World War I, art academies had
begun producing more graduates than even prosperous kingdoms (let
alone impoverished republics) could keep fully employed. The war and
its aftermath brought catastrophe for the finances of both winners and
losers. In Central Europe, not only did funds for official art, monuments,
and public buildings dry up; the monarchs and royal houses whose glo¬
rious deeds had formerly supplied much to celebrate by academic art had
departed ignominiously in 1918. Symbolically fitting, the best exemplar
of this kind of artist, Kampf s predecessor as director of the Berlin
Academy for most of the life of the German Empire, Anton von Wemer,
also died during the war (in 1915). There was simply little market left for
his huge, celebrity-crowded canvases celebrating such monarchical tri¬
umphs as ‘The Declaration of the German Empire.’ Even if the aesthetic
tastes of the republican successors did not differ radically, they generally
lacked the means to commission much more than a few war memorials
in the financially strapped Weimar period.
Having lost their cozy and clear ties to ‘official art,’ which had all
but disappeared in 1918, academies began to face decades of uncertainty
about their role. One option - closing them down - was tried only in the

50 See Paret, Berlin Secession, p. 108.

51 Arthur Kampf, Aus meinem Leben (Aachen, 1950), p. 61

68
 case of some provincial schools in Germany (such as Konigsberg and
Breslau by the end of the Weimar Republic era) on the grounds that they
merely duplicated what larger ones already offered."2 Another option
involved integrating the academies with the flourishing applied arts
schools to be discussed more fully later. This option was pressed quite
vigorously by some reformers in Prussia in the 1920s, with budget¬
cutting attention from state bureaucracies. In Germany, many academy
professors and students reacted bitterly to these reform attempts. As in so
many other areas of the Weimar Republic, they viewed reform and
Modernism as foreign, unhealthy, and threatening. A third option - usu¬
ally after an attempt to fuse them with applied arts schools had failed -
was to let them drift along. They thereby became prime targets for the
propaganda of the ‘artist’ Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
Totalitarian regimes such as Hitler’s or Stalin’s may have favored a
conservative, monumental, and heroic style, but their policies did little to
restore the fortunes of art academies. Although Hitler purged and coordi¬
nated the art schools (even politically and racially acceptable Modernists
had to go), he did not decouple them from the applied arts. Hitler’s war
drafted away most able-bodied students and professors and brought on
the physical destruction of most academy buildings by bombing. By the
last months of the war, art schools, like most other cultural institutions,
closed pending the Nazis’ ‘Final Victory.’
Perhaps surprisingly, they also reopened shortly after the dust had
settled over Germany’s rubble-filled cities. The need to reconnect to pre-
Nazi cultural traditions as well as more practical demands for artists and
architects to rebuild shattered and bumed-out urban centers militated in
their favor. Ironically, the academies’ forced marriage with applied arts
schools in the interwar period contributed to their resuscitation, since
nobody doubted the need for applied-arts professionals. The socially
despised ‘commercial’ partner in the marriage thus rescued the ‘high¬
born’ one from ruin.

52 This despite innovations combining traditional ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts training
before World War I. The architect Hans Poelzig, for example, reformed the
Breslau school after 1903 to include a wide variety of arts education. The
school’s new name in 1911 - Royal Academy of Fine and Applied Arts - as
well as its innovative faculty in the 1920s made it both a precursor and later ri¬
val of the Bauhaus.

69
 Let us now turn our attention to the evolution of applied-arts edu¬
cation. Schools to teach trades and crafts became common by the mid¬
nineteenth century, replacing the guilds’ apprenticeship system in many
branches of production. Rapid population and urban growth promoted
further the specialization of Kunstgewerbeschulen (literally art-craft
schools, but perhaps better translated as applied arts schools or colleges
of design) in Germany, which we have already encountered. Some of
these were initiated by cities, others by the governments of the federal
sates, and some by both cities and states. Last but not least, one could
still obtain private instruction.
Such schools originally sought only to raise the level of quality in
the production of handicrafts. Ornamental and domestic items from putti
on apartment buildings through textiles, jewelry, or porcelain to indus¬
trial design were covered in their curricula. In many places (e.g., Prussia)
they came under the supervision of the ministry of trade, not education.
World expositions, frequently recurring after the great Crystal Palace
show in London (1851), heightened consciousness among both trade
officials and producers about where their country stood in the grand
competitive bazaar of European and later trans-Atlantic design and tech¬
nology. In this dynamic and competitive world, schools of applied arts
received careful scrutiny and generous funding. Unlike art academies,
they were constantly changing and growing. Nurturing them became for
many educated Germans a matter of national cultural renewal, symbol¬
ized by the German Renaissance and the ‘bourgeois pride and creativity’
of Nuremberg and Albrecht Diirer. They ‘looked back nostalgically to
the Renaissance as a time before the establishment of a hierarchy in the
arts ' as symbolized by the ‘French’ and therefore alien, courtly, and
frivolous art academy.
As they evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century, ap¬
plied-arts schools took many shapes and served multiple functions.
Kunstgewerbeschulen were sometimes called by other names, given
their diverse origins. Of the forty extant in the German Empire by 1906,
for example, nearly a quarter were still known as Zeichenschulen
(drawing schools), Gewerbeschulen (crafts schools), or Gewerbemuseen
(craft museums). In larger cities, the schools were often affiliated with
(or had spmng from) a museum for arts and crafts, on the model of the

53 Lenman, Artists in Society, p. 49.

70
Victoria and Albert Museum in London and a similar museum with at¬
tached school in Vienna.1'4 Typically they started out as both secondary
vocational schools tor full-time pupils and as institutions for continuing
(evening and Sunday) education for apprentices and working craftspeo¬
ple. They opened their doors early to women, unlike the socially and
occupationally more exclusive art academies.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Kunstgewerbeschulen had be¬
come very popular, but critics charged that their ‘school-like’ instruction,
with heavy reliance on learning to copy and reproduce various historical
designs from ‘model books,’ was stifling the creativity and innovation
needed to keep German design and its associated industries competitive
internationally. Schools were revamped, often in a process involving
both state authorities and the private sector, to introduce more theory, in¬
dependent creative thinking, and the translation of student designs into
finished objects under teachers’ supervision in workshops (including
methods of adapting the objects to machine production). In the process,
Kunstgewerbeschulen became increasingly professionalized, shedding
much of their continuing-education functions to other kinds of lower
schools (e.g. Handwerkerschu/en or artisan schools) and upgrading their
curriculum to the point where they could compete effectively with fine
arts academies. One of the many ways of upgrading the schools was to
hire artists as teachers and directors, compensate them better, and even
give them the title ‘professor,’ which reformers also promoted. By
World War I, the goal of the schools was no longer solely instruction in
special decorative forms, but rather general artistic training with an em¬
phasis on entire architectural structures, not just ornamentation.
Attempts after World War I to raise Kunstgewerbeschulen into
‘academies’ on the same level as the older fine arts ones or universities,
or at least to meld them with existing Kunstakademien, were controver¬
sial for many reasons, however. One of the chief Kunstgewerbeschule
reformers, Hermann Muthesius, could not overcome his suspicion that
old-line academies produced unemployable intellectualized formalists.
He therefore opposed the marriage of the Berlin Academy and Kunstge¬
werbeschule into the Vereinigte Staatsschule in the mid-1920s. (Faculty
of academies and some Kunstgewerbeschulen all over Germany had

54 Gisela Moeller, ‘Die preussischen Kunstgewerbeschulen,’ in Ekkehard Mai et

at. (eds.), Ideengeschichte und Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin, 1983), p. 120.

71
 similar reservations, although of course the academy professors gen¬
erally denigrated the ‘materialistic’ and ‘merely practical’ contamination
of instruction by Kunstgewerbeschulen.) The fusion idea was driven
largely by arguments of cost-effectiveness, with the Kunstgewerbe¬
schulen assigned the role of ‘basic art education’ to be followed (in
select cases) by entry into the ‘fine arts’ sphere at the level of the acad¬
emies’ master ateliers.
The Nazis moved quickly to restore the leading ‘high’ role to art
academies which, once cleansed of avant-garde and other (racially, po¬
litically) ‘undesirable elements,’ corresponded to their conservative
tastes. This left Kunstgewerbeschulen largely back where they had been
before the reforms at the turn of the century, serving exclusively to train
artisans. Nazi Education Ministry decrees of 27 February 1934 and 9
April 1938 renamed and demoted the Kunstgewerbeschulen to Hand-
werkerschulen and then Meisterschulen des deutschen Handwerks. This
de-reform was largely retained in the early years of the Federal Republic.
In addition to the publicly-supported art education institutions men¬
tioned above, the pre-war German Reich listed five public ‘art schools’
(generally founded to train art teachers for the school system) and over a
dozen private art schools, not counting the activities of hundreds of
independent artists who taught out of their ateliers for private, usually
paying, students.5" (Munich alone had nearly sixty private schools of this
type in 1914).56 Initially some had Fill-time students as well as those
attending night and Sunday classes. In this sense, they resembled
vocational and technical schools more than such ‘higher’ educational
institutions as academies. Their students tended to be younger, and more
of them came out of direct work experience. Some schools sFessed a
more vocational and part-time curriculum. Others emphasized the multi¬
year curriculum of the Fill-time sttident. Still, before World War I,
applied-arts graduates generally started earlier and sttidied fewer years
than academy students. Tuition fees were kept attractive, so the former
came from less socially prestigious social strata.
Also missing until late in their development was a clear idealistic
‘mission statement.’ Universities and academies regularly wrapped
themselves in the idealistic drapery of science and culture. Applied-arts

55 See Dresslers Kunstjahrbuch, I (1904), ‘Lehrstatten der Kunst,’ pp. 402 ff.
56 Lenman, Artists in Society, p. 123.

72
 schools were, by contrast, utilitarian in origin. At least in the beginning,
they needed no high-sounding rhetoric to justify their existence. There
were early exceptions even to this generalization, though. The Arts and
Crafts Movement in England did develop a sort of craft ideology in the
hands of William Morris and associates. Ironically, one of the major fig¬
ures in English applied-arts education, the German architect Gottfried
Semper, had fled from political persecution in the aftermath of the 1848
revolution, later to serve as a founding father of the new National Art
Training School in South Kensington (renamed Royal Academy of Art
in 1896) and its affiliated museum (the later Victoria and Albert).
Semper had been a professor at the Dresden Academy and one of the
youngest cofounders of the major pre-1848 national architects’ union
Deutscher Architekten- und Ingenierenverein (Association of German
Architects and Engineers) in 1842."7 As we shall see later, a nascent
aesthetic ideology for the applied arts fostered by Semper was subse¬
quently reimported to Germany as an ‘English model.’ By then it floated
in the same intellectual stream of ‘cultural crisis’ and ‘decadence’ anxie¬
ties as the critical thought of Nietzsche. As the massive popularity of
Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator,
1890) showed, inventing a new and ‘authentic’ aesthetic sense appeared
to many the cure for the fin-de-siecle malaise. Certainly the exponents of
better applied-arts schools could exploit the rhetoric of high mission and
cultural regeneration. Everyday life, in the view of the Kunsterziehungs-
bewegung (Art Education Movement), must be suffused with an appre-
ciation for the beautiful. What better way to aestheticize everyday life
than filling it with beautiful objects? And what better way to produce
those objects than by revamping the applied-arts schools?
The key to this revolution was forged in an alliance of innovative
designers, progressive civil servants, and thoughtful industrial figures. It
opened Kunstgewerbeschulen to the notion of artistic creativity. In order
to meet the challenges of a new aesthetic for a new age, pupils should (as
in art academies) develop their own artistic vision. To give an example

57 Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper. Architect of the Nineteenth Century

(New Haven, 1996), p. 106.
58 Cf. Alfred Lichtwark, Die Grundlagen der kiinstlerischen Bildung. Der
Deutsche der Zukunft (Berlin: 1905). To be sure, many artists at the time, such
as Franz Lenbach, dismissed Langbehn and Lichtwark’s idea that art could ever
be an educational medium for the ‘masses.’

73
 of what this meant, teachers should no longer train students merely to go
copy traditional forms and slap them on a building erected in one of the
historicist styles of the Victorian or Wilhelmine Age. Instead, they
should thoroughly ground their students in theory, then unleash their
imagination in ‘workshops.’ These produced individual or collective
objects, from pieces of furniture or table settings to entire rooms, in¬
cluding paneling and murals. Much, if not all, of this original aesthetic
evolved parallel to the art nouveau movement. Commonly, elegant sim¬
plicity and (often) references to the flowing irregularity of Nature re¬
placed formalism and historical references.
Typically, this revolution came from above in Imperial Germany.
In Prussia, with two-thirds of the Reich’s population and even more of
its industry, the key figure was Hermann Muthesius. This architect by
profession had entered the Prussian civil service, first as a kind of cul¬
tural attache in London, then as the official in charge of applied arts
schools at the trade ministry. Muthesius set about introducing reforms
from what he had learned (and discussed in numerous publications and
speeches) about English life-style. Bringing artistic imagination into
applied-arts education, he and his allies believed, would prove the fastest
way to raise the level of German taste. The turn of the twentieth century
witnessed an intense economic and imperialist rivalry between Germany
and Britain. One of the offshoots was the British attempt to belittle
Gennan industrial products as shabby and poorly designed. ‘Made in
Germany’ had to be stamped on imported goods from there. This label
later came to be a sign of pride and quality. But in the first decade of the
twentieth century, with yet another world exposition looming in St.
Louis (1904), the charge of shabbiness in German design stung leaders
of government and industry into action.59
Let us dwell briefly on the life and extraordinary influence of this
key figure in applied art and educational reform. The son of a master
mason and builder, Muthesius (1861-1927) was able to finish Realgvm-
nasium (Leipzig) and a year of art history (University of Berlin) before

59 The American evangelist Billy Sunday later demonstrated how necessary this
campaign was when he fanned American war enthusiasm with the words, Thou
knowest, O Lord, that no nation so infamous, vile, greedy, sensuous,
bloodthirsty ever disgraced the pages of history [as Germany]. If you turn hell
upside down, you’ll find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.’ Cited in
Ray Abrams, Preachers Present Arms (New York, 1933), p. 79.

74
switching to the study of architecture at the Technische Hochschule in
Berlin. He began his career studying foreign approaches to art and
building, spending 1887-91 in Tokyo (where he designed a neo-Gothic
German church). After a stint with the Prussian public works ministry,
he was attached to the German Embassy in London (1896-1903) and
reported particularly on English architecture and craft education. (The
English country house was especially interesting to Kaiser Wilhelm II,
whose mother and grandmother Victoria were English). Muthesius’s
book Das englische Haus (3 vols., Berlin, 1904-5) summarized his ad¬
miration for an architecture that reflected a genuine national (and in
terms of current intellectual fashion, ‘Germanic’) culture based on folk
traditions, as well as the skills of its architects, such as C. R. Macintosh.
His rejection of all ‘historicist’ styles was expressed in such works as
Stilarchitektur und Baukunst (Miihlheim, 1902). He was as opposed to
the idea that classical Greek or other past civilization was perfect for his
own time as he was to the tyranny of fashions such as art nouveau,
which had deteriorated into cheap imitations. Although an admirer of
Ruskin and Morris, Muthesius did not believe one could literally revive
the artisanal traditions of the middle ages on a scale large enough to
serve a modem society. Indeed, he embraced new materials, technolo¬
gies, and the machine for buildings and furnishings.
Although an inconsistent thinker and writer, Muthesius joined with
many others who sought to educate the German public to good taste and
infuse modem design, building, and industry with an aesthetic outlook.
He could mock the typical Wilhelmine apartment, its walls covered from
floor to ceiling with

pictures, prints, plates, Japanese fans [...]. There seems to be a literal fear of al¬
lowing any impression of emptiness to arise from any small, peaceful [uncov¬
ered] surface [...right down to] the brass dog, whose tail wags with the ticking
of the clock imbedded in its side.60

Appointed to the Prussian Ministry of Trade upon his return from

England, Muthesius was charged with reforming the majority of
German arts and crafts schools, which happened to be supervised by

60 Hermann Muthesius, ‘Kultur und Kunst,’ in Kultur und Kunsl. Gesammelte

Aufsatze iiber kiinstlerische Fragen in Deutschland (Jena and Leipzig, 1904), p.
23.

75
 his ministry.61 His criticisms of the outworn and unimaginative meth¬
ods of the German crafts industry led to a public clash with some of its
leaders, which in turn provoked Muthesius and many progressive
artists, architects, businessmen, economists, and even politicians to
found the Deutscher Werkbund in 1907. He continued to practice ar¬
chitecture as well, building opulent ‘country houses’ especially in
what are now the suburbs of Berlin. Muthesius was the prime leader
of the Werkbund until 1914, when his advocacy of Typisierung (see
below) failed to be adopted after a heated controversy among the
membership.
From his return from Britain in 1903 until his retirement in 1926,
Muthesius played the key role in supervising and reforming arts and
crafts schools in Prussia from his office in the Ministry of Trade. He
was instrumental in appointing such artist-designers as Peter Behrens,
Hans Poelzig, and Bruno Paul to art academies and Kunstgewer-
beschulen in Diisseldorf, Breslau, and Berlin. It is perhaps ironic that
this advocate of suburban living — which required efficient urban tran¬
sit - was killed in a streetcar accident in Berlin.
Muthesius’s supervision of all the Kunstgewerbeschulen in Prus¬
sia connected him to a network of like-minded reformers eventually
institutionalized into the Deutscher Werkbund and other organizations.
Using their economic and political influence, these industrialists, art
teachers, designers, and civil servants affected reforms and appoint¬
ment of their allies as directors of applied-arts schools inside and out¬
side Prussia. An example is the appointment of Henry van de Velde to
run the Grand Ducal school in Weimar through the connections of
Count Harry Kessler while the latter was acting as a sort of court cul¬
tural advisor. As a lesult of reforms and new foundations, Germany
possessed on the eve of World War I no less than 40 applied arts
schools, as we have seen, and more and more often led by innovative
directors.
The Werkbund had reached its high point with an impressive ex¬
position of its ideas in Cologne in 1914. By this time, it had begun to

61 For this phase of his career, see John V. Maciuka, ‘Art in an Age of Govern¬
ment Intervention: Hermann Muthesius, Sachlichkeit, and the State, 1897-
1907,’ German Studies Review, 21 (1998), pp. 285-308; and idem, ‘Hermann
Muthesius and the Reform of German Architecture, Arts, and Crafts, 1890-
1914’ (PhD dissertation Berkeley, 1998).

76
experience some of the splits and controversies common among
growing associations. One such split, which drove Muthesius to the
margins of the Werkbund, involved the relationship between industrial
and handicraft production. Muthesius and his allies pursued the goal
of Typisierung. Graduates of applied-arts schools should serve in¬
dustry by designing ‘types’ that could be produced in series (mass
production still remained in its infancy). His critics defended the
individual, hand-made piece in the artisan tradition. This fissure
showed that even the progressive and evangelizing Werkbund con¬
tained members with fundamentally different interpretations of their
common ‘goal,’ the ‘revitalization of applied arts.’ Some, like their
English forerunner William Morris, looked back to a romanticized
medieval past notionally populated by Hans Sachses and other
creative, independent guildsmen. Others accepted the future of in¬
dustrial production and global markets. In this concept, the role of the
aesthetically formed school graduate was to dream up original designs
and. through his training in school ‘workshops,’ know how to
transform the idea materially into a serially reproducible object.
It is worth recalling that ‘the’ Bauhaus was in reality a series of
Kunstgewerbeschulen comparable to other, earlier reformed schools.
Its ideas emerged from the same context of the pre-World War I dis¬
cussions about aestheticizing life (Art Education Movement) and the
material, especially industrial, world (Werkbund). Already demonized
by its enemies at birth, it consisted of a shifting set of teachers and di¬
rectors driven by political controversy and other difficulties from one
place to another. It began in 1919 as the Staatliches Bauhaus, or ‘state
house of building,’ the amalgamation of the Grand Ducal Art Acad¬
emy and Kunstgewerbeschule in Weimar, with an innovative faculty
including Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, Johan¬
nes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche, Paul Klee, Wassily
Kandinsky, and Lazslo Moholy-Nagy. Initially several professors of
the original academy who had favored reforms also taught there but
eventually withdrew and refounded the Weimar Art Academy as a
rival institution. Political groupings of center and right objected to
alleged ‘Communist-Spartacist’ tendencies in the school, rumors that
the City Hall would be repainted in an Expressionist style by the
avant-gardists of the school, and (perhaps most serious from the view¬
point of the professional artistic community) that the Bauhaus was

77
 bent on abolishing real art instruction in favor of ‘training advanced
craftsmen.’62
Forced out of Weimar and the building it shared with the rival art
academy, it settled in the Anhalt industrial town of Dessau as a School
of Design in 1926. Feininger, Marcks, and Itten were gone, but Josef
Albers and Marcel Breuer, among others, had joined the faculty. The
Dessau incarnation of the Bauhaus stressed housing and domestic
products (including marketing its own designs to raise money). De¬
spite its reputation as left-wing and unconventional, most of its
women students and few female instructors were consigned to tradi¬
tional areas of ‘women’s work,’ for, as one of its instructors wrote,
‘The ability of woman to become absorbed in detail and her interest in
experimental “play” with surfaces suit her for this work [weaving].’63
Under Gropius’s direction the Dessau Bauhaus had come to realize
one of the goals of the Werkbund, to create prototypes for industry.
Unfortunately, while this benefited industry, the latter did not come up
with the kind of private funding needed to sustain the school. After
Gropius was forced to resign in 1928 (the sympathetic Frankfurter
Zeitung leported his departure from ‘one of the most hated institutions
of the “new Germany’”),64 Hannes Mayer (attacked for being too soft
on Communism) and finally Mies van der Rohe (attacked for being
too hard on Communism) directed it; by the end in 1932 it had lost all
the original faculty except Kandinsky and Klee.
Moved briefly to Berlin as a private institute in 1932 after Nazi
pressures could no longer be resisted in Dessau, the school was soon
engulfed by the brown tide sweeping over all Germany. An exile
school was established in Chicago by Moholy-Nagy in 1937 (New
Bauhaus, then School of Design, finally Institute of Design from
1944). A privately-funded Hochschule fur Gestaltung (Institute of De¬
sign) was founded in postwar Ulm by a surviving sister of the Munich

62 Bauhaus Weimar, ed., ‘The Dispute over the Staatliches Bauhaus’ and Ministry
of Culture in Weimar, ‘Results of the Investigation Concerning the Staatliches
Bauhaus in Weimar,’ in Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus (Cambridge MA
1969), pp. 38-9.
63 Helene Nonne-Schmidt, ‘Woman’s Place at the Bauhaus,’ in Wingler, Bauhaus
p. 117.
64 Walter Drexel, ‘Why is Gropius Leaving?’, Frankfurter Zeitung, No. 209, 17
Mar 1928, reprinted in translation in Wingler, Bauhaus, pp. 136-7.

78
‘White Rose’ anti-Nazi resistance students, the ‘siblings Scholl,’ but it
eventually lost its experimental profile.
It is worth recalling that if the Bauhaus was not ever one school,
it also was not a ‘school’ in the sense of having a fixed set of princi¬
ples. As Mies van der Rohe later claimed, ‘The Bauhaus was not an
institution with a clear program - it was an idea [...].,65 While to its
detractors and enemies is may have seemed the incarnation of alien,
cosmopolitan-internationalist, anti-humanistic, cold, abstract, soul¬
engineering tendencies, in reality its teachers did not and could not
agree on any such program. Individualism, experimentation, interdis¬
ciplinarity, and at times ‘chaos’ might be said to be more characteris¬
tic of the interwar Bauhaus than ‘school-building.’ Also important to
recall, many of its founding ideas about the relationship between art
and industry proved quickly outdated or impractical.
The fate of the Bauhaus illustrates the deep conflicts in Ger¬
many, both generally and within the arts professions, over such issues
as the role of ‘fine’ vs. ‘applied’ art, academy vs. design school, art as
an expression of ‘national’ community vs. ‘international’ human val¬
ues in a rapidly changing world, as well as the paradox of opportuni¬
ties for revolutionary change missed because of post-revolutionary
poverty. It became a symbol for extremes of right and left of what was
wrong with the Weimar Republic. At the same time, many of its ideas
continued to influence architecture and design through and of course
beyond the Third Reich,66 confirming the suspicion that its leaders
were not so much enemies of innovative design as of designers they
did not control.
As the Bauhaus professors and students discovered when trying to
apply the concept in the 1920s, producing quality designs for mecha¬
nized serial production was easier said than done. The ‘rationalization’

65 Mies van der Rohe, in Wingler, Bauhaus, p. 2.

66 See Anna Teut, Architektur im Dritten Reich, 1933-1945 (Berlin, 1967), pp.
77-8. One of the most significant changes in patronage made by the Nazi re¬
gime was to raise the percentage of public commissions for architects from 33
per cent at the time they took power in 1933 to 100 per cent by the beginning of
World War II. Ibid. See also Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), Bauhaus-Moderne im
Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung (Munich, 1993),
showing how many Bauhaus graduates were able to continue the school’s inno¬
vations even under the Third Reich.

79
 of industry by the 1920s, the rise of mass-production goods requiring
cheapness of production rather than high quality, and rapid technical
change practically defeated the Typisierung agenda of the school. At the
same time, by emphasizing theory, creativity, and innovation, not only
the Bauhaus but many other Kunstgewerbeschulen had attracted some of
the most talented young men and women into a new kind of art educa¬
tion. From the turn of the twentieth century on, one encounters an ap¬
plied-arts school as often as an art academy in the biography of respected
visual artists and architects.
As already mentioned, the blurring of lines between academy and
Kunstgewerbeschulen continued in the interwar period with attempts to
integrate the two. Prussia pushed through this refonn in the 1920s, al¬
though not without great resistance from the academies. Even Draconian
measures, such as the forced retirement of professors, were used occa¬
sionally and threatened more often. It would take until the 1960s, there¬
fore, before most consolidations had reached completion.
One might well ask what all the fuss was about. Why should two
types of art school be integrated at all? The initiative lay outside the
academies, whose professors were for the most part quite content to
continue with their leisurely, small-class attention to the classical canon.
Of course practical and fiscal reasons abounded for integration: elimi¬
nating duplications of professorships, classrooms, ateliers, libraries, and
so on. This was a major argument used by state ministers advocating the
reform. Quite often, though, lack of funds to add needed space for a uni¬
fied facility delayed reform plans, obviously to the satisfaction of most
academicians. The main beneficiaries of integration were the professors
at the Kunstgewerbeschulen. In the German system, their status and
often their salaries were being upgraded. The official elevation of techni¬
cal colleges to the same level with universities around 1900 showed the
way for the ‘junior partners’ in the arts education world, and their lever¬
age with bureaucracy and industry helped in transforming ‘schools’ into
more clearly tertiary-educational institutions. Another inducement for
the applied-arts professors lay in the greater level of self-government and
autonomy enjoyed by most academies. Higher salaries, greater prestige,
expanded bureaucratic tenure and retirement benefits, lower teaching
loads, and smaller classes were all perceived as benefits of integration
for the Kunstgewerbeschule teachers.

80
 Students, insofar as they expressed their feelings, generally sup¬
ported such integrations. Some hesitation was shown on their behalf,
however, from reformers themselves. The temptation for students in a
combined arts college was to gravitate toward the ‘fine’ or ‘free’ arts
and neglect the practical handicraft training that lay at the heart of ap¬
plied arts. Even a seasoned reformer such as Richard Riemerschmid,
who had directed a brief experiment in a consolidation school in Ba¬
varia in the early 1920s, warned a few years later of this danger.
Another feature of German universities craved by upwardly mobile
technical colleges and art academies was the self-governing attributes of
a Rektoratsverfassung. This fonn of collegial self-rule provided for the
election and rotation in office of the instructional chief executive officer
(•Rektor). Election by one’s peers (who would normally rotate into the
office eventually) and short terms of office militated against dictatorial
authority, and decisions (such as setting curriculum and hiring profes¬
sors) tended to be made collegially. An appointed director, on the other
hand, responsible only to a ministry and in office many years, could and
did act imperiously, as Anton von Wemer had in Berlin. Most profes¬
sors, for obvious reasons, preferred and pressed for the rectoral model.
Bruno Paul, the controversial head of the unified Berlin Vereinigte
Staatsschule before his forced departure in 1933, wrote to a friend that
the ‘director model’ proved superior. Artists, he said, lack the discipline
to work under collegial self-government, and the best way for a school to
be well run was by a director installed and supported by a state minis¬
try.6 Of course Paul was reflecting on his own bitter experience, trying
to ram a reformed and unified school down the throats of some very un¬
convinced holdovers from the former royal academy. Consensus rarely
makes for radical changes.
Before leaving the topic of art education reform, we should turn our
attention briefly to the changing aspirations and training needs of archi¬
tects. For centuries before the nineteenth, most building was done by
local craftsmen and master builders, not by architects. Even through-

67 Letter from Bruno Paul to Karl Gross (director of the Kunstgewerbeschule in

Dresden), 17 Jan 1933, Sachsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, III.3.6., Sachsisches
Ministerium fur Volksbildung, 17984: Organisationsfragen der Kunstge-wer-
beakademie, 1933-9. For a cogent and brief summary of Paul’s earlier expectations
about unifying the training of ‘applied’ and ‘fine’ artists along with that of
architects, see his Erziehung von Kiinstlem an staatlichen Schulen (Berlin, 1919).

81
 out most of the nineteenth century, most architects were civil servants
in charge of government projects and were trained in special ‘building
academies’ (Bauakademien). A minority were also trained by some
of the art academies, and increasingly in the last decades of the
century, in technical colleges as well. (The Berlin Technische Hoch-
schule, for example, arose in 1879 as a consolidation of the older state
Bauakademie and business-oriented Gewerbeakademie.) German
Technische Hochschulen began to achieve the status of universities
with the right to confer doctorates (in addition to examination-based
diplomas) by about 1900. Increasingly, however, private architects
and others conversant with the field complained that traditional TH
training aimed to turn out unimaginative bureaucrats, not artistically-
imbued innovators.
The same multi-faceted fin-de-siecle cultural unrest expressed
in the Kunsterziehungsbewegung (Art Education Movement), Kunst-
gewerbeschule reform, and artists’ secessions affected architects, too.
The Bund Deutscher Architekten (League of German Architects,
BDA), founded in 1904 to represent mostly private architects, com¬
plained that students needed less, not more, formal training (but more
imagination). Many, especially those in the Werkbund, called for a
unified education for both architects and building engineers, based on
knowledge of practical artisanal techniques and ending in the kind of
master ateliers common in art academies - an idea partly realized in
the Bauhaus during the 1920s. The chorus of complaint sounded the
same themes repeatedly: architectural training (especially in the tech¬
nical colleges) was too academic and isolated from real building sites,
knowledge of materials and the real world, and was tailored to the
needs of the ‘green tables’ of government administrative offices.
The BDA, after years of debate, finally adopted its own princi¬
ples for architectural education in 1925, summarized below:

I. Admission requirements for academic study (technical college, academy):

A. Graduation from a Gymnasium, Realgymnasium, or Oberrealschule or passage
of entrance examination showing equivalent general knowledge.
B. Evidence of at least a half year of practical artisanal experience

II. Academic training:

In a lower and upper division, each of four semesters, with emphasis away from
the lecture hall and onto the drawing table

82
 Lower division:
A. Building specialties with apparatus, principally building construction,
building materials, statics, and artisanal techniques in elementary form;
also instruction in the history of building and structural forms, with exer¬
cises in drawing and modeling, ending in
B. A preliminary examination and
C. Practical training of at least one year in an architectural design office

Upper Division:
D. Students who have done A—C, or graduates of Baugewerkschulen who
have met the same requirements, may be admitted to this level to study,
principally drafting designs based on real projects. Students will develop
these designs in a master class, and may take only one such class each
semester. In their remaining time they may take general-educational
electives at a university or technical college. Drawing and modeling
would be obligatory courses.
E. Main examination
Precondition for the final oral examination is a satisfactory set of reports
from the heads of all master-classes taken as well as completion of a
practical test involving extemporaneous solutions of assigned problems.
The exam itself will be restricted to the elective courses taken. Passage of
this exam confers the title Diplomarchitekt.b8

The BDA’s concept that architectural training should be tailored

to the ‘professional image’ of the architect in private practice finally
won out in the postwar Federal Republic, although not without con¬
tradiction.69
The debate about applied arts schools was overtaken in Germany
(as elsewhere) by the Second World War. As with art academies,
conscription of students and professors, Allied air and artillery
bombardment, and the almost total collapse of the postwar economy
put their fate on hold. By the mid-1940s, many things had changed in
the relationship between ‘art’ and ‘application,’ too. Although the
handicraft tradition had not died out completely, it clearly was moving

68 For text and comments by prominent architects of the period, see Bernhard
Gaber, Entwicklung des Berufsstandes der freischaffenden Architekten [...] BDA
(Essen, 1966), pp. 135-6 and 71 ff.
69 For a careful summary of the complex and multifaceted training of all sorts of
people involved in the older building trades before reorganization of architec¬
tural education, see Erich Konter, ‘“Architektenausbildung” im Deutschen
Reich,’ in Ekkehard Mai, Hans Pohl, and Stephan Waetzold (eds.), Kunstpolitik
undKunstforderung im Kaiserreich (Berlin, 1982), pp. 285-308.

83
to the margins of an economy reviving and later booming on the basis
of mass-produced consumer goods. The Nazi attempts to turn back the
clock and promote pure artisanal schools for ‘application’ were thus
doomed to obsolescence. Applied-arts schools generally became or
stayed integrated with academies of art after the war in both east and
west.
In Germany particularly, but elsewhere in Europe as well, the
purposes of ‘fine arts’ training changed forever with the end of the
war. Already decrepit in the interwar period, such specialties as
history painting, monumental sculpture, and grandiose public
architecture ceased to get commissions. Hitler fascism waged a war to
the knife on Modernism and - having no clear aesthetics of its own -
embraced or embellished traditional artistic and architectural standards.
Consequently the traditional canon, already outworn, came to be
confused with Nazism; Modernism, with the triumph of its foes.
Granted, there were exceptions to these generalizations. Insofar as
damaged historical structures (churches, government buildings, and
palaces) were gradually restored, artists and architects familiar with the
historicist canon still found employment. Even in the age of efficient
concrete and glass public buildings, exhausting and cheapening the
Bauhaus tradition, some room for monumentality still remained. For
decades artists living under regimes influenced by Stalinism could paint
huge ‘history’ murals extolling the proletariat, or work on ‘socialist
wedding-cake’ projects like the Frankurter Allee (first renamed for
Stalin, later Karl Marx) in East Berlin. But art schools had to adjust to a
different set of demands.
It is impossible to treat here in full the new elements introduced
into art education. The internationalization of styles (successive forms
of non-representational painting - for example, abstract, abstract
expressionism, or brutalism - under American and West European
influences or socialist realism under Soviet pressure) militated against
inculcating traditional craftsmanship. New materials (plastics,
acrylics) or combinations (multi-media) had to be tried, new sources
of light (from neon tubing to lasers) experimented with, new forms of
image creation (television, computers) put to work by artists. Art came
to include ‘conceptual’ space dividers or even ‘performance.’ A well-
known exemplar of the 1960s ‘revolution’ in art and its teaching, Josef
Beuys, courted being fired from the Dusseldorf Art Academy for

84
leading student strikes. For Beuys, art might consist of blocks of con¬
gealed fat, constructions made from rough felt, or old blackboards
containing chalked snatches of his theoretical ramblings on social action.
Beuys indeed broke down the ‘ivory tower’ of the academy to urge all
artists to ‘perform’ their art as a kind of endless political activism.
Boundaries between visual, musical, literary, and performing arts, in the
view of Beuys and his international colleagues in ‘Fluxus,’ no longer had
any meaning. A flourishing international market developed for objects
and actions certified as ‘art’ primarily by their being purchased as such.
Thus Duchamp’s wry joke (the urinal-tumed-art by addition of the
artist’s signature) was expanded into a very serious multi-billion dollar
industry. Even when mocked, as by Andy Warhol in the 1960s, this
market proved that he and many others received far more than the
‘fifteen minutes of fame’ Warhol, with a characteristically poker face,
claimed.
Despite such wrenching developments, art schools still exist, still
teach fundamental skills, and still offer interaction with older profes¬
sionals as regular or visiting faculty; facilities such as studios and
ateliers; and fellow students off whom to bounce ideas. The old status
tights among ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ artists have become muted in the
face of the vast diversity of materials and ideas that now go into art
and design. The conceit that one cannot really ‘teach art,’ but merely
create an environment where ‘talent’ can develop, is more entrenched
than ever. Nevertheless, virtually all professional artists now attend art
schools and can in that sense be considered more ‘professionalized’
than ever.70
And despite the availability of affordable or free instruction at art
academies and applied arts schools in most of Europe, yet another
form of art education has persisted throughout our period. Anybody
can and could get private lessons. It is very difficult to assess the
importance of this educational resource, because it has served many
different purposes. Some - probably most - private instruction served
the needs of the non-professional arts community, such as amateur

70 The most recent (1998) survey indicated that 95 per cent of all German artists
studied at an art academy or fine arts college (Kunsthochschule), specialty college
(Fachhochschide), or other colleges (e.g. universities). See Robke, Kunst und
Arbeit, p. 96.

85
 painters and applied-arts craftsmen. The ‘students’ in such private
courses may play little role in a history of professional artists. But
their existence provided an often indispensable audience and source of
income for the latter.
Where private instruction did overlap with formal academic in¬
struction, it served as both preparatory and post-academy training. In
order to gain the skills necessary to pass the entrance requirements of art
academies, for example, many aspirants paid for private instruction.
Often this was offered by former students at the academy, sometimes
even by the professors, thus giving some inside insight into the tacit and
unwritten standards of admission. Just as doctors and lawyers commonly
went from university completion to some kind of ‘post-doctoral’ practi¬
cal training before assuming full independent professional practice,
many artists went to another city known for its art community to study
privately with a leading figure, after finishing their institutional educa¬
tion. In some places, notably Paris, such private education was commer¬
cially organized, serving hundreds of students at several locations, often
employing members of the academy as part-time teachers. Of what did
such instruction consist? The histories of such private schools as the
Academie Julian in Paris suggest a great deal of independent work on
the part of the paying students, with the ‘professors’ dropping in
occasionally to ‘correct,’ i.e. make critical suggestions. This was a con¬
tinuation of the methods of the academy.
These private arrangements had at times the additional advantage
of serving the needs of students shut out of the formal educational
network. Women, as we have seen, could have access to art education
privately when such public institutions as academies were still closed to
them. Foreigners, too, who often found it difficult to enter official art
schools, could make use of private instruction. Even when academy
instruction (or at least the prestigious prizes essential to a good career,
like the French Prix de Rome) were closed to foreigners, private
instruction, even by the same professors teaching on the side, could
overcome barriers for those who could afford it.
Private instruction in the arts (performing as well as visual) con¬
trasted with counterparts in training for other professions by its lack of
market regulation. Just as anybody could claim to be an artist, so
could anybody offer art instruction. In practice, however, only in¬
structors with a certain competence or at least local prestige were

86
likely to attract paying students. That cachet in turn derived usually
from connections and recommendations within the arts community.
These in turn often depended on formal educational networks
(moonlighting professors and former students), exhibitions linked to
academies or artists’ professional organizations (and prizes won
there), or active membership in the local artists’ associations.
Considering the small size relative to other professional groups,
artistic communities did not need to rely so heavily on educational
certificates and licenses - and hence highly structured and monopolistic
educational institutions - as others. It is worth remembering, too, that not
even doctors and lawyers, with their elaborate educational certificates,
achieved complete market dominance. ‘Quacks’ and ‘shyster lawyers’
still existed and picked up their tradecraft outside the medical and legal
faculties of universities. What made private art instruction unique, how¬
ever, was that neither the profession nor the state made any attempt to
suppress or control it. Disputes among artists about what was ‘good’ art
or its ‘teachability’ being of long standing, an agreed standard could not
be found for licensing. Only art teachers headed for a teaching career in
non-art schools (e.g., German Zeichenlehrer or drawing masters) were
expected to leave art schools with examination-certified credentials to
teach.
Forming artists as a process also did not end with the termination
of formal instruction. ‘Grappling with the material,’ a search to trans¬
late the image in the mind into a physical work of art, constituted a
lifetime learning assignment.
Educating artists constituted a growth industry in itself over the
past century and more. At no time, since the members of the Royal
Academy in London complained about a lack of good painters in the
country in the mid-eighteenth century, has anybody seriously suggested
a lack of practitioners. ‘Too many students, too many schools, too many
artists!’ has been the cry. At times of severe economic crisis and lack of
work in such ‘luxury’ professions as the arts, some professional groups
even called for the outright closing of art academies.71 They argued that

71 Criticism of art academies for churning out too many artists constituted a recurring
theme for complaints by working artists in the press of the Weimar Republic. By
the onset of the Depression, however, even professional organizations began to
urge governments to shut them down, either permanently or tor the foreseeable
future. See petition from Chairman Ludolf Albrecht of the Hamburger Kunstler-

87
 the state was spending vast amounts training people who would only
graduate onto the welfare rolls. Have art schools really overproduced
artists with such reckless abandon? If so, why? If not, was the rector of
the Dresden Art Academy right in claiming, ‘For a century, moaning and
complaining about the academy and its professors have been one of the
few effective means of creating a temporary unanimity among artists’
associations - enough to vote for a resolution.’72
Statistical models for projecting future requirements of labor
markets have rarely proven reliable because of the unpredictability of
many variables. Such models work even worse in the relatively small
area of professional labor markets. Projected ‘need’ or demand statis¬
tics for most of the learned professions have tended historically to un¬
derestimate the market, which has expanded to employ far more
doctors, lawyers, or engineers than most statisticians could have
dreamed. Long-term economic prosperity, increasing complexity and
specialization, and the absence of war are just some of the factors
making such projections difficult for the last half of the twentieth
century, for example. For the even smaller and specialized groups in
the aits professions, even minor changes in the overall economy often
produce booms and busts in art demand. Catastrophes, on the other
hand, such as the economic consequences of two world wars and the
Great Depression, cut very deeply into expectations.
The impressionistic statistics of the nineteenth century indicate as
much as a fourteen-fold increase in the number of visual artists between
1840 and 1907 (from about one to fourteen thousand), where it leveled
off and long remained stable (1933 occupational census).73 Yet this in-

schaft to the Hamburg Senate, 30 Aug 1932, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 363-
2.B.20. The Dresden Kunstlerschaft, typically, also expressed the wish to close
their art academy: why should the state spend over a thousand marks a year per
capita to train artists ‘who will promptly become welfare cases?’ See article by
Herbert Lehmann, Dresdner Volkszeitung, 28 Sep 1931. The RVBKD noted in
1931 the demand for artists’ organizations for the shutting of art academies - Prus¬
sia had already done so with those of Konigsberg, Breslau, and Kassel See letter
from RVBKD to Dresden Academy, 31 Dec 1931, in Archiv, Hochschule fur
bildende Kunst, Dresden, Akte 1349.
72 Letter from Rektor Wilhelm Kreis to Saxon Minister of Interior 25 Jul 1931
Archiv, HfBK, Dresden, Akte 1242.
73 See the estimates in Athanasius Raczynski, Geschichte der neueren deutschen
Kunst, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1841), III, 388; Robin Lenman, ‘Painters, Patronage and

88
crease cannot be blamed entirely on German art schools, which appear
before 1914 not to have vastly overproduced neophyte artists. The mar¬
ket for art was certainly crowded. But artists at the time, like other pro¬
fessionals, were only beginning to feel the pinch of competition and
coming up with ideas to solve their creative problems. Still, the prosper¬
ity of Imperial Germany offered a comfortable living for most artists.
This would change after 1918, and again after 1945, because the econ¬
omy had shrunk dramatically, not because there were suddenly too many
artists.
The question of ‘overproduction’ was further complicated by the
increase in the number of schools offering tertiary-level education. Not
only were no new art academies founded in Germany after World War I;
several were shut down or forced to merge with Kunstgewerbeschulen,
as we have seen. But the latter had undoubtedly shifted up-market and
by the 1920s were often sending into the world young men and women
really trained as full-blown ‘fine’ artists, not merely as interior decora¬
tors or textile designers. In an unending struggle to keep the handicraft
tradition viable, governments began reorganizing trade-related secondary
education (e.g. Fachschulen), but even some of their students entered the
market for ‘high’ art after World War I.
Undoubtedly art schools of all types produce more artists today
than a century ago. Exact statistics are difficult to calculate for a number
of reasons. What can be said unequivocally is that neither the expansion
of art education nor the total number of artists resulting from it compares
to per-capita growth in all other professional fields (except perhaps for
the clergy). For example, the number of doctors grew from five per
100,000 population in 1900 (German Empire) to 443 in 1999 (united
Federal Republic). The number of lawyers grew in the same time period
from 13 to 127 per 100,000.74 At roughly the same time, the number of
visual artists increased from 23 to 91 per 100,000, with a staggering
amount of that growth coming only in the last quarter century (there

the Art Market in Germany, 1850-1914,’ Past and Present, 121 (1989), p. 120;
and Alan Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1993), p. 7.
74 Charles E. McClelland, ‘Le liberi professioni in Gennania dopo ll 1945,’ m
Maria Malatesta (ed.), Professioni tra passato e futuro [Quaderni di rassegna
forense, 7] (Milan, 2002), p. 154.

89
 were only 51 artists per 100,000 population in the old Federal Republic
in 1978).75
The surviving evidence indicates that most graduates of art
schools in Germany, at least, did not in fact go directly onto welfare
rolls. A list of exmatriculants from the Dresden Academy of Applied
Arts from the very difficult years 1919-20 shows that of 107 students,
11 went on to study further at an art academy; 16 were independent
artists; 31 were employees in the arts field; and five became teachers.
A further 23 did not respond, and an unknown number were war dead
or still recovering from war wounds. While hardly indicative of good
economic times for beginning a career, these statistics also do not
support the widespread notion of a massive ‘artists’ proletariat.’76
Art educators generally responded to complaints of ‘overproduc¬
tion’ in any case with a somewhat Darwinian logic. Nature, so it ran,
produces a limited number of talented people with an aptitude for the
arts. One can discern signs of talent during the admission and teaching
process. But the most adept student at copying and reproducing will
often turn out to be unimaginative, mediocre artists in their later careers.
Only those who continue to struggle and teach themselves may become
memorably creative. Therefore cutting back on admissions or making
standards much more severe will not really stop the flow of mediocrity.
It might, however, reduce even further the opportunities for real ‘genius’
to surface. In short, according to this logic, art schools resemble Dar¬
win’s jungle, with extravagant waste as part of nature. Reducing admis¬
sions, the logic continues, would only force the rejected applicants to
seek private instruction. The best solution to lack of work in the art mar¬
ket is therefore to urge students to acquire secondary job skills for a
Broterwerb (‘bread-earning’).
One can imagine the shock if medical or law students heard such
sentiments in their schools. Even mediocre physicians and lawyers
find their niche in society. One would hardly urge them to develop a
second set of skills to earn enough on the side to continue practicing
their primary profession. Yet precisely the expectation of training

75 Haak/Schmidt, Arbeitsmarkte, Table 1.

76 Sachsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, III.3.6., Sachsisches Ministerium fur Volksbildung,
17934, Kunstgerwerbeschule 1915-21.

90
many from whom a few are ‘chosen’ or marked for fame and admira¬
tion has long formed a part of the mentality of art educators.
In conclusion, we have seen that the artistic professions (includ¬
ing non-visual ones) have structured educational processes, including
tertiary ones, but that they are more amorphous and result in far less
‘credentialing’ of graduates than is the case with virtually all other
learned professions. Widely criticized since at least the last third of the
nineteenth century, art schools never achieved or even sought a
complete monopoly on the formation of art professionals. And yet an
astonishingly large percentage of those calling themselves artists at¬
tended such schools. Here we confront one of the main paradoxes of
these professions. Attending or receiving certificates from the respec¬
tive educational institutions is not required to join the profession. Yet
almost everybody does, and probably more so in the late twentieth
century than at any previous time. The most widespread cliche among
professors at art academies has been that one cannot ‘teach’ art.
Among academy graduates, the inverse cliche appears almost as
common, that they did not Team’ art there. Yet the educational ex¬
perience must have value, since most artists submit to it voluntarily.
The learning process, in contrast to the formation of members of most
other learned professions, follows a different rationale from the text¬
book cramming of many other fields. Because an art student is
unlikely to be able to show his parents his ‘textbooks’ and say ‘this is
what I learned this semester,’ art students have traditionally been sus¬
pected of being lazy, sybaritic, and even lascivious. In fact, the amor¬
phous structure of much art education - which has if anything become
even less structured in recent decades - may fill it with anxiety and
stress for students. Competition with other artists is the constant theme
from the first day in art school.77 The quest for the teacher’s praise,
prizes, and distinctions in exhibitions, as well as acceptance by a
‘master’ into his class or atelier, contrasts with the esprit de corps
found in other professional schools. This competitiveness, already
built into professional training, may help explain why arts graduates

77 This theme recurs frequently in memoir literature. A recent example: At the

Diisseldorf Art Academy, ‘rivalry and jealousy dominated the atmosphere.’
Jorg Immendorff, Hier und jetzt: Das tun, was zu tun ist: Materialien zur Dis-
kussion, Kunst im politischen Kampf; auf welcher Seite stehst Du, Kultur-
schaffender? (Cologne, 1973), p. 15.

91
 experienced such great difficulty in organizing themselves, as we shall
see in another chapter.

92
Chapter Four
Artists’ Rewards

Let us protect the arts, certainly! But not the

artists. They are a band of debauched do-
nothings.
- Emile Augier78

‘L’art pour Tart' - art for art’s sake - has worn so thin as an aesthetic
philosophy that it ironically serves (in its Latin form, even more
ironic) as the motto of one of Hollywood’s most successful movie
manufacturers, MGM. Yet the nineteenth century aesthetic movement
that wrote the phrase on its banners sought to free the arts from un¬
seemly dependency on wealthy patrons or profit-hungry exploiters of
artists’ skills. One can hardly imagine anybody seriously advocating,
for example, ‘dentistry for its own sake’ or ‘administrative law as an
uplifting hobby.’ The closest parallel lay in the notion of zweckfreie
Forschung (open-ended or ‘basic’ research) advocated by natural
scientists. The latter were pursuing knowledge of natural phenomena
wherever discoveries and new puzzles led, irrespective of immediate
practical benefits in applied technology. Both science and art should
be decoupled from the everyday worries of making a living. Who
should pay for ‘purpose-free’ pursuit of scientific and scholarly truth
or aesthetic beauty, however, was and remains an issue for unending
debate.
Art and science pursued for their own sakes constituted another
novel nineteenth century idea. As we have already noted, the artisanal
traditions of European and North American art connoted a close
connection to the needs of clients and their ability to pay. With the
demise of artisan guilds and control over mostly local markets, artists’

78 Cited in Michele Vessillier-Ressi, La condition d’artiste. Regards sur I’art,

Vargent et la societe (Paris, 1997), p. 344. This collection is a mine of amusing
and irreverent quips by authors, composers, and visual artists, many non-
French, about their profession.

93
 incomes become perhaps more precarious, but their opportunities and
horizons also expanded markedly.
Painters, sculptors, and architects rising to prominence in the
eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries - usually members of
the Royal Academy, the Academie Frangaise, or one of the major
German academies — could amass fortunes from their work. Some of
them - Reynolds, Turner, Landseer, David, Ingres, Manet, Lieber-
mann or Winterhalter - are still widely recognized today. Some of the
richest, like Bouguereau in Paris or Lenbach in Munich, however, are
all but forgotten. What is noteworthy about the success stories of the
nineteenth century is that these men — and the occasional woman, like
Rosa Bonheur - found acceptance and rewards from their own con¬
temporaries. High society commissioned or bought their works and
invited them to their homes. Kings awarded them honors and even
patents of nobility. Whatever their status became later in the twentieth
century, it appears to have risen in the course of the nineteenth.

In 1782 it was reported that the standing of Munich painters was so low that
every official considered himself half princely by comparison. Yet less than a
century later a successful artist was not only accepted but lionized in fashion¬
able society.79

They were, to be sure, the lucky few, the Malerfiirsten (painter-

princes). Few artists left behind large estates for their families. Solid
bourgeois fathers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had
nightmares that a son would become an artist. (Daughters might be
‘accomplished’ in the arts, but pursuit of a career in them could also
wreck marriage prospects.) The chance of earning a decent living, by
comparison to the other learned professions, were bleak enough. The
time and expense of preparation led in many ways into a dead end.
The common school preparation for other professions - a lycee or
Gymnasium curriculum in the classics or a ‘realistic’ mixture of clas¬
sics, modem languages and science — concluded with an Abitur or
baccalaureat. One could work in many fields with such credentials,
even if one did not attend a university and pursue a learned profession.
In contrast, most applicants for admission to art academies had to
spend their high-school years studying the arts. Only a minority could

79 Lenman, Artists and Society, pp. 42-3.

94
 also arrive with a higher school-leaving certificate in hand. The deci¬
sion to ‘become an artist’ also meant excluding most other respectable
ways to make a living. A decision to finish a traditional pre-profes¬
sional secondary-school curriculum and university training, however,
and the choice of a specific profession need not be made until a non¬
arts student’s early twenties.
Unemployment or subsistence existence entered the lives of other
professional graduates, too, especially during years of economic crisis
(e.g., the 1920s, 1940s, 1960s). The professional facilities of higher
education often ‘warned off prospective students with dire
projections of ‘overcrowding.’ Yet few other professional schools had
to go as far as so many art academies did. In Germany in the 1920s,
aspirants commonly heard that they should learn a trade before
studying art, so they could support themselves afterward.80 Although
impossible to quantify, impressionistic evidence points in the direction
of a widening gap between the incomes of artists and most other pro¬
fessional groups starting at the beginning of the twentieth century.
One sign of that is the frequency of complaints in the professional
journals about poverty and ‘proletarianization.’ While tides of com¬
plaint can be followed through the 1920s and early 1930s, and again
for a few years after 1945, cries of impoverishment largely faded from
the pages of most professional journals in Germany from the 1950s
on. Not so from the artists’ professional press. As noted in an earlier
chapter, one of the motives behind a drive to unionize artists from the
late 1960s onward lay in a feeling of exclusion from the benefits of
the ‘economic miracle’ of the postwar boom.

80 Wilhelm von Bode, Die Erziehung der Kiinstler an staatlichen Schulen (Berlin,
1919) merely recognized what had long been a reality by recommending Kunst-
gewerbeschulen as a good preparation both for earning a living and later study
to be a ‘fine artist’ at state academies. Higher education merely reflected here
his agreement with Bruno Paul, the director of the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschulen,
whose superior Bode had been as Director of Prussian Royal Museums. Paul
insisted that artisanal training had to be the foundation of all art education,
whether ‘applied’ or ‘fine.’ See Paul, Erziehung von Kiinstlern, p. 3. Such ideas
were continued - and in Prussia carried out, at least organizationally - in the
form of unified Kunstgewerbeschule and Academy in 1924. See Wilhelm
Waetzold (the head cultural undersecretary in the Prussian Ministry of Culture
and Education in the early 1920s), Gedanken zur Kunstschulreform (Leipzig,
1921), especially p. 6.

95
 Still, such coarse indicators of economic discontent could well
form a part of what Eckhard Neumann calls the ‘hero myth’ of mod¬
em western artists.81 If social marginalization - including economic
disadvantagedness - is taken as a consequence of ‘genius,’ even as a
precondition for creativity, then riches or fame can appear as a threat
to creativity. This psychological defense mechanism may explain, ac¬
cording to Neumann, why so many artists are reluctant to take collec¬
tive action to improve their livelihoods. Poverty, in other words, can
be embraced as a sign of giftedness, the tme badge of honor. Hence
complaining about poverty might be a subjective ritual of self-identi¬
fication, as much or more than an objective statement of economic
hardship.
Poormouthing may well have been a psychological need, but
there is ample statistical evidence confirming how disadvantaged art¬
ists have been, at least in the twentieth century. In Germany learned
professionals not in state or private employ have been treated for tax
purposes as operators of small businesses. As such they were sub¬
jected to a Gewerbesteuer or commercial income tax. Most lawyers,
doctors, engineers and others in the learned professions paid this tax
on incomes from their practices. Artists did not always qualify, be¬
cause their turnover remained too small.8" Another measure includes
qualification for social security payments and benefits. In virtually all
such systems, one qualifies based on the activity bringing in the pri¬
mary source of income. Large numbers of artists have had to report
their primary source of income as deriving from some other activity

81 Eckhard Neumann, Kunstlermythen. Eine psychohistorische Studie iiber Kre-

ativitdt (Frankfurt/M., 1986). Neumann dismisses as a ‘superstition’ the view
among both artists and the public that joining professional organizations would
threaten artists’ role as ‘social outcasts’ (p. 256) or that a favorable economic
starting-point, as with van Gogh or Gaugum, could diminish the ‘genius’ of
their work.
82 Nobody disputes the average low incomes of visual artists compared to non-
artistic learned professions, but figures allowing hard comparisons have been
sketchy until recent decades. West German artists paying income taxes as inde¬
pendent professionals earned an average of DM 35,000 in 1983, for example;
the average for all other independent professionals (Freiberufler) was DM
108,000 - three times as high. See Marlies Hummel, Die Lage der freien und
kunstlerischen Berufe in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich 1990)
Tabelle A-6.

96
 than what they consider their professions.83 Not only does this make it
hard to gauge how many artists there are at a given time, even in an
era of statistical sophistication; it makes one wonder how many other
forms of human activity get mismeasured by tools forged to help tax
collectors.
Another method of measuring artists’ economic success entails
surveying records of the estates they left. Only in rare cases, as in
nineteenth-century France, do consistent records allowing statistical
profiles exist. In the country and era that celebrated the arts and artists
more than any other, estate records only indicate that most artists be¬
longed to the bourgeoisie, a useful but imprecise distinction.84 What
little evidence exists for Germany in the twentieth century would lend
itself equally well to the (erroneous) conclusion that artists belonged
generally to the industrial working class, based solely on their average
incomes.
Measuring professional success by the size of postmortem estates
is in any case open to methodological doubt. Judging by the social
status of artists’ fathers, many would likely have inherited property
themselves, as well as being helped by their families. Before World
War I, for example, 33—45 per cent of Munich art students traced their
social origins back to the propertied or educated middle class; a fur¬
ther 50-66 per cent came from the Mittelstand (shopkeepers, clerks,
craftsmen, teachers etc.); and only two to eight per cent from the
lower orders of society. (These ranges relate to the period 1882—
1907.) At the Royal Saxon Art Academy in Dresden, the entering
class of 1882/3 counted six Gymnasium pupils among its 16 new re¬
cruits; the entering class of 1902/3 counted among its 15 newcomers
two sons of factory owners, one son of a university professor and one
heir to a noble landed estate. A few had even attended a university
prior to switching over to the academy. The admission of women stu¬
dents, first to the new Women’s Department of the Kunstgewerbe-
schule afterl906, then to the art academy after World War I,
undoubtedly raised the social recruitment level of art students in

83 See Karla Fohrbeck and Andreas J. Wiesand, Der Kiinstler-Report (Munich,

1975).
84 Andree Sfeir-Semler, Die Maler am Pariser Salon, 1791-1880 (Frankfurt/M.,
1992), pp. 518-31.

97
 Dresden further. The first class of women admitted to the former
consisted almost exclusively of daughters of academic professionals,
civil servants and military officers, and businessmen. And by 1923/4
women comprised a third of the German as well as over half the
foreign Kimstgewerbeschule students, if only a sixth of the art
academy students in Dresden. As at Munich, the children of the
Mittelstand preponderated, with only a negligible number from
peasant or proletarian backgrounds.85
A marriage could also bring welcome property or income into
artists’ lives. As one prominent German painter, Lovis Corinth, liked
to quip, ‘There are three things an artist needs to succeed: talent, hard
work, and money. One can even succeed dispensing with one of these,
but nobody could achieve a good result with only one.’86 Corinth him¬
self, the son of an East Prussian tanner, ended up enjoying all three,
but his material security came from his step-mother’s inheritance,
aided by the wealth and connections of his young Jewish wife (and
model) Charlotte Berend.

From 1901, with his battle cry ‘white tie and tails and patent leather shoes,’
Corinth threw himself into the life of Berlin society. Through Walter Leistikow,
he discovered how much might be earned by portrait commissions. [...] He en¬
couraged Corinth to open an art school for young ladies. [...] At Klopstock-
strasse, on the two floors below Corinth’s studio, [Charlotte] had an apartment
decorated in a style befitting the couple’s social standing and also suitable for
receiving Corinth s wealthy clientele. Here the Corinths employed as many as
six servants [...].87

The sacrifices many women bore to support an artist husband could

alone be the subject of an entire book. But the fact remains that a
spouse’s contribution to artists’ estates renders the latter a question¬
able index of professional success or failure.

85 For Munich see Ruppert, Moderne Kunstler, p. 131; for Dresden, see Sachs-
isches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, III.3.6.1.1, Kunstakademie Dresden, 110,
Matrikel WS 1882/3-1902/3; ibid.. III.3.6., Sachsisches Ministerium fur
Volksbildung, 17984, Kunstgewerbeschule Frauenabteilung; 17935, Akademie
fiir Kunstgewerbe Dresden 1921-35; 18019, Kunstakademie-Unterricht 1923-
8.
86 Lovis Corinth, Das Erlernen der Malerei. Ein Handbuch (Berlin, 1908), p. 12.
87 Peter-Klaus Schuster et al„ Lovis Corinth (Munich/New York, 1996), p' 47.

98
 Some of the first attempts to estimate artists’ income appeared
shortly before World War I. One well-informed observer calculated
the production costs of an average painter’s annual output, the per¬
centages of such paintings being sold at any of the big annual exposi¬
tions, and the sale prices achieved. The study came to the conclusion
that 90 per cent of artists were actually losing money.88 Joachim von
Biilow assumed there were 30,000 visual artists in Germany in 1911,
most of whom were ‘applied’ artists not submitting work to exposi¬
tions. He further reckoned about 40,000 visual artworks were submit¬
ted by some 10,000 artists for Germany’s ten major and many smaller
annual expositions, and that about half were actually accepted and
shown. Assuming an average sale price of 1,000 marks, he concluded
that the average gross income of the 10,000 submitting artists could
not have been much more than 2,000 marks per year, a ‘proletarian’
income, from which overhead costs for materials, ateliers etc. had to
be deducted. More recent estimates suggest 1,000 marks per painting
to have been rare - 500 may have been closer.89 By 1970, nearly twice
as many visual artists were working in the FRG, which had roughly
the same population as the 1911 German Empire. With twice as many
visual artists per capita, only about one-third claimed in 1970 to re¬
ceive most of their income from sales of their work.90
These arguments were based only partly on empirical evidence.
But they do raise the possibility that art may be the only profession in
which one can speak of negative professional income, at least for a
large number of practitioners during long stretches of their careers.
More recent survey evidence suggests that even under conditions
of economic prosperity in the long post-1950 West German boom,
only a minority of artists (albeit a large one) achieved satisfying or
adequate income from their professional activity. Many of these in
turn were employees or civil servants, e.g., professors or teachers. An
artist who spends 25 hours a week in the classroom, as was the norm
for Kunstgewerbeschulen, is hardly likely to produce as much original
work as a ‘free’ or self-employed one, although he might enjoy finan-

88 Joachim von Biilow, Kunstler-Elend undProletariat (Berlin, 1911), pp. 1-3.

89 Ibid. Robin Lenman, ‘Der deutsche Kunstmarkt 1840-1923: Integration, Ver-
anderung, Wachstum,’ in Ekkehard Mai and Peter Paret (eds.), Sammler, Stifter
und Museen (Cologne, 1993), p. 144.
90 Fohrbeck and Wiesand, Kiinstler-Report, pp. 511, 592-3.

99
 cial and job security. Incomes for artists employed in industry were
also often quite respectable. Peter Behrens, for example, could earn
15,000 marks as director of the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule, itself an
exceptionally high salary, but he made five times that when he worked
in the design department of the electrical company AEG during the
last years of the Empire.91
There is an old argument that learned men and women working
in salaried or civil service status cannot properly be called profession¬
als at all. As part of larger authority structures, they allegedly lack the
autonomy and decision-making powers intrinsic to the ‘liberal profes¬
sions.’ The same argument, applied to visual artists, holds that only
autonomous artists working at no behest but their own imagination
and genius truly deserve to be called professional. Although such
snobbism based on nineteenth-century ideas of the ‘free, creative per¬
sonality are out of step with much twentieth century psychology, they
have not completely faded from the professional landscape
Thus, even many prosperous artists can be regarded in the
professional community as ‘sell-outs’ working in enterprises tainted
by ‘commercialism.’ The badge of poverty, especially in the twentieth
century, is worn most often by the ‘free artist,’ the one-person entre¬
preneur taking his chances on the free market of goods and services.
Painters and sculptors fresh out of art school could go on doing what
they had been and hope for notice and purchases when they showed
their work. Unlike physicians and lawyers, they rarely opened a ‘prac¬
tice’ and cultivated a local clientele. Private architects (i.e. those not
employed as civil servants) were somewhat different, but also had to
struggle until recognition and commissions came their way. Young
writers and composers, insofar as they lacked a ‘day job,’ faced a
similar situation.
The free artist thus usually encountered different economic ex¬
pectations and calculations from the ‘free’ doctor, lawyer, engineer or
natural scientist. Like them, the artist had to worry about the overhead
of a ‘practice’ - for the doctor, a surgery and equipment, for the
painter or sculptor, an atelier and paint or stone. Only in the late
twentieth century have art schools begun to include in their curriculum

91 Letter from Hermann Muthesius to Richard Riemerschmid, 23 Jul 1912, Nach-

lass Muthesius, Werkbundarchiv Berlin.

100
 courses on ‘self-marketing.’ Before, artists had to depend on informal
hearsay from their networks of friends, fellow students, teachers, or
sympathetic dealers. Not only were they not expected to keep as care¬
ful account books as a doctor or lawyer; to evince concern about such
things publicly ran against socially constructed stereotypes. The
bookkeeping for many artists was done by their creditors. Because of
the unpredictable nature of most artists’ incomes, they were easy prey
for landlords, art-supply merchants, gallery owners and even patrons
who tided them over with loans, and sometimes tidied up large profits
from works they acquired for a pittance.
The kinds of income available to the ‘free artist’ almost defy
cataloguing, so wide were their range. Sketches, studies, copies, drafts
in clay, scale models, and floor plans could all be sold for small prices
at some point, in some market. Watercolor landscapes did and still do
fill a niche in the tourist market, and portraits in one of several media
formed a reliable source of income for painters - occasionally for
sculptors - fortunate enough to find patrons to commission them. Just
among painters, different types of pictures fetched different prices
depending on a number of factors. Pencil, charcoal, pen-and-ink
drawings, watercolors, oils, and combinations of media were tradi¬
tionally priced according to the time invested in making them, as guild
craftsmen had done. Engravings and lithographs, and other forms of
prints, including posters, could sell quite well to individual buyers or,
before photographic reproductions largely replaced them, illustrate
books. By the late 1880s, however, works in the ‘minor’ visual arts
media began to be shown and collected at prices that could make a
considerable difference to the income of their creators, and still af¬
fordable prints took up an increasingly important share of the mar¬
ket.92 Murals and other forms of wall paintings, a protected species
today, could keep artists busy for years, especially in boom periods of
rapid urban expansion and relative prosperity (such as 1870-1914).
Churches, schools, courthouses, city halls, and even army barracks
needed murals done or renewed. Some private homes, offices, and
other private quarters, especially during the past century, have been
decorated or designed in toto by artists. (A recent striking commercial

92 For a discussion of developments in Germany to 1914, see Lenman, Artists in

Society, pp. 166-71.

101
 version is the chain of ‘artotels’ by A. R. Penck.)93 Designing stage
sets, coins, medals and - insofar as professional artists became in¬
volved - everyday use articles from fabrics to jewelry, artists negoti¬
ated their income directly with patrons or indirectly through the
market.
What ordinary artists received as income from these sales is im¬
possible to generalize, but it was modest. Exceptions to the rule in¬
volved artists whose work was fashionable (e.g., Picasso, Warhol,
Kiefer) or who occupied positions of special prominence (leaders of
the academy, from Ingres to Liebermann). When academic standards
still held sway, artists often advertised their prizes won in various ex¬
hibitions. These might or might not bring in an extra income, but they
served as a kind of quality warranty for the public. Before buying art
became a part of financial speculation, such medals were a sort of in¬
dicator that the price paid would at least not be lost tomorrow. If
works by recognized living artists did not necessarily appreciate, at
least they could be warranted to keep their value.
One of the factors holding down prices in the market came from
so-called Schundwaren (shoddy goods). Other professions, too, had to
compete with what one might call ‘unlicensed practitioners’ - tavern-
table legal advisors, purveyors of patent medicines, and other people
with some exposure to the skills of professionals. Artists, too, had to
sigh and moan over competition - especially on the level of the naive
public — from their equivalent of snake-oil merchants.
Just as itinerant peddlers offer ‘real, original art’ today in flea
markets and abandoned gas stations, their predecessors offered the
public images placed on canvas or paper at knockdown prices a cen¬
tury ago. Entrepreneurs organized whole cottage industries to turn out
‘art,’ most often copies or vague approximations of images deemed
successful at recent exhibitions. This ‘art’ may even have done less
professional harm than comparable competition from medical or legal
charlatans. For one reason, it was usually executed by people with
some training in art, however badly paid. For another, it brought some
aesthetic bright spot into homes that might otherwise have lacked any

93 Penck, bom Ralf Winkler, is one of the few living German self-taught artists to
achieve fame and fortune. He nevertheless attempted to attend art school but
was turned down by the GDR admissions authorities.

102
introduction to art. For professional artists, however, it meant another
potential market sector saturated with shoddy product. Long before
photographic reproductions or posters began gracing the walls of the
‘popular classes,’ cheap copies and hand-made ‘originals’ based on
sound art-school principles competed with the efforts of professional
artists.
Artists not only had to compete with whole factories turning out
‘hand-painted art’ (each part of the ‘work,’ from clouds to bonnets,
being slapped on by different hands).94 They also, in a manner of
speaking, had to compete with their own work. Copyright laws, never
easy to enforce seamlessly, proved weak and only partly effective in
the nineteenth century. Despite reforms and improvements in the
twentieth century, reproduction rights were still protected for only a
limited time. Artists from painters and sculptors through writers and
composers were supposed to receive payment for reproduction of their
original work. The German Reich’s copyright law of 1876 was revised
in 1901 to strengthen protections for literature and music. The old
Allgemeine Deutsche Kiinstlergenossenschaft (ADKG) appointed a
commission that suggested changes for artists, such as photographic
and other reproduction rights, preventing publishers from printing
more reproductions than contractually agreed to, or without consulting
the artist in advance, and extending the term of copyright from 30 to
50 years after the artist’s death - none of which was achieved before
World War I.95 One of the few promises to artists kept by the Nazis in
power was to extend the limit to 50 years. Only well after World War
II was the limit extended to 70 years by the 1965 update of the West
German copyright law.
Artists, however, generally welcomed authorized reproductions
of their work ‘competing’ with the original. Not only did their income

94 An example updated to use new technology in the 1920s involved an entrepre¬

neur running help-wanted ads to attract artists. Those who responded found
photographic portraits already enlarged and projected onto a ready canvas,
waiting for the artist to supply the paint - for 2.38 Marks (60 U.S. cents) per
‘oil portrait.’ Kunst und Wirtschaft, 9, No. 14 (1928-9), p. 319.
95 Allgemeine Deutsche Kiinstlergenossenschaft, Materialien zu einer Neuge-
staltung des Gestzes betreffend das Urheberrecht an den Werken der bildenden
Kunstler (Munich, 1902), pp. 18-22. The report was signed by commission’s
secretary, the later spokesman for the successor organization of the ADKG in
the interwar period, Otto Marcus.

103
 improve, but their name recognition and ability to market more origi¬
nal works as well. Their lack of participation in the value appreciation
ot works they had already sold, on the other hand, long irritated them.
Under free-market nineteenth century custom, any profit (and of
course loss as well) incurred by the resale of an artwork went to the
owner (less a "provision’ fee to any agents involved). The artist, who
might have sold a work for a pittance at a time of financial despera¬
tion, watched others profiting from its increase in value with every
sale to a new owner, without himself realizing a further penny in in¬
come.
This situation was first redressed in Europe by the French loi de
suite in 1920.96 It amounted to a kind of turnover tax on each subse¬
quent resale of a work of art. German artists’ organizations agitated
tor something similar for decades, finally achieving a variant in the
so-called Folgerecht in 1976.
This German ‘succession law’ provides that five per cent of the
proceeds of all resales of artworks made since 1900 be paid to the
creator or his/her estate. The actual funds are effectively raised by a
tax of one per cent on the turnover of art trade enterprises, such as
galleries and auction houses. The law is meant to redress in a small
way the non-remuneration of artists as some of their work increases in
value and becomes a speculative commodity.97 The Folgerecht is
separate from and should not be confused with what is sometimes
called the ‘cultural contribution’ (Kulturabgabe). The latter is a le¬
gally required turnover tax on publishers and other businesses repro¬
ducing or otherwise commercially exploiting the product of all kinds
of independent ‘authors,’ including artists. Since the 1980s it has pro¬
vided a partial substitute for the ‘employers’ contribution’ - obviously
non-existent in the case of non-employee artists - to extend Ger¬
many’s health and social security system to cover artists.
If it is difficult to generalize about the income levels of artists,
especially ‘free’ ones, it is somewhat easier to describe an earning
curve over a career. In most other ‘liberal professions,’ as with art, the
first years of practice were likely to be meager ones, as clientele and

96 Raymonde Moulin (ed.), Vademecum des bi/denden Kiinstlers, 2nd ed (Luxem¬

burg, 1987), p. X13. '
97 Ibid.

104
reputation built up. Costs of getting established had to be met and pos¬
sible debts from years of higher education paid off. Twenty years of
hard work usually passed before professional practitioners reached a
point of maturity and recognition. At that point, though, the estab¬
lished doctor, lawyer, engineer, or teacher could likely begin enjoying
a degree of economic security that would continue until (and into)
retirement. Artists’ income curves were not dissimilar, except that
their name recognition and public favor could not be counted on to
appear at all or to last very long. Even in an era of dominant and gla¬
cially changing academic canons, older artists were often rejected by
the market as being passe. This problem became ever more acute as
fashions beginning with realism, impressionism, post-impressionism,
fauvism, cubism etc. succeeded each other with mounting velocity.
The relatively short time span between arrival at recognition and
rejection as old hat became ever shorter in the hectic twentieth cen¬
tury. And we should recall that we are still speaking of artists with
successful careers. Many achieved only modest or local recognition;
many others failed even at that. Artists who achieved some financial
success in mid-life did not always find themselves well equipped by
their experience to manage money well. Yet others who might have
reaped the rewards of growing fame - one thinks of many Impres¬
sionists and Postimpressionists - died too early to experience it.
In addition to the economic earning curve built into most artists’
career, we should note the impact of economic cycles. In Central
Europe anyway, artists appear to have complained less about eco¬
nomic conditions during times of currency inflation, such as 1918-23
and 1945^18. In contrast to many other middle-class professionals,
artists probably had less invested in liquid assets (such as bonds or
cash accounts) and thus had less to lose when these went up in smoke
due to hyperinflation after World War I or the currency reform of
1948.98 On the other hand, currency inflations make investors keenly
interested in exchanging doubtful cash for more reliable commodities,

98 This is not to say the mostly middle-class artists did not suffer. As the econo¬
mist Alfred Weber pointed out in a 1922 lecture, the destruction of savings, an¬
nuities, rents, and other forms of liquid assets by hyperinflation meant that all
intellectuals now had to work for a living, and their work brought in less on av¬
erage than that of manual laborers. Alfred Weber, Die Not der geistigen Arbeit-
er (Leipzig, 1923), esp. pp. 32, 44-5.

105
 including artworks. To be sure, all collectables tended to increase in
value during the German inflation and subsequent hyperinflation of
1914-23, and living artists did not all benefit, or benefit equally, from
this trend. Relatively speaking, years of economic recovery or stability
such as 1924-28 or 1948-60 in Germany impacted artists’ sales nega¬
tively. And of course the Great Depression through most of the 1930s
greatly reduced public as well as private budgets for the ‘luxury’ of
art. With the exception of a few good years at the beginning and end,
the twentieth century has not been kind to artists’ incomes.
Given all the uncertainties in the lifetime income flow of artists,
their reliance at times on secondary occupations cannot surprise us.
By these I mean activities diverting artists’ time from the direct pro¬
duction of art works. Some of these - e.g., teaching - coincided with
professional work and compared, for example, with doctors teaching
in hospitals. Having private pupils or teaching some courses at an art
school offered a valuable source of additional income for many ‘free’
artists, particularly for those with established reputations. Most major
art centers, as we have noted, had private art schools catering to those
who could not or did not wish to attend public ones. Daughters of
well-to-do parents could almost replicate the curriculum of public
educational institutions if their parents could pay for private tuition.
It is impossible to calculate the significance of income from
teaching on the arts community. Full- and part-time teachers at art
academies and Kunstgewerbeschulen in Germany may have com¬
prised ten per cent of the local professional artists. If the pay scale for
an hour of teaching at some of these was typical (something ap¬
proaching an agreed and published fee scale, as with many other pro¬
fessions, was never negotiated by the professional associations), an
artist could earn 90 to 150 marks for each class-hour of instruction
over an academic year around 1900. Around that time, the Berlin
Kunstgewerbeschule expected its day teachers to offer 42 hours of
instruction a week for 35 weeks out of the year. At the rate going in
Prussia a decade later, that would have meant between 2.6 and 4.3
marks per actual hour of instruction. Elsewhere, evidence suggests
two marks per hour was the norm around 1900. This seems small by
today’s standards (about half a U.S. dollar at that time) yet was more

106
than double the wage of a skilled worker.99 But there was a limit to
this market, and many artists (judging by the sparse memoirs and ar¬
chived papers available) would have attracted few or no students.
When one approaches the labor market for skilled trades, one
sees how the distinction between ‘artistic’ and other work sometimes
blurs. The insistence of Kunstgewerbeschulen on some practical train¬
ing in the applied arts before or during schooling underlines the family
resemblance. Was a graduate of an applied arts school straying too far
from his professional qualifications as an interior designer by accept¬
ing jobs as a housepainter? Or, if trained in fabric design, by taking on
work as a seamstress? Was an art academy alumnus turning away
from his career as a painter by using his brushes to retouch commer¬
cial photographic portraits? Establishing what proportion of artists
engage in such work or how significant their earnings were can never
be reliably done. But fragmentary evidence - a census or two, lists of
art school graduates’ jobs at the time of exmatriculation, complaints
by business owners about unfair competition in the decoration trades -
indicates it was not negligible. The twentieth century’s most notorious
failed artist, Adolf Hitler, who could not make a living from the sale
of his watercolors and postcards, was variously (and incorrectly) be¬
littled by his enemies as a mere ‘paperhanger’ or ‘housepainter.’100
Whether Hitler ever resorted to such occasional jobs is not the point; it
was widely and credibly assumed at the time that the line between a
needy artist and a skilled laborer was blurry. And it should not sur¬
prise us that artists did not exactly delight in recording for posterity
which of these kinds of jobs - occasional or longer-term - they ac¬
cepted to keep body and soul together.
An interesting sidelight on artists’ rewards comes from their mar¬
riages. Like other middle class professionals, artists also aspired to
connubium, home, and family. There is little evidence that most of

99 See Hermann Muthesius, ‘Verwaltungsbericht liber kunstgewerbliche und

handwerkliche Unterrichtsanstalten,’ 1 Oct 1905, in Nachlass Muthesius,
Werkbundarchiv Berlin, pp. 88-90; Jahresbericht 1889/90, Unterrichtsanstalt
beim Kunstgewerbemuseum (1889-91), Geheimes Staatsarchiv Dahlem, Rep.
76Ve/l 5/XII/6/Bd. II, pp. 169-71.
100 Perhaps the best comment ever on this subject is attributed to the Polish apho-
rist Stanislaw Jerzy Lee: ‘Art critics, beware: in every bad painter, there may be
another Hitler lurking.’

107
 them were able to take the implied advice of the painter Lovis Cor¬
inth, mentioned earlier, to inherit money or to marry a wealthy spouse.
And yet no doubt some were able to. After all, despite the Bohemian
legends, professional artists belonged to prominent local social circles
and - if the activities of German artists’ associations are typical -
came into frequent contact with not only local elites but the aristoc¬
racy and royal families as well. The annual summer festival of the
Union of Berlin Artists, for example, attracted some 700 guests, in¬
cluding Prussian Crown Prince and future Emperor Frederick III and
his consort.101 Indeed, the fact that a majority of the (male) members
were married can be adduced from the fact that they excluded mem¬
bers’ wives from the annual summer artists’ festival, until pressure
from the latter put an end (in the 1880s) to what appeared to be a tra¬
dition of all-night revelry and alcoholic overindulgence.
Fragmentary records also support the picture of artists marrying
fairly late in life, or not at all, because of advanced age or lack of fi¬
nancial security. Spouses (especially in the twentieth century) often
themselves took up professional activity as artists, teachers, or some
1 elated career. Large numbers of children do not appear to have been

common in these marriages. A probably representative survey of

Dtisseldorf artists in the 1980s revealed that only a twentieth of those
surveyed had two or more children, but 57 per cent no children at all,
in contiast to much higher rates of parenthood in the general popula¬
tion. Women artists in particular - nearly 60 per cent - were likely to
live alone, i.e. without a marital partner or children. As the survey
author dryly commented, ‘a woman choosing the career of artist will
have the statistical probability of living her life alone - whether by
choice or necessity.’102

101 The 1884 Sommerfest featured ‘a fantasy play around the big lake and an is¬
land. dances by elves and sprites in front of the ruins of a castle, a storm with
wild, devilish demons and satyrs thrashing through the water, and the liberation
and salvation of the terrified, delicate creatures [elves and sprites] by a posse of
pious knights of God, who sailed over on ships, by the light of flames and the
sound ol clerical choirs, and defeated hell’s brood in a Christian fight.’ Verein
?Jrlmon ,KQnStlcr’ festschrift zur Feier seines funfzigjdhhgen Bestehens, 19
Mai 1891 (Berlin, 1891), pp. 76-7, 82.
102 See Hans-Peter Thurn, Kunstler in der Gesellschaft. Eine empirische Unter-
suchung (Opladen, 1985), pp. 18-20..

108
 All the evidence points to an affirmation of what European and
American artists had been saying for two centuries: art is no royal
road to riches. With some spectacular exceptions, few became wealthy
from the sale of their work in their lifetime. Unlike other professions,
once freed from the standards of guild organization, artists were un¬
able to work out mutually agreed ‘fee schedules.’ Although they
might well attempt to price their work in accordance with some tradi¬
tional hunch based on materials, labor time, and skill, they very often
had to accept not a ‘fee’ but an offer lying far below the asking price.
In a market crammed with good as well as mediocre and quite bad art,
only a tiny minority of connoisseurs, collectors, or fans would insist
on the need to have this (as opposed to some other) work and pay full
price for it. Museum directors, theoretically guardians of the highest
standards in art, were just as likely to bargain down prices asked by
even quite famous artists, just like the shabbiest speculator. No doubt
this parsimony derived from fear that some ‘taxpayers’ would express
loud outrage over public funds being spent for art they did not under¬
stand (a favorite tactic of the Nazis, culminating intheir infamous
1937 show ‘Degenerate Art’). But for artists this meant the market,
rather than a fee schedule agreed by professional associations and ac¬
cepted by clients both private and public, set the parameters of their
incomes from ‘free’ professional activity.
Artists themselves often stood clueless before the caprices of the
market. Berthe Morisot, one of the best-known women painters of the
late nineteenth century, wound up selling a lot of her works priced in
the hundreds of francs (at rates comparable to those received by other
good artists) only after failing to sell many priced in the thousands.
Her brother-in-law, Eduard Manet, had given her the well-meaning
but bad advice to demand high prices because this made a good im¬
pression on wealthy collectors. As a wife, mother, and member of the
haute bourgeoisie, Morisot had to be defended also against the charge
of being a ‘dilettante.’103 Much more common, no doubt, is the experi¬
ence of the Diisseldorf artists a century later, in 1985. The one-quarter
of local artists who could make a living solely from the sale of their

103 Suzanne G. Lindsey, ‘Berthe Morisot: Nineteenth Century Woman as Profes¬

sional,’ in T. J. Edelstein (ed.), Perspectives on Morisot (New York, 1990), p.
79.

109
 artworks reported having to sell them (or see them unsold) at prices
that exceeded their overhead costs by an average of less than DM 800
per month. For the rest, their average overhead costs (atelier rent, ma¬
terials, etc.) were higher than their net income, implying that over half
the average price paid for the artworks represented the physical con¬
tents and space-rent to put them together, not even the artists’ time.104
It has been argued - by numerous philosophers, social scientists,
cultural critics, and not a few artists - that the political and industrial
revolutions of the past two centuries took society in one direction,
leaving art isolated and ‘autonomous’ only in its social alienation. The
most apocalyptic versions of this include Hans Sedlmeyer’s 1947
diatribe against contemporary culture, The Loss of the Mean}05 Eco¬
nomic underperformance that would drive people out of other learned
professions appears, in this view, as merely a symptom of the margin¬
alization of beauty and the dulling of aspirations for ‘higher values.’
That artists nevertheless slog on enhances their status as martyrs, vi¬
sionaries, and gurus in a sick society. Certainly Sedelmeyer’s Toss’
became a prediction for the last fifty years of the twentieth century, in
that virtually any attempt to create visual art as a serious continuation
of nineteenth-century canons (except as parody) is doomed to critical
failure.
But from another viewpoint, artists are also the last real capitalist
entrepreneurs, albeit usually small scale ones. They provide the capital
and management skills, but also the labor, for their enterprises. Rarely,
by the nature of the profession, could they expand their production
facilities. Hiring more ‘hands made little economic sense and could
lead to doubts of authenticity. Bound to his own ‘creative vision’ as
authenticated by his signature, the modem artist generally lacked even
the limited scope for partnerships and incorporation increasingly
found in medicine, law, or engineering. As an entrepreneur in the

104 Thum, Kiinstler, pp. 26-9, 52.

105 Hans Sedlmeyer, Verlust der Mitte. Die bildenden Kiinste des 19. und 20. Jahr-
hunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg, 1948), esp. pp. 16 ff.
Sedlmeyer was compromised enough by nearness to the Nazis that he had to
give up his university post in Vienna in 1945, but was highly enough regarded
as one of the few serious art historians still working in the Third Reich that he
was given a professorship in Munich in 1951. See John Petropoulos, The
Faustian Bargain. The Art World in Nazi Germany (New York, 2000), p. 169

110
market, the ‘free’ artist often confronted capitalist (or public) corpora¬
tions much more powerful than he. The artist was and probably
always will be in an unequal position, doomed to remain an infinitesi¬
mal entrepreneurial speck in a vast market ocean. Even though some
art schools have recently added courses designed to make artists better
businessmen and self-marketers, the small scale of their enterprise and
the multi-tasking demanded of the ‘head of the firm’ point to the per¬
manent fragility of this kind of ‘capitalism.’
Even in the GDR, the sole German state ever to try a closed-
market system for the purchase of art, there was a small amount of
room for private art sales. Individuals (including West Germans) with
the interest and funds could buy art directly from the artist, and even a
few galleries were tolerated at times.106 Despite the heavy ideological
hand of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, and especially during the last
half of the GDR’s existence, many artists were able to deviate slightly
from the party line, not seldom with public approval via feedback on
public exhibitions.107
Artists also face the increasing problem of piracy. An ‘original’
work derives much of its economic value from its rarity or singularity.
Of course artists have always been able to make multiple copies of a
work - paintings or sculptures of different sizes but on the same
theme, prints in limited editions, even ‘fakes’ of their own work. At
least since the days of Gutenberg, writers have had to face what be¬
came for visual artists a serious problem only with the advent of the
‘age of mechanical reproducibility.’10s With the arrival of the Internet,
images, sounds, and words can be electronically reproduced and pi¬
rated with astonishing ease.

106 For the history of two of these, see Hans-Georg Sehrt, 'Die Galerie Henning in
Halle, 1947-1962,’ in Feist et al. (eds.), Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR, pp.
237-45, and Gudrun Schmidt, ‘Die Galerie Konkret in Berlin,’ ibid., pp. 290-7.
107 For an excellent recent survey of the entire spectrum of art, covering schools to
galleries, local atelier space to the global art market, see Beat Wyss et al.,
Kunststadt Stuttgart. Studie des Instituts fur Kunstgeschichte an der Universitat
Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 2000). For general comments, see Robke, Kunst und Arbeit,
pp.161-70.
108 Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduz-
ierbarkeit,’ in R. Tiedemann and H. Schwepperthauser (eds.), Gesammelte
Schriften, 1/2 (Frankfurt/M., 1974), pp. 433-508.

Ill
 One of the chief concerns of artists’ organizations lay in the area
of copyright protection and use fees, as alluded to elsewhere. All art¬
ists (including musicians and writers, performers, and architects)
shared an interest in strong regulation. In practice, some groups
evinced a stronger interest than others. Architects, for example, did
not usually need to fear somebody copying an exact building plan.
Authors and composers had perhaps the keenest interest in preventing
unauthorized (and unpaid) reproduction of their creations, which was
rampant through the eighteenth century. Painters and sculptors took an
interest if their works were reproduced for some other use than being
shown as an ‘original,’ for example as an illustration in a periodical.
The droit de suite, already mentioned, interested artists whose work
might change owners one or more times during their lifetime (and
even beyond it, for the sake of their heirs).
Virtually all artists’ organizations battled from time to time to
strengthen copyright and fee regulations. In Germany the copyright
legislation of the Empire bore the marks of its ‘liberal’ origins, since it
favored public access and publishers’ profits over long-term coverage
of copyright, and it contained many loopholes irritating to authors.
Eftorts to change legislation in the 1920s, for example to extend the
copyright period to 50 years, generated much disgruntlement, but po¬
litical fragmentation and the countervailing interests of other eco¬
nomic interest groups (e.g., publishers) prevented implementation of
regulations completely satisfying to artists.
Some professional organizations set up special departments to
supervise royalty and copyright issues. For example, by the last years
of the Weimar Republic, composers, authors, and some publishers had
founded GEMA, the Genossenschaft zur Verwertung Musikalischer
Auffuhrungsrechte or Collective for Compensation for Musical Perfor¬
mance Rights, the German equivalent of ASCAP. Before the Nazis’
Reichskulturkammer took over such functions, GEMA even persuaded
Goebbels to found a state-sanctioned institution (STAGMA, Staats-
anstalt fiir die Genehmigung Musikalischer Auffuhrungsrechte) to
enforce collection of performance royalties.109 On the one hand, the
Nazis perpetuated much of the cultural superstructure of the past as far
as artists’ fees, royalties, and copyright were concerned. They con-

109 Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, p. 36.

112
 sented to Richard Strauss’ long-time demand and extended copyright
protection from 30 to 50 years in 1934, with a disproportionate
amount of royalty fees collection going to ‘serious’ composers and
musicians rather than ‘popular’ ones.110 On the other, when their ideo¬
logical and racial obsessions intervened, artists lost more than their
rights and fees. Comparable distortions afflicted artists under Soviet
influence. Royalties could still be paid and art works sold, but artists
could not usually count on an undistorted market or the right to spend
their income freely. Even quite famous East German authors like Bert
Brecht, when allowed to keep their western-currency royalties in
banks abroad, were not often able to travel freely or spend their re¬
wards as they pleased.
Under the more settled conditions of the second half of the
twentieth century, artists enjoy in many ways adequate protection of
intellectual property, watched over by professional organizations. In
addition to such restored organizations as GEMA, for example, the
BBK and government set up the Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst
to collect royalty payments for artists’ social security. On the other
hand, changes in the media-market for images mean that it is harder to
benefit financially from original artistic ideas. When so much visual
art is being computer-generated, for example, a precise image defined
by the co-ordinates of pixels may be copyrightable. But the general
idea of the image can easily be pirated for advertising or other media
purposes.
By the end of the twentieth century, perhaps the simplest way to
distinguish fine art from advertising is to discover who pays for the
artwork. If the patron is Dell Comics, it must be almost anonymous,
commercial graphic design; if it is the Museum of Modem Art, it must
be a Roy Lichtenstein. Unions and professional associations may, in
many cases, negotiate collective contracts with artists’ employers.
Clearly the largest percentage of artists earns its living today in activi¬
ties other than the production and sale of individual works for the
market. But even unions, professional associations, or other agencies
can hardly match the power of such patrons as governments and large
corporations. The days in which Hans von Marees could continue
painting (and refusing to exhibit) for twenty years because of support

110 Ibid., p. 51.

113
 from his chief patron Fiedler, or Anselm Feuerbach, sustained through
his many quarrels with would-be buyers by his parents, may be gone
forever.111
The image of the lonely, socially marginal, and ‘starving’ artist
was a topos created in the nineteenth century and illustrated by a few
choice examples (such as Caspar David Friedrich). Insofar as the
world of visual artists came to resemble the topos during some parts of
the twentieth century, at least in economic aspects, it did so because of
significant changes in recruitment and composition. Lack of restric¬
tions on the professional title ‘artist,’ the expansion of educational
opportunities as well as employment chances in the commercial
world, and the significant increase in the number of women among
visual artists all contributed to a remolding of the markets for artists’
services. The end of the twentieth century, at least in some countries
like Germany and France, witnessed a further rapid acceleration in
these trends.

111 Feuerbach was one of many nineteenth-century artists emerging from the upper
bourgeoisie (a few even came from the nobility), another source of private sup¬
port for individual artists. Feuerbach was the son of a knight and counted
among his family members (father and uncles) noted professors and practitio¬
ners in archaeology, mathematics, philosophy, law, and philology. See Julius
Allgeyer, Anselm Feuerbach, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1904), p. 77. For self-portraits of
some securely bourgeois and prosperous, even socially ‘arrived’ artists, see
Georg M. Blochmann, Zeitgeist und Kunsllermythos. Untersuchungen zur
Selbstdarstellung deutscher Maler der Griinderzeit: Marees, Lenbach, Bocklin,
Makart, Feuerbach (Munster, 1991).

114
Chapter Five
Herding Cats: Organizing Artists

We have got used to the idea that art is as¬

signed to the realm of leisure, and thus to the
opposite of gainful employment. And is it not
true, artists actually pursue an obsession, a
calling, rather than exercising a profession?
- Thomas Robke'12

Professionals are important elements in modem society. Some schol¬

ars, following the sociologist Talcott Parsons, rate them as the key
element in knowledge-based, postindustrial societies. Others, like M.
S. Larson, view them less benevolently, as special kinds of interest
groups aiming relentlessly for power and privilege.113 Whatever their
importance or power for good or ill, though, we can best approach and
study professions via the organizations set up to represent their inter¬
ests. Some of these have achieved great size, wealth and power, like
the notorious American Medical Association. At their most successful,
professional organizations determine the parameters of professional
life, from how many practitioners should be admitted to what sort of
incomes they will receive, from policing ethics code violators to co¬
writing regulatory legislation.
Professional associations graduated, around the end of the nine¬
teenth century, from their origins as scientific/scholarly discussion and
mutual-aid societies to lobbying organizations. Typically they created
national umbrella organizations to represent the profession on the
level of countrywide problems and legislation, but retained local and
regional chapters, often acting separately concerning local issues. In
cases of successful professionalization processes, a single predomi¬
nant association might normally represent the whole profession.
(Competing and non-competing organizations, such as ones for pro-

112 Robke, Kunst und Arbeit, p. 11.

113 Magali S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley, 1977).

115
 tessionals of different ethnic or religious backgrounds or for special¬
ists within the professions, like anesthesiologists within medicine,
need not detract from this generalization). In Germany, united as a
federal state in 1871, many of the professional licensing powers cen¬
tralized in Britain or France were retained by the federated states.
When German doctors or lawyers pushed for state-sanctioned self-
governing professional bodies (Kammern or ‘chambers’), they had to
do so on the state, not national level. Similarly, the states retained
sovereign rights in matters of culture, religion, and education. Profes¬
sions involved in these areas - such as teachers and artists - could
organize nationally, but act differently in the separate states. To be
sure, Prussia constituted two-thirds of the German Reich, and many
smaller states followed its lead in professional regulations. But the
remaining ‘sovereign states’ rights’ in the arena of culture came to be
emphasized more strongly than ever as a sign of independence from
Berlin s overweening domination. Within limits, something similar
could be said of the German-speaking provinces of the federalized
Swiss Confederation or the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its succes¬
sors after 1918.
For many reasons artists felt less compulsion to organize than
members of other professions. Their ‘market for services’ revolved for
most ot the nineteenth century around recurring public exhibitions of
their work. Art schools themselves organized salons in major art cen¬
ters. In cities lacking recurring academy expositions, local or regional
art unions sprang up to fulfill this task. In some cities, the art union
and academy arranged shows jointly, as in Berlin. A major reason for
artists banding together was the mutual need to show their new work
to the public and, if possible, sell it.
Two major types of artists’ organizations evolved in nineteenth-
century Germany to fulfill the exposition imperative. One consisted
almost exclusively of artists and bore many different names, the most
common of which was Kiinstlergenossenschaft (literally ‘comradeship
of artists , but equally ‘collective’). The major German national art¬
ists association indeed bore this name. Many local chapters of the
national Kiinstlergenossenschaft chose a variant name, e.g., Miinch-
ener Kiinstlergenossenschaft. Others were called Kiinstlervereinigung
01 something similar. The local and regional comradeships were
voluntary, dues-paying associations which, like their cognates in other

116
 professions, aspired to (but never achieved) inclusion of all active
professionals in their ranks.
The Allgemeine Deutsche Kiinstlergenossenschaft (ADKG), the
first national organization of German artists, was founded in 1856 and
thus predates most of the other national professional organizations,
including those of engineers, doctors, and lawyers. Its origins went
back to a Diisseldorf artists’ association founded in 1844 for mutual
aid (widows’ and health insurance fund) and its associated artists’
club, founded in 1848, the Ma/kasten (Paint Box).114 A national fund
of a similar kind was one of the ADKG’s objectives. The organization
constituted a federation of various local artists’ associations through¬
out the Germanic Confederation, and its nascent economic concerns
(showing it was not merely a fraternal club) led to an (unsuccessful)
petition to the Federal Diet {Bundestag) for better copyright protection
of intellectual property.
The ADKG was most successful, however, in promoting the idea
of national art exhibitions. Before this time, almost all such shows
were local or regional in nature, often organized by the local art acad¬
emy. The exhibition in Munich in 1858 was a direct outgrowth of
these efforts. The ADKG did have academicians as members, but it
was non-teaching artists who most needed promotion and exposure.
Gradually the national organization and some of its powerful local
branches (e.g. in Munich and Berlin) succeeded in supplanting the
academies in mounting ever more frequent and larger shows, includ¬
ing international ones. Traditionally, the juries drawn from ADKG
chapters were not supposed to exclude works except for ‘artistic im¬
perfection,’ not on the basis of taste or style. Precisely this ‘democ¬
ratic’ (critics would say ‘mob’ or ‘art-proletarian’) tradition led to ever
more unwieldy, large, and frequent shows in which many ‘elite’ artists
felt their work was being swamped or ignored.
Although the ADKG embraced a large percentage of German
visual artists (its membership in the 1860s was already nearly 1,700),
it proved incapable of uniting them behind any unified program. Even
a second attempt at establishing an insurance fund was hobbled in the

114 For a lavish collection of sources on this important club, see Sabine Schroyen
and Hans-Wemer Langbrandtner (eds.), Quellen zur Geschichte des Kunst-
lervereins Malkasten in Diisseldorf (Diisseldorf1992).

117
 1890s by dissension. In the end the ADKG’s association with mass
exhibitions, appearance of closeness to official circles (e.g. Anton von
Werner), and its inability to satisfy the desires by various ‘secessions’
from the early 1890s on for privileged status within the organization
led to its internal weakening and declining dynamism by the early
twentieth century. It also had to concede that it was unable to raise the
incomes and security of German artists, blaming overproduction of
artists by the academies and government favoritism of pet artists for
the situation. Already on the eve of World War I it had begun to lose
the confidence of many artists, who pressed for a more ‘modem,’ i.e.
pressure-group-like organization. Dominated by a mostly geriatric
establishment and regarded as irrelevant by many younger artists by
1914, it provoked such comments as: ‘German bowlers and stamp
collectors are better organized than German artists!’115
The perceived weaknesses of the ADKG led to the creation of a
rival but more exclusive national organization of visual artists a
decade before World War. The German Artists’ League (Deutscher
Kunstlerbund — DKB) was founded in 1904 by a number of artists
affiliated with the secessions arising in various German and Austrian
cities since 1892. Tensions between these ‘secessionist’ artists and the
mainstream ADKG had long revolved around exhibition policies. The
Kiinstlergenossenschaft and its had come to exercise a dominant in¬
fluence on the size and quality of major shows, opting usually for
maximum inclusiveness of contemporary German artists, no matter
how gigantic the shows became. The secessions had been founded
chiefly as organizations of self-selecting local elites wishing smaller
and more exclusive shows of their own.
These tensions came to a head in 1903^1 after the fiasco of ar¬
ranging the German art contingent sent to the St. Louis World Expo¬
sition. A number of secessionist artists, as well as others fed up with
the ADKG, founded the Kunstlerbund as a sort of national secession.
As Count Harry Kessler complained:

The basic principle in modem galleries is this: primarily, a picture gets bought
from every artist who has painted inoffensively for a few years and acquired the
title professor. The money approved by the parliament for modem art is a sort
of state trough from which every member of the herd has a right to eat his fill.

115 Arthur Dobsky, ‘Kunst und Sozialpolitik,’ Kunstfur Alle, 28 (1913), p. 522.

118
 Whatever is left is distributed among works about which numerous commis¬
sions of older artists and academy professors can agree. That will rarely be
anything aesthetically exceptional and therefore one-sided; and never anything
artistically revolutionary [...]. The subject, especially if it is political and patri¬
otic, often decides the purchase, and social connections carry a certain
weight.116

Unlike the older organization, it was not a league of local artists’

associations but rather operated on the basis of individual membership
by election.

The elitist concept that [Walter] Leistikow and [Max] Liebermann had intro¬
duced to the management of the Berlin Secession was carried even further in
the new group. All business was entrusted to an executive committee of thirty
individuals, elected for five year terms, during which time they held absolute
authority, including the power to decide on membership applications, appoint
juries, and replace those who left the committee.117

Among the leaders were Count Leopold von Kalckreuth (presi¬

dent); Count Harry Kessler, Max Klinger, Max Liebermann, and Fritz
von Uhde (vice-presidents); and such diverse artists as Max Slevogt,
Lovis Corinth, Ludwig Thoma, and Henry van de Velde.
The DKB was emphatically not, however, a club exclusively of
the avant-garde. It rather represented both traditional and experimental
artists (as well as critics and even businessmen) who were for the most
part already well-established. As a contemporary observer wrote, the
DKB was ‘a union of the various secessions, with the addition of out¬
siders,’ and if anything perhaps did not go far enough in being elitist
and small in scale.1 IS Its raison d’etre was both elitist (targeting the
‘democratic’ exhibition policies of the ADKG, which it claimed pro-

116 Count Harry Kessler, Der deutsche Kunstlerbund (Berlin, 1904), pp. 22-3.
‘Professor’ was an honorific title often bestowed by royal governments irre¬
spective of actual teaching positions or pedagogical activity. For Peter Paret,
‘Art and the National Image: The Conflict over Germany’s Participation in the
St. Louis Exposition,’ Central European History, 11 (1978), Wilhelm II’s med¬
dling in the selection of art for St. Louis and the split leading to the founding of
the Kunstlerbund ‘destroyed the institutional cohesion of German artists for the
next thirty years.’ (p. 179)
117 Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession (Cambridge, MA, 1980), p. 136.
118 Wilhelm Scholermann, ‘Vom deutschen Kunstlerbund,’ Kunst fur Alle, 21
(1905), p. 258.

119
 moted mediocrity but — of course — also failed to lionize sufficiently
the ‘exceptional’ nature of DKB members’ work) and anti-authoritar¬
ian (aimed at the meddling of Kaiser Wilhelm II and other govern¬
ment agencies in art matters, which should be ‘as free as science’).119
While the DKB prospered for some years (its members already
being prominent), its elitist nature prevented it from becoming a real
successor to the increasingly moribund ADKG, and its initial crusad¬
ing zeal was largely dissipated by World War I. Dissolved by the
Nazis in 1936 but refounded in 1950, the DKB proclaimed itself to be
a non-partisan advisory body for public acquisitions and commissions,
but explicitly not a sounding board for the economic and social inter¬
ests of all German artists.120 Ironically, though, it came to reflect more
the views of the West German ‘fine arts’ academies of 1950 than the
opponents of academic art as in 1904. Its original postwar president
was the director of the Berlin Academy for Fine Arts, Karl Hofer, and
the board of directors included the prominent painters and academy
piotessors Karl Schmitt-Rottluff (Berlin), Willi Baumeister (Stutt¬
gart), Erich Heckel (Karlsruhe), and Ewald Matare (Dusseldorf). In its
early years, at least, the revived DKB was very close to the cold-war
mentality of the successive Adenauer governments and tried with
some success to shape the FRG’s art policies and commissions. Forty
years later, the DKB had undergone serious internal splits between
avant-garde and more traditional artists, with votes of no confidence
in the board of directors. Perhaps tellingly, no members had shown
works in both the DKB annual expositions and the quinquennial doc-
umenta since 1972.121
After World War II the victorious Allies forbade all professional
oiganizations. Only gradually were local and regional ones allowed to
revive, usually after some screening of the membership to exclude
active collaborators with the Nazis. (Mere membership in the Reichs-
kammer der Bildenden Kiinste, because it had been mandatory for all
working artists, was not regarded as evidence of collaboration.) As
had been the case with previous artists’ associations, the postwar local

119 Kessler, Kiinstlerbund, p. i.

120 Deutscher Kiinstlerbund, Deutscher Kiinstlerbund 1950 (Berlin, 1950) pp 1-2
121 Deutscher Kiinstlerbund, Durchsicht. 40 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland
und der Deutsche Kiinstlerbund (Kiel, 1989), pp. 9, 13

120
 ones began to seek national affiliation with each other, until finally all
regions of the Federal Republic formally joined the clumsily-named
Bund deutscher Landesberufsverbdnde Bildender Kiinstler (Federa¬
tion of German State Professional Associations of Visual Artists) in
1953.
In its first years, the Berufsverband Bildender Kiinstler (or BBK
- it was renamed in 1972) attempted to represent all German visual
artists, especially in their economic and social demands, in a con¬
scious continuation of the RVBKD, a particularly important role given
the existence of a Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Kunst (Emergency
Community of German Art) that offered grants and loans from a vari¬
ety of public and private sources. The existence of a trade union alter¬
native immediately after the war, as well as the division of Germany
from 1949 on, meant the BBK could not claim to represent all German
visual artists, although its local chapters did have 7,500 members in
1950, and perhaps 10,000 by 1953, in the 11 West German federal
states including West Berlin. In actual fact, though, the BBK became
embroiled in politics, since the governing FRG coalition parties CDU
and FDP favored (and subsidized) a socially and politically conser¬
vative disposition of professional artists. Cold War ideological char¬
ges, interference by the Federal Ministry for All-German Affairs, and
other issues caused fissures and splits throughout the 1950s and
1960s, with some major state associations (e.g. North-Rhine-West-
phalia and West Berlin) withdrawing for up to a dozen years.
A new generation of artists and leaders, dissatisfied with the pau¬
city of achievements of an organization that had delivered few advan¬
tages by pursuing Mittelstandspolitik along the lines of more fortunate
non-artistic professional organizations, called a national Artists’ Con¬
gress in Frankfurt in 1971. In the wake of several years of Vietnam era
social protests stretching from ‘occupied’ art academies to politically-
engaged performances and installations, German visual artists called
for a first-ever (and only) national congress of (West) German artists
in Frankfurt/Main in the late spring of 1971. The congress met in the
Church of St. Paul (Paulskirche), which had been home to the first
(failed) national parliament during the revolutionary years 1848-9.
The tone of the congress was indeed ‘democratic’ and close in spirit to
the goals of labor unions, which had taken a renewed interest in
organizing artists. As the resolutions began, ‘the social underprivileg-

121
 ing of artists corresponds to the cultural underprivileging of the wage-
dependent population.The social and political radicalism of
German artists may have reached a high water mark at this time, and
the resolutions of the meeting are worth citing in some detail, as in the
following passages.

I. Securing the conditions for existence of visual artists

[...] is the essential precondition allowing them to fulfill their social task
of producing culture.
Their heretofore completely uncertain economic situation again and again
exposes them to the compulsion to subordinate their artistic ideas and
goals to the often antithetical political, economic, and aesthetic objectives
of their industrial and public patrons [...].

1. Artists’social fund
[...] as the basis for a general social security (sickness, old age) insurance.
This fund will receive revenues collected by the state a) through the sale
and resale of art works, b) by receipt of reproduction rights for picture
books [...] and other art book production, c) from those active in the art
sphere (e.g. art dealers, [...] auctioneers, experts, employees of museums
and art leagues, from publishers, [...] journalists, professors, and art
teachers) [...] and will be legitimized by recognition and legal anchoring
of a general and anonymous right of succession [.Nachfolgerecht] for
visual artists.

2. Right of succession
We demand an increase in the direct share of successive sales (minimum
five per cent) [...].

3. Ateliers, Workshops
We demand increased building of ateliers and workshops as public works
[...] and planning them into new residential and commercial projects, and
consultation with representatives of professional associations for future
planning. Rents affordable for visual artists are to be guaranteed [...].

6. Art in Building [Kunst am Ban, ‘percentage for the arts’]

[...] All building projects [...] financed or subventioned by public funds
must include budgeted funds for art [...].

9. Tax law
It is well known that only the fewest visual artists can live from their pro¬
fession. It is less well known that even this small number of artists can

122 This and all subsequent text from ‘Beschlusse des Kongress der Ktinstler 1971 ’
leprinted in Berufsverband Bildender Kiinstler Berlins (ed.), 30 Jahre Berufs-
verband Bildender Kiinstler Berlins (Berlin, 1980), pp. 279-82

122
 only live from income connected to artistic activity for a short period
during their lifetimes. Artists are, however, taxed in their earning years
like the representatives of other professions who can count on a regular
income until old age.

We therefore demand that our legislators adjust tax laws to take into con¬
sideration the high risk and special conditions of the artistic profession.
a. The profession of artist is to be regarded as such even when it
brings in no income. Tax offices should recognize this by allowing artists
to deduct expenses generated by artistic activity from income generated
by other activity [...].
b. [...] We demand the abolition of turnover tax for artists [...].
e. To promote sales and commissions of art works by private par¬
ties, we demand a law making money spent on works by living artists
tax-deductible.

II. Democratization of the Arts

One cannot speak of art and artists being free in our society. Art and art¬
ists are presently dependent on the economic and cultural privilege of a
minority [...]. Additionally, there is the political privilege of public insti¬
tutions, which are permanently prepared to fulfill cultural objectives ac¬
cording to the economic interests of capitalism [...].

1. Democratization of associations.
The associations of visual artists can only fulfill their tasks as instruments
for the realization of the social and cultural interests of artists in the sense
of a democratization of the cultural sphere if they introduce a funda¬
mental democratization of their own structures [...].
c. Admission to professional associations must be administered
according to the following considerations:^) proof of study at an
academy, arts-and-crafts school or similar specialized school; (2) proof
of exhibition or publication activity; (3) proof of continuous involvement
in questions of artistic creativity.
Consideration of aesthetic criteria in regard to admission to membership
are to be excluded.

2. Self-determination - self-administration
The precondition of [...] the democratization of the cultural sector is the
creation of organizational forms through which artists and public can
practice self-determination in culture and art.
Artists’ associations and art leagues (as representatives of the art public),
once democratized, can serve as organizational seeds [...].
It is our goal to transfer decision-making in the realm of cultural policy to
the self-administration of artists and the concerned public, in the follow¬
ing areas:

123
 a. exhibitions, promotion of the arts, awards of commissions and
prizes.
b. art leagues and museums must have democratic structures, so
that their one-sided domination by commercial and political inter¬
ests can be overcome. Electability of directors and responsible of¬
ficials ot art institutions and museums by boards representing
equally their users, staffs, as well as representatives of the profes¬
sional associations and visual artists; [the boards] will also render
opinions about purchase, exhibition, and public-activity policies

3. Art fairs
It is unbearable for a democratic cultural policy for a few galleries with
support from the public hand - as in Cologne and Berlin - to organize
themselves into monopolistic combines with the practical result of ex¬
cluding from, or hampering access to the art market for the majority of
other galleries. An opening in principle of the art markets for all inter¬
ested galleries, artists’ groups and associations, irrespective of their eco¬
nomic potency [...].

III. Demolition of bourgeois cultural privileges and construction of democratic

cultural work [...].

1. Places of production - ways of distribution

The creation of non-commercial places of production and ways of distri¬
bution is a necessary requirement for the democratization of the arts.
More exhibition possibilities, workspaces etc. as centers of communica¬
tion between artists and population create the possibility of working
against the manipulative influence of the dominant cultural industry [...].
3. Expansion of our pedagogical assignment
An altered professional image of visual artists requires our cooperation
and codetermination in all realms of public education.

Out of the 1971 Artists’ Congress emerged a revived BBK,

made up of individual members instead of state chapters and more
open to the idea of affiliation with labor unions. Even so, a two-
thirds majority was needed to take the latter step, and this could not
be achieved. Instead, state chapters were allowed to join one of the
national labor unions for artists, as several did. These unions had
mostly existed since the immediate postwar period, but they had
attracted few artists and had, indeed, capitulated to government
pressure not to press for organizing artists, who were supposed to
belong to the realm of the ‘free professions.’ When the BBK (in the

124
wake of the 1971 Artists Congress) revived the possibility of labor
union membership, organizing drives were resumed. By 1985, the
main postwar unions with visual arts members, the Artists’ Union
0Gewerkschaft Kunst) and the Industrial Union Printing and Paper
(IG Druck und Papier) united in the Media Union (Industrie-
Gewerkschaft Medien) and most recently (2000) in the giant union
VERDI. Within IG Medien there are nine special groups, including
visual artists, journalists, writers, musicians, and stage performers.
These unions are clearly a reaction to the mounting consolidation and
globalization of media enterprises and appeal most to artists employed
by such enterprises. Aside from the verbal threat of the strike weapon,
the IG Medien has tended to fight for many of the same professional
rights and social security measures as non-unionized artists. The
section for visual artists nevertheless had only 1,500 members in
1999, far less than the Authors’ Association (SV) section (4,000)
founded by such Nobel laureates as Heinrich Boll and Gunther Grass
in 1969, or the BBK itself (12,000).
The BBK cooperates with organizations other than labor unions,
such as the association of women artists and patrons GEDOK as well
as the small, elective Deutscher Kiinstlerbund (membership 450 in
2002), in regional, national, and international bodies dealing with
matters of importance to artists, such as the Verwertungsgesellschaft
Bild-Kunst and the Kiinstlerfonds, which respectively supervise the
collection of anonymous royalties and the distribution of prizes and
stipends flowing from public and private donors.123
Up to this point we have been examining professional organiza¬
tions comprising mostly artists themselves. A second type of organi¬
zation, the Kunstverein or art union, included artists as members but
principally joined together ‘amateurs’ in the sense of ‘friends of art.’
Lectures, exhibitions, and social events formed a part of its activities.
Most art unions also distributed artworks to their members. A major
inducement to paying the considerable annual dues lay in the gift
to members of artworks suitable for domestic use. Typically each
member would receive at least an original graphic (e.g., a lithograph).
More valuable original works, generally by local, living artists, were

123 In addition to ibid., see www.igmedien.de/vielfalt.html, p. 1; www.bbk-bund-

esverband.de/bbk/bbk.htm, pp.1-6; www.kuenstlerbund.de/dkb.html, p. 1.

125
 distributed to the winners of recurring lotteries. Dues and other
income (from exhibitions, for example) paid for the purchase of the art
works. German art unions typically included local civic leaders,
prominent professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, and civil ser¬
vants) and others from both the propertied and ‘cultivated’ (gebildet)
bourgeoisie, even the occasional noble. They sometimes built up per¬
manent collections or donated their holdings to a public art museum,
as in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle.
Although several cities in the Holy Roman Empire had local
associations including artists and lay persons interested in the arts
(as well as sciences, literature, etc.) the ‘art league’ as a specific
urban, bourgeois private initiative is a creation of the early nineteenth
century, modeled on English forerunners. About a hundred were
founded by the time of German unification (1871). Today, Kunst-
vereine still exist in most German communities, even smaller ones.
But their function declined in the interwar period mostly to the level
of intimate, local shows and supplying members with opportunities for
socializing and acquiring graphic-arts works.
During much of the nineteenth century, though, they filled an im¬
portant gap — even in cities with an art academy and recurring salons —
between producing artists and consuming public. Typically member-
financed, they enabled artists to show their work and, through their own
collective purchases for the leagues’ collection, individual members’
purchases, lotteries of original works, and regular premium distributions
of graphic reproductions to all members, facilitated the spread of art into
the public consciousness as well as private homes.
Aiguably the oldest pure Kunstverein (i.e. one not comprised
chiefly of artists, or multifunctional) was that of Karlsruhe, the capital of
the new state of Baden, founded in 1818. Another early and influential
example was the Munich Art League, founded in 1823 with support
from the art-loving court of King Ludwig I (helping overcome suspi¬
cions by German governments during this period of extreme political
reaction against all kinds of clubs). It was both a semi-public institution,
in that it organized shows open to the public (sometimes changing
weekly), but it was also a closed society for lectures, conversation, and
conviviality, explicitly welcoming ‘amateurs’ and ‘dilettantes’ as lay art
lovers were then known.

126
 Already before mid-century other new art leagues in southern
Germany and the Rhineland were cooperating with each other to hold
traveling exhibitions, which increased exposure by local artists to a re¬
gional and national level. By 1856 these traveling shows (lasting from
one to six weeks per city) took on regular schedules and exposed hun¬
dreds of thousands of art fanciers to works from all over Central Europe
(and beyond).
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of in¬
terest in arts and crafts, which did not fit into the typical scope of art
leagues. Munich’s league faced rivalry (from 1861) from the Kunst-
gewerbeverein (Arts and Crafts Union), which pressed for the aesthetic
education of craftspeople and the improvement of manufactured prod¬
ucts. Feelings on the part of active artists that the Art League was not
promoting their professional interests led to the creation of a Munich
Kiinstlergenossenschaft (KG), a major building block of the national
ADKG from the mid-1850s on. The KG aggressively challenged the
Munich KunstvereirCs exhibition policies by wresting organizational
control of the royal salons from the Munich Art Academy in 1863. Of
course, the kinds of art represented in the salons and later Munich’s
Glaspalast (Crystal Palace) exhibitions did not exactly replicate the kind
of art most Kunstverein members sought for their apartments, such as
genre, landscape, or still-life paintings in smaller formats.
By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the rise of private
galleries, inexpensive art reproductions for domestic consumption, and
vastly expanded state-supported museums and huge international art
shows all over Germany had made many earlier functions of Kunstver-
eine redundant, and they began a long period of decline in membership
and financial vigor. Even so, all Germany’s Kimstvereine together in the
last years before World War I had (at around two million marks annu¬
ally) almost twice as much to spend on acquiring original art as all the
German states and municipalities combined.124 Another cause of their
decline may have been the changing tastes of the educated middle class,
which turned increasingly to art works from the past (as well as other
‘antiques’) as preferred objects of public viewing and private consump-

124 Stephan Waetzold, 'Artists in Society,’ in German Masters of the Nineteenth

Century, Metropolitan Museum of New York Catalogue (New York, 1981), p.
44.

127
 tion. The Munich Kunstverein's membership, for example, declined
from around 6,000 in 1900 to a quarter of that in the late 1920s. The
Karlsruhe Kunstverein experienced a membership bubble during the
years of acute inflation down to 1924, presumably caused by interest in
art speculation as a hedge against inflation (or perhaps, by selling family
artworks, surviving it). But its membership declined from a temporary
peak of 2,300 in 1923 to 1,700 in 1932 and, despite Kunstvereine being
declared a cultural ‘pillar’ in Goebbels’s Reichskulturkammer, to only
1,200 in 1936 and 800 by the outbreak of World War II in 1939.125
Kunstvereine drew heavily on the propertied and educated middle
class for their membership. Unlike some other clubs (singing and gym¬
nastics, for example) Kunstvereine tended to be politically neutral or
conservative. The initial membership of the Karlsruhe Kunstverein was
made up of 78 per cent upper-middle class people (bureaucrats 22 per
cent, academicians 20 per cent, merchants and entrepreneurs 16 per cent,
/ entiers eight per cent, military officers and artists six per cent each).
The Baden royal family alone supplied another six per cent of the mem¬
bers. The revived postwar Karlsmhe Kunstverein had about 2,000
members in 1969, but with relatively fewer bureaucrats, officers,’and
businessmen (not to mention members of the royal court) than in the
nineteenth century. Every third member held a professional degree (33
per cent), with artists (14 per cent), mid-level employees (nine per cent),
bureaucrats (eight per cent), students (eight per cent), and businessmen
(four percent) making up the rest.126
Understandably, Kunstvereine were rarely in the avant-garde of ar¬
tistic taste. The Karlsmhe Kunstverein's annual art premiums (engrav¬
ings) for members over the period 1832-71 consisted of religious themes
(about one-quarter), illustrations from literature (e.g. Schiller or Shake¬
speare), and - fully half of the premiums - genre scenes, mostly ideali¬
zations of everyday life, meant to instruct, uplift, or amuse. New forms
of painting, e.g. naturalism, when they arrived, met with initial resistance
by viewers at exhibitions and even more in the selection of prints for the
annual premiums. Only after World War II, for example, did works of

125 For reterences here to the Munich Kunstverein, see York Langenstein Der
Munchner Kunstverein im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1983), passim.
126 For reterences here to the Karlsruhe Kunstverein, see Christian Sternberg ‘ Die
Geschichte des Karlsruher Kunstvereins’ (PhD dissertation Karlsruhe 1977)
passim. ’ '

128
Gennan Expressionism become desirable to members of the Karlsruhe
Kunstverein.
The rejuvenation of Kanstvereine in recent years has been linked
with crisis and criticism, but some have tried to take on the role of sup¬
porting socially critical art and experimentation. The younger and better-
educated membership, it may turn out, could alter the traditional role of
this unusual bourgeois institution.
Kunstvereine were never professional associations of artists. They
welcomed artists as members and on their boards of directors, but they
were principally unions of art appreciators, the organized face of the
local Interest Community of Art. Their agenda did not always coin¬
cide with that of artists' professional organizations, which sometimes
got into conflict with art unions. This occurred in Hamburg in 1928
over the building and ownership of a House of Artists. The Hamburg
Kunstlerschaft or artists’ association failed to raise enough money to
remodel a villa donated tor the purpose, and the local Kunstverein
took on this task. (Its board included many wealthy and prominent
citizens.) The artists’ association (like those everywhere else) feared
being denied enough opportunity for exhibiting its members’ work.
The Kunstverein, they feared, had become too cosmopolitan, prefer¬
ring to use available exposition space to show the work of non-local or
even internationally known artists.127 Here they did discern a change
in the tastes of art union leaders, at least in large urban areas. Art his¬
torians, connoisseurs, and professional curators (such as Alfred Licht-
wark) were now leading the formation of taste, often to the detriment
of indigenous, ‘ordinary’ artists. Even before 1914, Kunstvereine and
Kimstlervereinigungen (artists’ associations) no longer always agreed
about the obligations of the former to the latter.

127 See Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 363-2, B.4, Unterstutzung Kunstverein in Hamburg

(1928-33), especially the letter from Kunsthalle Director Pauli to State Coun¬
cilor Lippmann (9 Aug 1928) bewailing the lack of exhibition space in the city;
subsequent complaints of the local artists’ organizations Kunstlerschaft, Kiinst-
lervereinigung, Sezession and the RVBKD about the high-handed way the
Kunstverein denied equal access to local artists, even thought the Hamburg
government had subsidized the renovation of the Villa Simon gallery (e.g., let¬
ter from RVBKD, 12 Feb 1931, and the fairly haughty response of the
Kunstverein, 2 Apr 1931).

129
 A similar tension grew between artists’ organizations and that
collection of significant patrons I will call the ‘state.’ By this I mean
all institutions of a public character, spending funds raised by public
authority. In practice the ‘state’ had many facets. It could take the
form of a royal or lesser court before 1918, with some monarchs tak¬
ing a personal interest in the arts and spending money they disposed
over (Ludwig II of Bavaria is a famous and extravagant example). It
could take the form of civil servants, commissions, and councils
charged with overseeing the growing museums and adding to their
collections by purchase, donations or trades. Germany, unlike most of
Europe, lacked a centralized state authority charged with ‘art policy.’
Each of the federal states, from huge Prussia to the small city-state of
Bremen, as well as many wealthier cities acting independently of the
state bureaucracies, made their own decisions about art. The churches,
too, fell loosely under the heading of the ‘state’ by the nineteenth
century, insofar as their property had been secularized, at the latest, by
governments carrying out the Napoleonic revolution in Western
Europe. Building, renovating, and decorating church buildings contin¬
ued as a source of commissions for artists. But the churches no longer
had the independent wealth or the sovereign authority to spend it that
some had enjoyed before. Even here, civil servants and commissions
made the decisions, more or less as a part of public policy.
Artists thus looked to the ‘state’ more as a client than as a regu¬
lator. A good example of how that role could change over time comes
from the Berlin National Gallery. Founded in 1861 partly by a dona¬
tion of a civic-minded banker and collector, Joachim Wagener, the
Nationalgalerie was explicitly chartered to purchase and show works
primarily by contemporary German artists. Its very name symbolized
that mid-nineteenth-century patriotism that united ‘Germany’ cultur¬
ally well before its political fusion under Prussia in 1871. In light of
later controversies about its purpose, it is worth emphasizing that it
was created ‘to reduce the crisis of visual artists [...] by the foundation
°f a,p8useum for works of more recent, especially indigenous artists
[-]•’ The Prussian government began by giving it 75,000 marks for

128 Such is the inscription for the 11 volumes of files on the Nationalgalerie in the
Findbuch or index for it in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Dahlem, Rep. Ve/l/I,
even though the files themselves were lost to wartime bombing. For a recent

130
purchases (1862), rising to level out at about 350,000 marks annually
by 1900. Purchases ot art for other venues as well as new monumental
works (e.g. statues) were only slightly greater by 1900. The central
state budget for running and stocking museums, art academies and
schools, and related arts institutions rose tenfold between 1849 and
1899 (to nearly 3.3 million marks), not counting considerable expen¬
ditures by the Prussian provinces and municipalities. By way of con¬
trast, the Prussian budget for public health in 1899 was less than two
million marks.129
Most of the art purchased by the Nationalgalerie before 1900 is
not on view today. Public taste - not to mention the thinking of cura¬
tors - has changed so dramatically since then that its proudest pur¬
chases ot that era would elicit boredom or mockery. For example, the
plaster reproductions of classical sculpture considered de rigeur for
serious nineteenth-century museums were embarrassing as ‘copies’ in
twentieth-century museums obsessed with ‘originality.’ Changes in
public taste were often preceded or forced by changes in acquisitions
policies by major museums such as the Nationalgalerie. Public scan¬
dals erupted, for example, when the museum acquired paintings by
French Impressionists under its director from 1895 to 1908, Hugo von
Tschudi. From Kaiser Wilhelm II down to the ordinary newspaper
reader, buying ‘foreign’ art seemed unpatriotic. (Ironically, Germany
on the eve of World War I had so many connoisseurs who disagreed
with this hurrah-patriotism that Germany had become a more impor¬
tant market for French Impressionist works than France itself!)130
The inward-turning chauvinism and provincialism that increas¬
ingly characterized German intellectual discourse under Wilhelm II
even cast suspicion on innocuous German ‘impressionists’ such as
Max Liebermann and the painters of the so-called ‘plein-air’ style.
The fact that Edvard Munch, let alone the radical experiments of
Dresden’s Briicke (Bridge) or Munich’s Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider)
schools, shocked German conservatives’ taste goes without saying.

excellent analysis of the role of museums in Gennany, see James J. Sheehan,

Museums in the German Art World. From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise
of Modernism (Oxford, 2000).
129 Wilhelm Wygodzinski, ‘Die Kunst im preussischen Etat,’ Kunst fur Alle, 19
(1903/4), pp. 281-5 and 576-7.
130 Lenman, Artists and Society, p. 171.

131
 Today we tend to think of the avant-garde of 1910 as ‘the’ artists
of the time and find it hard to sympathize with their critics. Indeed,
later validation and heroization of the avant-garde has tended to cover
up the fact that its promoters also had a selfish agenda of their own.131
But not only cultural conservatives like Wilhelm II denounced their
art as a disease eating away at the fragile new ‘national’ culture. So
did most of the ‘living German artists’ of the era, including many who
had themselves formed part of the ‘secessions’ of the 1890s. We
might recall also that Wilhelm II, trained as a child under the aegis of
his art-loving, English-born mother Viktoria (1840-1901), although
‘only’ a painter of marinescapes, was probably the most accomplished
‘everyday’ artist on any major European throne at the time.132
Of course many German artists viewed stylistic innovations more
tolerantly. Max Liebennann, as president of the Prussian Academy of
Arts during most of the Weimar era, for example, publicly defended
the experiments of the latest avant-gardes, although he privately found
them disconnected from nature and therefore alien. But the split over
‘good’ and ‘bad’ art necessarily aligned most of the traditional artists
unambiguously in favor of their own conservative style. Every foreign
or alien-looking artwork purchased by public collections was bought
with marks they thought should support them. That such nationalism
was not merely a disguise for stylistic backwardness can be gleaned

131 See, for example, Barbara Paul, Hugo von Tschudi und die moderne franz-
osische Kunst im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Mainz, 1993).
132 Wilhelm’s bizarre, but undoubtedly sincere, belief that he was supporting a
'people’s art’ as the ‘people’s Kaiser’ found expression in a book published at
government expense, initiated by the ruler himself and cobbled together by the
director of the Hohenzollem Museum. The volume lavishly catalogued Wil¬
helm’s contributions, from government buildings and churches down to
costumes and flags, from fine art to arts and crafts. It even claimed (not very
convincingly) that the Kaiser’s alleged hatred of modem art was a misunder¬
standing. The ruler was merely opposed to attention-getting sensationalism, it
claimed. In the Kaiser’s words: ‘All that stoops to be mere [self-] advertising is
no longer art, even it people praise it a hundred or a thousand times over.’ Paul
Seidel, Der Kaiser und die Kunst (Berlin, 1907), p 15. Chancellor Bernhard von
Billow had ordered a catalogue of ‘those works in the field of art and applied
arts owing their creation to the personal influence of His Majesty, through sug¬
gestion, support, or hand-made improvements to the design.’ Letter from von
Biilow to Prussian Ministry of State, 17 Dec 1902, in Bundesarchiv Rep 76
Ve/l/I, no. 11, vol. I, 1.

132
 from public complaints around the turn of the century. Even the Great
Berlin Exposition, run by the ‘conservative’ Berlin establishment,
drew fire from one commentator in 1903: foreigners invited to exhibit
came injury-free and were given not only pride of place but free ship¬
ping and insurance, a luxury not afforded most German exhibitors.
Was it equitable for foreigners to sell 46 times the value of the
German art they bought at the last dozen big German shows? LlJ It be¬
came increasingly commonplace for artists to blame a ‘new art estab¬
lishment’ for influencing public acquisitions and ultimately public
taste. This establishment could be loosely identified with a new net¬
work of art historians and connoisseurs, wealthy collectors (often in¬
cidentally Jewish), gallery owners, museum curators and directors,
and art critics — in short, with ‘non-artists.’ To some degree the critics
of avant-garde art after 1900 were claiming that it constituted a mas¬
sive attack on their professional competence, as well as on sacred
German Kultur.
One of the most vocal and widely noticed protests came from the
painter Carl Vinnen of the Worpswede art colony in North Gennany.
Ein Protest deutscher Kunstler (1911) denounced particularly the pur¬
chase ‘for millions of marks’ of foreign, principally French art.
Vinnen especially emphasized the damage to German artists by an in¬
creasingly negative international balance of art sales, in which France
‘exported’ to Germany 60 per cent more art than it imported. Vinnen
attributed this imbalance to the influence of ‘an interest group, grown
too strong in Gennany, and its allies, the aesthetes and snobs.’134
The reaction of the ‘aesthetes and snobs’ was sharp and immedi¬
ate. The distinguished Hamburg Kunsthalle Director Alfred Lichtwark
dismissed the protest in a few lines as unrealistic:

The art trade has the right to arrogate all power that the state, the artists’ com¬
munity, and the moneyed class surrender because of their own superficiality,
ignorance, or lack of culture [...]. It owes its dominant position, which under
certain conditions can become all-powerful, to the cultural and economic in¬
adequacies of the [above-named] factors.135

133 Hans Holtzbecher, Die grosse Berliner Kunstaustellung: Eine Flucht der
Kunstler in die Offentlichkeit (Berlin, 1903), p. 18.
134 Karl Vinnen, Ein Protest deutscher Kunstler (Jena, 1911), pp. 80, 1.
135 Im Kampf um die Kunst, pp. 154—67, 28.

133
 This chilly contempt for everyday artists and their allies was
typical of the volume Kampf um die Kunst (Struggle for Art). Paul
Cassirer’s contribution, ‘Kunst und Kunsthandel’ (Art and the Art
Trade), was more biting and passionate. It deserves to be cited exten¬
sively here to give a flavor of the bitterness of the controversy over
the proper balance of appreciating foreign (particularly French) vs.
domestically produced art. Cassirer became one of the leading Berlin
art dealers ot the era of Wilhelm II and was especially associated
with championing modern French Impressionism and the members
of the Berlin Secession. Not insignificantly, Cassirer was of Jewish
origin.L( For some or all these reasons he was an implied target of
suspicion and abuse by such artists as the signatories of Vinnen’s
Protest. In the following excerpts, Cassirer demonstrates the out¬
spoken verve with which he accepted the charge that dealers, critics,
and art historians were changing the way German art was being sold,
but condemning the failures of the older professional art market as
the root cause.

Artists think and speak about everything possible, but never about their eco¬
nomic and social situation. [...] Authors and musicians are founding economic
associations; actors are striving to firm up their social position; but nothing is
happening among visual artists. [...] They live in a very strange ignorance of
their own position. [...] I believe there is no profession that pays so little
attention to its situation as that of painters. They are satisfied with cursing
instead of looking for the root of the evil. [...]
A huge mass of artists lives strewn over Germany. Their names are
known only in a radius of a few miles, they sit in every little town and every
neighborhood of big cities and jealously guard the small circle of acquaintances
they have against the approach of fellow artists. The newspapers do not know
their names, or only barely. [...]
The history of Dutch artists in the seventeenth century is a string of such
destinies. [...] They lived their external lives as wine dealers, publicans, or ship¬
ping clerks. Our century developed for such artists other methods of getting
along. They can flee into the realm of the public, which for the artist has four
forms: the newspaper, the art exhibition, the art dealership, the gallery. The
artist who flees into the public realm loses the advantage of warm patronage but
gams protection from the cleverer go-getters among his colleagues. [...] I do not

136 For an excellent discussion of the role of Jews in the Berlin art world of the
time, see Peter Paret, Modernism and the “Alien Element in German Art’“ in
German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 60-

134
believe our modem artists would like to dispense with this public realm. It may
be more brutal, it may be less attractive, but nobody pushes away the cup of
freedom who has once drunk from it. [...]
The art trade and exhibitions are the constitution of the ‘people’ of paint¬
ing. The thought of returning to the feudalism of the princely patron is a ro¬
mantic concoction. [...] Thus arose the type of today’s exhibitions. Artists join
an association, mostly under state patronage; they call upon their colleagues to
show what they have painted; the pictures are sent in; the best among the artists
decide which will be accepted; the pictures are hung on the walls. [...] The idea
of justice and publicity predominated. The selecting artists were called the jury.
Those pictures with the most votes got hung down low; those with fewer votes,
in the second row above; and so on into the fourth row. Once the jury had done
its job, the rooms were opened and the crowd pushed in and took possession of
the spiritual content of the pictures. To defray costs of the exhibition, admission
was charged. Painting began to compete with theatre. But there appeared right
away the difference in the economic conditions of the theatre and painting. [...]
Actors are there only to be seen, not to be bought. [...]
These exhibitions, founded from the standpoint of justice and in the inter¬
est of the people, became the pillories of personality and talent. It’s just unfair
that one has more talent than the other, and it’s only fair that the mob defends
itself against those who defy this law. Thus the managers of these exhibitions
defended themselves against the innovators, the revolutionaries in art [...] and
became the most unjust of judges and destroyers of ideals. [...] In this era, when
fostering art by the state, municipalities, and associations failed, the great role
of art dealers began. [...] Only now, in an age of unrecognized painters, the art
trade followed the trend of the times and went public. Art dealers founded sa¬
lons, in which they offered exhibitions. They selected those among the artists
whose work convinced them, exhibited, advertised, invited the newspaper crit¬
ics to write about it, and became competitors of the official exhibitions. [...] The
art dealer [...] usually began with the idea of correcting public opinion, exactly
the way a businessman would do it. He said, these pictures are good, but no¬
body buys them, because the jurors of the official exhibitions have to be against
the individual eccentric out of consideration for the great mass of artists. But
since they are good, the public will buy them if the dealer recommends them.
There is nothing smarter than a businessman who sells good wares at cheap
prices caused by accident or the failings of his competitors.
The influence of the art trade grew constantly after the 1870s, just as aca¬
demic art petrified more and more [...] at the same time as the influence of the
writing critic grew. Slowly the critics, the laymen, won ground from the rulers
of official art. [...] A third ally appeared: the art scholar. He usurped the
management of the gallery that earlier lay in the hands of painters. The
academy and official exhibitions lost more and more respect, importance, and
influence. [...] At least I believe the Berlin Academy, as well as the Paris one,
now mean absolutely nothing for art, and that it is a matter of indifference
whether both exist or not. [...]

135
 Vinnen believes foreign artists are taking away bread from German ones.
He is wrong, the good foreign artist is the helper of the good German painter.
He comes to our country not to attack the latter, but rather to assist him in the
fight against the international guild of bad painters.137

Nevertheless, Vinnen s protest was joined by numerous noted

artists, many of whom then and later could hardly be called provincial,
anti-cosmopolitan, anti-modem, or sympathetic to chauvinism, such as
the Simplicissimus caricaturist T. T. Heine, Richard Riemerschmid, or
Kathe Kollwitz. On the contrary, the ‘protest’ undoubtedly repre¬
sented a wider consensus view among everyday artists than refutations
such as Cassirei s. It also presaged a dispute about the local, national,
and cosmopolitan obligations of public and private patronage that
raged on through the interwar period and, in much more muted form,
can still be heard in Germany today.
The complaint that the ‘state’ as art patron was misled by the
opinions of non-artists, once articulated, would also echo repeatedly
through the twentieth century. It would be easy to draw the conclu¬
sion, based solely on such complaints, that key civil servants armed
with a thorough understanding of avant-garde art single-mindedly as¬
sembled only works by those today regarded as pioneers. Such an im¬
pression is far from the truth. Actually most state funds for
acquisitions were distributed - in good bureaucratic fashion - by art
commissions, such as Prussia’s Landeskunstkommission or Saxony’s
Akcidemischer Rat. These were no doubt sometimes swayed by the ad¬
vanced taste of some state museum directors who sat on them. But the
voice of the art establishment, in the form of art-academy professors
or other prominent local artists, never ceased to be heard and probably
dominated most of the time. The records of these boards show, in
varying degree, a greater openness to avant-garde art before 1914 than
one might expect, as well as a considerable willingness after 1918 to
continue buying from those working in traditional styles.
The Akademischer Rat of the Saxon Academy, consisting pri¬
marily of professors, bought paintings for the Royal Gallery by Lie-
bermann, Slevogt, and Klinger in the last years of the monarchy and
despite their conservative tastes, ones by Pechstein, Nolde and Ko¬
koschka in the years after the 1918 revolution. At the same time,

137 Paul Cassirer, ‘Kunst und Kunsthandel,’ Pan, I (1911), pp. 457-69 and 558-73.

136
 however, they continued to spend large sums on works shown by local
artists in the Kiinstlervereinigung expositions, including (with recusal
from voting by the painters) works by the faculty members them¬
selves, such as Professors Gussmann or Dreher.138
Patronage from private collectors rose naturally with the in¬
creasing prosperity of Germany’s (and Europe’s) middle class from
the mid-nineteenth century on. Individual collectors might deal di¬
rectly with artists known to them, but many came to rely on the judg¬
ment of a relatively new breed of ‘professional’ in the art market, the
gallery owner. Businesses devoted entirely to selling art were a new
phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. Before then, art was sold
as one ‘line’ among others in shops that also offered old furniture or
‘antiques,’ books, painters’ supplies, and other merchandise. The side¬
line became a main line with such famous precursors as Paul Durand-
Ruel in Paris. No longer near relatives of second-hand furniture shops,
these galleries, as designed by such famous artists as Whistler, turned
into elegant venues for wealthy socialites as well as sophisticated
speculators, guided by the self-assured and experienced taste of the
dealer/connoisseur.
Some of these dealers were, of course, shady or of dubious
judgment, as many a wealthy speculator in ‘art futures’ discovered
later to the detriment of his net worth. Some advised their clients to
‘invest’ only in ‘old masters,’ heralding the beginning of unprece¬
dented expenditures by private and even public collectors on works by
the ‘safely dead.’ Some dealers became close friends and supporters
of living artists, though. Many an artist from the late nineteenth cen¬
tury on came through a crisis of poverty by borrowing from or selling
whole studios full of paintings to a sympathetic dealer. Or, like the
innovative Berlin gallery owner Paul Cassirer cited above, dealers
might offer a kind of retainer to artists.

An element in the gallery’s success was Cassirer’s policy of offering a number

of artists an annual income in return for the exclusive representation of their
work, excepting commissions that came to them directly. Typical were his ar¬
rangements with Slevogt and Gaul. Whether or not their works were sold, each
was guaranteed a minimum of 4,000 marks a year - about the salary of a Gym-

138 See Sachsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, III.3.6.1.1., Kunstakademie Dresden, 105:

Protokolle des Akademischen Rates, esp. for the years 1915-21.

137
 nasium teacher or the pay of an army captain. If sales rose above the minimum,
the gallery collected a commission and expenses that ranged from fifteen to
thirty per cent.139

At this point one can begin to understand the modem myth that
painters works wait for their creators’ death to increase in value:
The most important kind of legal contract in the art business is the
Last Will and Testament.’140 This practice was not limited to private
dealers, either. The Pmssian government reportedly paid 1.4 million
marks, an unprecedented sum at the time, to purchase the works in the
estate of the popular painter Adolf von Menzel (1815-1905) to keep
them from disappearing into private collections.141
Yet even a symbiosis between gallery owners and artists had an
impact on the profession of the latter. Dealers had every motive
to build up the reputations of the artists they ‘represented’ and to shift
the focus of the public from ‘pictures to careers.’142 If they had
themselves acquired some of ‘their’ artists’ work at early, low prices,
dealers could also benefit personally from guiding successful
careers. And artists who had a respectable gallery marketing their
work felt relieved of some of the pressure to exhibit regularly in the
traditional salons, where the public still came to see individual
artworks, not career showcases for one of more celebrity artists 1411
As dealers increasingly influenced patrons and mediated between
them and artists, museum curators and a whole new sub-profession of

139 Paret, German Encounters, p. 75.

140 Peter Hacks, Schone Wirtschaft. Asthetisch-dkonomische Fragmente (Berlin,
1988), p. 69.
141 See Count Harry Kessler’s contribution to 1m Kampfum die Kunst, p. 124.
142 In their pioneering study of changes in the nineteenth-century art market,
Harrison and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers. Institutional Change in
the French Painting World (New York, 1965) observed: ‘It was artists, not
paintings, who were the focus of the dealer-critic institutional system The new
system triumphed in part because it could and did command a bigger market
than the academic-governmental structure. Equally important, however, it dealt
with an artist more in terms of his production over a career and thus provided
a rational alternative to the chaos of the academic focus on paintings by them¬
selves.’ (p. 96.)
143 For a good discussion of showcasing by dealers before World War I. see
Michael Z. Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the
Market for Modern Art (New York, 1995).

138
art experts made decisions for the taxpaying public. The new aca¬
demic discipline of art history, still in its brilliant beginnings with
such works as Jakob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy (1867), subtly shifted art discourse from the ‘eternally beautiful’
to the evolving and changing aspects of style. Increasingly, men
trained in this academic background, with their own firm ideas of
what constitutes ‘good art,’ dominated (in the view of many artists)
the selection and display of artworks in public museums and galleries.
Interacting with them, another group of ‘new’ professionals, special¬
ized art journalists, interpreted the meaning of what the public went to
see. This task became ever more crucial as visual art moved away
from realistic, representational styles and into the arcane vocabulary
of myriad twentieth-century movements and schools. As late as the
1880s in Germany, for example, major art journals such as Sachses
Salon der Kunst or the Kunstchronik devoted most of their pages to
listing salons and cataloguing paintings, sculptures, and their sales. By
1900, lavishly illustrated and expensive journals like Pan (1895—
1900), its more popular successor, Bruno Cassirer’s Kunst und Kiinst-
ler, Kunst fur Alle, or Kunstwart aestheticized the art trade to the level
of almost ethereal reverence.
The development of these many mediators between the ‘profes¬
sionals’ offering their ‘services’ and the publics being served consti¬
tuted a rare example of professional structural development that also
promoted alienation among the rank-and-file artists. The inescapable
need for such intermediaries becomes clearer, though, when we
examine another aspect of professional organization - the exhibition
dilemma.144
Regular (normally annual) salons or exhibitions of the best work
of academy members date back to eighteenth-century Paris and

144 The problem surfaced at least a generation before in France, where the decline
of the salon system derived not from a decline in the academy as such, but the
mounting tension between ‘official’ art and the burgeoning and differentiating
market for all other kinds of art. In the end quasi-official bi- or triennial exposi¬
tions carried on the semi-official function of the old salons, while shows
mounted by various ‘independents’ (as well as private galleries and other ven¬
ues) catered to the rest of the market. See Patricia Mainardi, The End of the
Salon: Art and the State in the Third Republic (Cambridge, 1993), passim. See
also her Art and Politics of the Second Empire (New Haven, 1987).

139
 London, with roots going further back still. Even when non-members
of the academy were allowed to submit works, the art public in major
capitals did not have to view and absorb much more than a few hun¬
dred works at each exposition. By the last decades of the nineteenth
century, the number of artists, submissions, and works exhibited (as
well as refused) had grown astonishingly. The annual shows in
Munich s Crystal Palace (a design borrowed from the epochal London
world fair hall of 1851) swelled to over 2,900 pieces in 1906, and
prices declined by one-third from 1900 to 1908 alone. The less harshly
juried annual show of the Munich Kunstverein went from 6,000 pieces
in 1898 to 8,200 in 1908.14:1 Stacked literally from floor to ceiling in
vast exhibition halls, many works were hard to see and, among the
crowded walls, harder still to appreciate. Not only did traditional sa¬
lons swell vastly in size. To accommodate the artists clamoring for
attention, new exhibitions and buildings to house them were called
into being. Despite the gargantuan size and multiplying numbers of
exhibitions, the number of works shown in them represented only a
fraction of works available to the public for sale. Munich’s art market
alone was estimated to offer 40,000 paintings a year shortly after the
turn of the century.146
Where traditional artists’ organizations had mounted the salons,
decisions were usually allocated to members of the local academy, or
to elected representatives of the artists’ collective (e.g., the Kiinstler-
genossenschaft in Munich), or to some combination of the two. Artists
characteristically complained about unfair treatment from the in¬
creasingly harassed juries, about bad placement of works that were
accepted, or other perceived impediments to the public’s appreciating
and buying their art. In all the major European art capitals, groups of
dissatisfied artists splintered off into their own associations to foster
special (and usually more select, smaller) exhibitions. Such was the
case, for example, with one of the earliest, most famous (and most
widely misunderstood), the salon des refuses (salon of the refused) in
Paris in 1863.

145 Paul Drey, Die wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Malkunst (Stuttgart 1911)
Tabelle X and XI. ° ’ ’’
146 Paul Drey, ‘Der Kunstmarkt,’ (PhD dissertation Munich, 1910), p. 157.

140
 The heroization of the Impressionists’ struggle for recognition147
has distorted somewhat the real reasons artists began forming ‘seces¬
sionist’ organizations. Their problem was not that their work was ‘re¬
fused’ consistently on grounds of being too ‘advanced.’ Not only
many works of the French Impressionists, but of members of the
German ‘secessions’ starting in the 1890s, gained acceptance to tradi¬
tional annual salons. The new exhibitions rivaling the traditional sa¬
lons did not, we should recall, pit purely avant-garde work against
stodgy conventionalism. Many quite conventional artists also joined
the ‘secessionists’ and their shows. One should be cautious about any
generalizations about the various ‘secessions’ starting with Munich’s
in 1892, but one thing that united otherwise ill-sorted painters was
personal animosity to influential local art lords, such as Lenbach in
Munich or Werner in Berlin.
Both Lenbach and Werner might be called ‘everyday artists’ who
rose to prominence more by luck, hard work, and social connections
than evidence of artistic ‘genius.’ Both contributed heavily, in their
lifetimes, to the organization and promotion of less fortunate col¬
leagues, only to become denounced by the end of their lives as ene¬
mies of real talent. Few German artists have been as involved in all
levels of professional activity as Anton von Werner (1843-1915),
whose career deserves further description.148 After attending the acad¬
emies of Berlin (1859-62) and Karlsruhe (to 1867), he made extended
visits to Paris and Italy, returning to Germany just in time to be as¬
signed to the staff of Crown Prince Friedrich (briefly emperor in 1888
and father of Wilhelm II) during the Franco-Prussian war. His illus¬
trations and large-scale paintings depicting soldiers, battles, and his¬
torical events won him attention at the royal court, and he was
appointed first a member, and a year later director of the fine arts
college (Hochschule) of the Prussian Academy of Arts (1874/5).

147 A classic ‘heroic’ distortion is John Rewald, The History of Impressionism

(New York, 1946, revised edn. 1961), which speaks of the ‘reactionary jury of
the salon’ and the ‘tyrannical Academy’ (pp. 7, 19).
148 See the excellent works of Dominik Bartmann, Anton von Werner (Berlin,
1985) and Anton von Werner[...].Katalog zur Ausstellung des Deutschen
Historischen Museums (Berlin, 1993); as well as Anton von Werner, Erlebnisee
und Eindriicke.

141
 Wemer vigorously reformed the moribund arts college, updating
the curriculum and rather high-handedly rejuvenating the faculty. He
increased enrollments from about 75 to an annual average of 150-200
during his directorship (down to 1915). Having instituted this reform,
however, Wemer clung to the increasingly criticized methods of the
academy’s teaching college to the end, resisting all ‘Modernist’ inno¬
vations as inimical to the state and nation.
Despite his personal prestige deriving from his closeness to Em¬
peror Wilhelm II, Wemer was often at odds with his fellow academy
members and struck an alliance with professional artists in Berlin to
increase control over major exhibitions in rivalry with the Royal
Academy. He made serious efforts to raise money through exhibitions
and other means to provide funds for artists in distress. The Verein
Berliner Kiinstler (the local chapter of the ADKG) rewarded his
efforts by repeatedly electing him their chairman (1887-95, 1899-
1901, and 1906—7), although as an avowed enemy of all ‘secessions’
he was not uncontroversial. He also served a term as national
chairman of the ADKG (1887-8). Werner’s influence on Pmssian and
(the much more limited) Reich art policy was marked, through a series
of formal and unofficial posts and contacts he built up. He sat on the
Pmssian Landeskunstkommission for all but five years of the period
1875-1911, doling out considerable sums for art found increasingly
sterile and corrupt by many observers. In his view the job of the
academy and its school was to uphold an unswerving patriotic ideal of
beauty in the same way ‘an international commission watches over the
certainty and undoubtedness of the metric standard.’149
It might be added that Wemer undoubtedly also reflected the
taste of the vast majority of the public interested in the arts, including
many educated people. The naturalistic illusionism of his grandes
machines recalled more a dying world of popular panoramas than the
emerging one of imaginary and abstract images. In this regard it is
understandable that he became a target and symbol for many progres¬
sive artists, who regarded him as the (unintentional) provoker of
German secession movements and the Deutscher Kunstlerbund. His

149 Anton von Wemer, Ansprachen und Reden des Direktors A. von Werner an die
Studierenden der Koniglichen akademischen Hochschule fur die bildenden
Kunste zu Berlin (Berlin, 1896), p. 42.

142
 involvement in many of the battles between conservatives and modems
(notably the Munch Affair in 1892, crises in Pmssian museum ad¬
ministration and acquisitions 1896-1908, including the Tschudi Affair,
and the flap over the St. Louis World Exposition 1904) has left his
name blackened in art history as a hopeless reactionary.
But his efforts to strengthen and steer the organized fine arts
profession into a position to benefit from state and private patronage
were undoubtedly well-meaning. The divisions among conservative
and experimental artists would probably have occurred in some form
(as they did in France) without the presence of a unique functionary
and artist who had his fingers in so many aspects of art in the German
Reich.
Personal disagreements continued to play a role in the further
coalescing and breaking apart of the secession movements themselves,
a signal not to regard them primarily as rallying points for a shared
aesthetic program. Indeed, the original secessions (minus splinter
groups that left them) had generally become quite conservative in their
turn by 1914.150
The secessionists’ quarrel with mainstream salons involved as
much the way they displayed art works as their selection policies.
Typically secessionists had already established reputations and argued
that not enough of their works could be shown off to maximum ad¬
vantage in the crowded jumble of traditional salons. Far from wishing
to ‘refuse’ or exclude such artists, some of the organizing bodies of
traditional salons even offered the secessionists pride of place and
other concessions.1”1 Individual breakaway artists sometimes even
accepted such offers and returned to the fold. But most recognized the
advantages in distancing themselves from the herd: exhibiting in
smaller, more easily viewable exhibitions alongside other noted con¬
temporaries, usually with more attention from press and public. As

150 Lenman, Artists in Society, p. 111.

151 See Vorstand des Vereins Berliner Ktinstler (ed.), Kunstgenossenschaft und
Sezession (Berlin, 1904). The VBK was the local branch of the national Kiinst-
lergenossenschaft and charged with running Berlin’s salons. After (not incor¬
rectly) describing the Sezession as a ‘mutual fame-insurance company’ that
could lead to ‘vanity, addiction to advertising, pushiness, and unfair competi¬
tion,’ all incidentally earmarks of unprofessional conduct, the VBK appealed
for ‘unity in tolerance’ with room for all in ‘quiet, serious work’ (p. 12).

143
 recognition (and prices) for Impressionist works climbed through the
last decades of the nineteenth century, their idea of holding officially
unsanctioned ‘anti-salons’ came to illustrate how a self-selecting
elite of artists could draw attention to themselves.
What did the appearance of secessionist movements mean for the
development of professional structures among artists? It is risky to
argue cause and effect. But the rise of separate exhibition associations
coincided chronologically with several other signs of change in artists’
professional working conditions. First, the attractiveness of traditional
salons began to fade. Judging by numbers of paying visitors and the
volume and value of works sold, the mammoth salons began to go into
crisis in the last decades before World War I.152 The influence of the
oiganizations sponsoring them, whether academies or artists’ associa¬
tions, declined in proportion to the rise of independent exhibition ven¬
ues.
According to professionalization theory, monopolization or at
least dominance of the market in services constitutes a major goal of
professional organizations. Throughout most of the nineteenth cen¬
tury, academies - also the educational gatekeepers of the visual arts
professions - or Kiinstlergenossenschaften - as federations of artists
produced by academies - largely determined what got picked, shown,
and to some extent bought by the public. If artists’ associations could
no longer offer an exclusive or at least rare opportunity to reach the
public, their attractiveness necessarily diminished.
Although promoting exhibitions belonged to the most important
functions of artists’ organizations in the nineteenth century, it was not
the only one. Mutual aid was an important reason for membership.
Artists’ organizations regularly offered some limited help for mem¬
bers impoverished by sickness or old age, for example. Such help fell
far short of demand and never constituted a systematic substitute for a
state social security system. Like other professionals, artists were
treated legally as ‘independent contractors’ operating a small business
Generally they were ineligible for the kind of mandatory illness, dis¬
ability, or old age insurance introduced in Germany in the 1880s and
later in other countries. To be eligible, they had to earn the majority of
their income as employees, meaning they were no longer technically

152 Ekkehard Mai, Expositionen (Munich, 1986), pp. 35^0,

144
counted as tree artists. Their average incomes, low compared to
other professionals, also translated into lower average contributions
and benefits.
Another function of artists’ associations, and even one quite visi¬
ble to the public, was sociability. The ‘Bohemian’ reputation of artists
lounging in cafes and bars distorts what was often a search for shelter
and company. Non-performing artists probably spend more time alone
than virtually all other professionals, and sociability provides a natural
corrective. As art teachers have repeated for centuries, too, students
contribute a great deal to each other’s learning. The process often con¬
tinues in later life, with the cafe or tavern as the ‘schoolroom.’ Finally,
cashing in on their gifts of design and imagination, artists fuelled their
public image of fun and levity by arranging festivals. These often
promoted a serious purpose, such as raising money from tickets to
increase the association’s assistance fund. The skits, pantomimes, pa¬
rades, dining, drinking, poetry, music, and scenic decoration of these
events often evinced a public face of lightheartedness entirely lacking
in conventions of physicians and engineers. In the heyday of history
painting under the Empire, artists’ festivals and tableaux vivants of¬
fered with their costumed three-dimensionality and movement a
uniquely vivid representation of local and national memory, especially
in the era before cinema and television.
This public visibility expressed in festivals represented, though,
an extension of the artists’ role in nineteenth-century society. Their
public functions, working for the ‘state’ in its various guises, for
churches, and even for private commissions in some cases, included
the spatial and decorative shaping of public spaces. Architects, deco¬
rators, sculptors, painters, ‘applied’ artists, and many others built at
least the ‘representational’ face of European cities. One need only
think of such buildings as the Paris Opera, dozens of city halls, luxury
villas lining the major boulevards and great projects like Munich’s
Leopoldstrasse or Vienna’s Ring to imagine this impact. What they
created ‘for the ages’ could easily be projected to what was created
only ‘for the occasion,’ including festive ones. Even the nineteenth
century had its ‘action’ and ‘installation’ art not designed to last.
The crisis of artists’ professional organizations - e.g., the decline
of the German Kunstgenossenschaften - before World War I reflected
a larger crisis to be discussed below. Consciousness of the limitations

145
 or outmodedness of traditional artists’ organizations gradually gave
rise to calls for new kinds of interest groups. In Germany this phe¬
nomenon stretched across the spectrum of learned professions.
Doctors, for example, founded the Hartmannbund as a combat
organization separate from the more general German Medical
Association to do battle with sickness insurance funds, even using
(quite successful) strike tactics. Such previously loyal and quiescent
professionals as judges and civil servants began organizing and
agitating for their economic interests just before the war. Artists, too,
began to clamor for a more pragmatic, clear-eyed type of lobbying
agency. The clamor produced the largest and most influential of these
in 1913, the Reichswirtschaftsverband Bildender Kiinstler Deutsch-
londs (National Economic Association of Visual Artists, renamed
simply Reichsverband in the 1920s, or RVBKD), with its affiliated
local chapters (including many of the old Genossenschafteri).
The RVBKD was the first national professional association of a
modem (interest-group politics) type and the de facto successor to the
ADKG . Its roots go back to mounting dissatisfactions with the eco¬
nomic status of the profession on the eve of World War I. It differed
significantly from previous artists’ organizations in emphasizing eco¬
nomic and practical issues, while de-emphasizing stylistic and aes¬
thetic quarrels. The former included some old chestnuts, such as
exhibition opportunities, public funding of the arts, social security,
and welfare. But they also included some newer matters: taxation,
copyright, royalties, prizes, artists’ materials and workspace, fee and
emolument scales, organs of self-regulation, and many more.
At first many established artists tended to look down on its or¬
ganizational efforts, but clearly the multiple artists’ societies (mostly
for exhibition purposes), even in a single art center like Berlin (Verein
Berliner Kiinstler, Sezession and secessions from it, Verein Berliner
Kiinstlerinnen, etc.), were unable to act collectively for the ameliora¬
tion of professional life. The young painter and teacher (at the Berlin
Kunstgewerbeschule, later the Vereinigte Staatsschule) Otto Marcus
(1863-1962) organized meetings and even (with the actors’ organiza¬
tion Buhnengenossenschaft) a successful ten-day festival. Eventually
gamering the support of such prominent artists as Max Liebermann,
Arthur Kampf, Max Pechstein, and Max Slevogt, Marcus was able to

146
travel around Germany and promote the establishment of local chap¬
ters until the war intervened.
In the 1920s, the RVBKD dropped the word Wirtschaft (eco¬
nomic) from its name but in fact sought to promote the common mate¬
rial and professional interests of all artists, above and beyond political
affiliations or aesthetic disputes among its members. While most of its
peak-level 10,000 members (who voluntarily joined one of the seven¬
teen Gau or regional associations, which in turn were the voting com¬
ponents of the national organization) were everyday artists, such
prominent figures as Kathe Kollwitz and Hans Baluschek were also
active (the latter only quitting as treasurer in 1931, after many years of
service, over Marcus’s ouster by conservative members).
We might dwell for a moment on the career of Baluschek, cer¬
tainly a good example of an everyday artist (although a relatively
well-known and successful one) who was also engaged in commercial
art as well as artists’ professional organizations. The son of a trans¬
portation engineer, Hans Baluschek (1870-1935) graduated from a
Gymnasium before attending the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst of
the Berlin Academy. Exposed to the Naturalist literary ideas of Amo
Holz and others, he developed an interest in socialist politics and il¬
lustrating urban daily life, especially themes involving the working
class. For this he was widely held to exemplify the ‘gutter artists’ de¬
nounced by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the turn of the century.
Baluschek’s ‘fine’ art was nevertheless shown in such respect¬
able venues as the Galerie Gurlitt and the Great Berlin Art Exposition.
Indeed, he was a founding member of the Berlin Secession. Despite
his classical academy education (not atypically for this generation), he
earned a comfortable living as a painter for modem industry as well as
a book illustrator (notably for fairy tales) during the Weimar Republic.
Divorced from his first wife, an actress, he later married one of his art
students and lived a bourgeois life with two children.
Because of his membership in the Social Democratic Party, how¬
ever, he was defamed and hounded by the new Nazi masters after
1933. As a bourgeois socialist, academy graduate working largely in
the applied arts, chronicler of proletarian life as well as officer of a
major artists’ professional organization, Baluschek incorporates many
of the aspirations and contradictions of his time.

147
 Baluschek’s RVBKD encompassed about 55 per cent of all art¬
ists listed in the definitive Dresslers Kunsthandbuch in 1921, and may
have approached a much greater inclusiveness by the end of the
Weimar Republic. (By way of comparison, the parallel professional
association of German writers, the Schutzverband deutscher Schrift-
steller, later renamed Deutscher Schriftsteller-Verband, founded in
1909, listed only 900 members in 1921.) With a tiny staff in Berlin,
Otto Marcus (as general secretary) was able to negotiate with govern¬
ments and influence policy, for example getting the turnover tax on
works sold by artists abolished, influencing changes in copyright laws,
or consulting about the creation of a national ‘artists chamber’ compa-
lable to the professional chambers (Kammer) of physicians, lawyers,
and others. Its failures, however, were many, including demands to set
up an artists fund financed by a tax on art auctions, to be seriously
consulted about art shows and building projects supported by the gov¬
ernment, or to include artists in unemployment insurance.
The \ erband had its own journal, Kunst und Wirstschaft, a
continuation of the ADKG’s journal Werkstatt der Kunst (1901-20)
and Dei deutsche Kiinstler (1914—20). The association’s journal dis¬
pensed legal, economic, and other advice. Some of the recurrent con¬
cerns discussed in it over the Weimar years included unfair taxation,
unscrupulous publishers, bureaucratic high-handedness by govern¬
ments in dealing with art issues, lack of adequate copyright protection,
and even high rates charged by the national railroad for shipping art¬
works. There were many instances of protests, including ones joined
by other artistic professionals (e.g. writers, musicians). The journal
published such hopeful signs of professional conduct as a code of
ethics, a fee scale tor art services, boiler-plate contracts for artists to
use with customers (including publishers, dealers etc.), agreements
made with the publishing industry, and dozens of others.153
Nothing perhaps sets off the individualistic and bourgeois aspi¬
rations of most visual artists (including the majority of them belonging
to the RVBKD) than a brief comparison with the parallel national

153 See especially Kunst und Wirtschaft, I (1920-1), No. 1, p 1- No 12 no \-4- 11

No. I, pp. 1-3; No. 7, pp. 2-3; N* 14, p. 3; No. 16, pp2-1 W
(1924-5), No. 4, p. 2; No.. 5, p. 3; No. 9, p. 2; VI (1925-6), No. 8, p. 1- No 10
pp. 153-7; No. 11, pp. 173-8; X (1929-30), No. 7, pp. 99-100; XIII (1932-3)’
No. 4, p. 75.

148
 organization of stage artists, the Deutsche Biihnengenossenschaft
(DBG, German Stage Association). Although theatres did hire visual
artists tor set design and other functions, this organization is profiled
here chiefly as an example of how some professional organizations of
(performing) artists succeeded early in using quasi-trade-union tactics
to achieve gams in working conditions and pay for their members.
The oldest national organization of theatre professionals was the
Deutscher Biihnenverein (DBV, 1846), but this ‘stage union’ consis¬
ted solely of theatre directors interested in counteracting breach of
contract by actors and other performers (for example by blacklisting
those who broke their engagements). In 1871 the Genossenschaft
Deutscher Biihnenangehoriger (Association of Those who belong to
the German Stage, a name later mercifully shortened) was founded as
a kind of counterweight to the organized directors, although the latter
could also join the Genossenschaft if nominated by their employees.
The DBG grew from 4,000 to over 6,000 members during the pe¬
riod 1872-1900, incorporating about a third of the actors, singers, and
musicians active in Germany’s many theatres. In addition to success¬
ful efforts at self-help (for example a pension fund established right at
the start), the DBG negotiated directly with the DBV, with which it
had set up a joint arbitration court to resolve work disputes in 1906,
although there were many difficulties with this down to the war. It
represented the stage artists in negotiating with the Reich government
about a national theatre law whose realization was, however, dashed
by the war itself. During the Weimar era the DBG grew to encompass
most theatre employees (with a high of 15,000 members in 1928) and
concluded exclusive salary and working-condition contracts with the
DBV in force through the Weimar era. On at least one occasion, in
1922, the DBG even used the strike weapon successfully.
Like musicians and other public performers, theatre people often
depended on teamwork (unlike many visual artists, who worked in
isolation) and could count on a strong demand for their entertainment
function, even if it was disguised as ‘culture-bearing activity.’ Espe¬
cially with the advent of mechanical reproducibility (sound and film
or video recording, for example) the professional associations of
stage, music-performing, and composing organizations agitated
strongly and in the end successfully for better copyright protection and
collection of royalties. The relative effectiveness of this quasi-union of

149
 ‘artists’ remained a haunting example for Germany’s visual artists
dissatisfied with the tactics of the RVBKD and early BBK, based as
they were on the professional image of the artist as independent eco¬
nomic contractor/entrepreneur.154
The poisonous political polarization of Germany with the onset
of the world economic depression after 1929 did not spare the
RVBKD. Marcus was deposed (according to some rumor, in an ‘an-
tisemitic intrigue’) in favor of more conservative, less activist leader¬
ship, and ultimately meetings were disrupted by Nazi members. One
opposition wing thought the RVBKD was not doing enough and
called for steps toward unionization, following the example of the
Buhnengenossenschaft, which had actually led successful strikes.
(Many radical-left artists in any case belonged to the communist
ASSO). The approaching takeover by the Nazis was heralded by some
naive side-switching, as one of the original founders recalled:

Many colleagues who had run around only days before, saying ‘Shit Hitler’
now suddenly shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ and appeared in black SS uniforms. Many
colleagues suffered fiom illusions about what the Nazis had in mind; rumors
even went around that Goebbels was in favor of modem art, as the Italian fas¬
cists were for Futurism. Often it was the most avant-garde artists who favored
the Nazis 55

Like the majority of German professional organizations, the

RVBKD was at first infiltrated and ultimately ‘coordinated’ by the
Nazis (in this case initially taken over by Rosenberg’s Kampfbundfur
deutsche Kultur) until the emergence of Goebbels’s Reichskultur-
kammer, to which all artists had to belong in order to work. The BBK
of the Federal Republic may be regarded as the legitimate postwar
successor of the RVBKD.

154 Aloys Kaufmann, Die sozia/en Leistungen der Deutschen Buhnengenossen¬

schaft (Essen, 1931), esp. pp. 13-50.
155 Fritz Preiss, founding chairman of the Membership Committee of the RVBKD,
interview with Hannes Schwenger, ‘Als die SA in den Saal marschierte...’, in
Bemfsverband Bildender Kiinstler Berlins (ed.), 30 Jahre Berufsverband
Bildender Kiinstler Berlins (Berlin, 1980), p. 4. For a good brief overview of
the history of the RVBKD, see Michael Nungesser (ed.), ‘Als die SA in den
Saal marschierte... Das Ende des Reichsverbandes Bildender Kiinstler
Deutschlands' (Berlin, 1983).

150
 As in other professions, visual artists joined specialized, regional,
or gender-related groups in addition to - or to the exclusion of - the
Reichsverband. A good example is the Verein Berliner Kunstlerinnen
(VKB). Founded in 1867 as the ‘Association of Women Artists and
Friends of Art in Berlin,’ this was the oldest German professional as¬
sociation for female visual artists. It had from the start a bourgeois
character, with more women ‘friends of art’ as members (62 in 1867;
321 in 1880) than practicing artists (29 and 131, respectively). Its
central concerns were (1) to set up an art school, (2) to provide social
security for the many single women artists, and (3) to institute exhibi¬
tions, juried by women, that would more readily accept women’s art¬
works.
The school was meant to provide an affordable alternative to the
usually expensive private art lessons that were the only previous pro¬
fessional training open to women. (The Berlin Academy was free but
excluded women until 1919; the Kunstgewerbeschule was open to
women but had not yet become an equal rival to fine-arts education at
the academy.) By 1905, its school had nearly 300 women students,
compared to altogether 165 in the 27 private art schools counted in
Prussia at that time. Ultimately this school also trained women to be
art teachers as well, and was recognized and given support by the
state. It replicated much the same curriculum available at the Royal
Prussian Academy, including working with female nude models
deemed the pinnacle of such training. (The male students at the
academy were allowed only male models and had to pay for private
modeling to draw female nudes.) Indeed, some of its teachers were
full-time professors at the academy. Government subventions clearly
aimed ultimately to make the association’s school an attractive, ‘sepa¬
rate but equal’ alternative to admitting women to the academy, par¬
ticularly after an initiative by German women artists in that direction
failed in 1908, the same year women were finally admitted to Prussian
universities. Paula Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz were both
students of the school, and Kollwitz also later taught there.
An emergency fund for artists in misfortune (1870), a pension
fund (1885), and a sickness insurance fund (1910) provided a modest
buffer against social and economic insecurity. Funds for the associa¬
tion were raised by contributions, government subventions, lotteries of
works donated by members (as with traditional art leagues), Christmas

151
 fairs with applied-art works, and costumed fetes. The royal family and
wealthy Berliners, among others, visited the relatively small (200-300
works) semi-annual shows and often purchased artworks.
After reaching a membership of over 800 (with actual artists still
in the minority) before 1914, the VKB began to decline after the end
of the monarchy, whose supporters had been among its social elite.
Far from being a radical-feminist organization, it was closest in spirit
to Helene Lange s matemalist’ image of women and professional
self-help. By 1927 it had become exclusively a professional organiza¬
tion for trained women artists, excluding both amateur ‘friends’ and
women in the applied arts. The 1923 inflation wiped out much of its
pre-war pension and scholarship funds. Competition from public
schools now open to women sapped its previously flourishing art
school, which had to admit men. The relatively traditional, bourgeois
mentality ot the VKB was reflected in the predominance of such gen¬
res as portrait, floral still-life, landscape, and animal representations.
Having become not much more than a small exhibition society
already in the 1930s, the VKB went through periods of inactivity and
revival after 1945, but never regained its importance reached under the
Empire, when it might have been best described as a female version of
the Verein Berliner Kilns tier, i.e. affiliated more with official art
circles than the avant-garde.156
Let us dwell for a moment at the career of one of the leading fig¬
ures of the VKB, Renee Sintenis (1888-1965). Bom in Silesia as the
daughter of a Pmssian jurist and lawyer of Huguenot descent, Sintenis
studied (1908-12) at the Kunslgewerbeschule in Berlin. Influenced by
her childhood love of horses, she became a specialist in sculpting and
drawing animals. Her stylized human sculptures won several prizes,
including her Runner Nurmi (Olympic Games Prize, 1932). She be¬
came the first sculptress to be elected to the Pmssian Academy of Fine
Arts (1931), in whose Hochschule she also taught sculpture. She mar¬
ried her former Kunstgewerbeschule teacher, the printmaker and de¬
signer E. R. Weiss, in 1917. Persecuted as an alleged ‘quarter Jew’
and pro-Weimar artist under the Nazi regime, she continued to do il¬
lustrations for animal books published in Germany and America. Ex-

156 Carola Muysers (ed.), Profession ohne Tradition. 125 Jahre Verein der Berliner
Kunstlermnen (Berlin, 1992), pp. 76-7, 426-56.

152
cept tor her ‘race’ and Weimar-friendly politics she might have fit into
a particular niche the Nazis allowed women artists. ‘The number of
women in the art trade did not decline [atter 1933], but they were as¬
signed to certain fields such as small sculptures. Leading teaching po¬
sitions were closed to them.’157
She was one of the prominent leaders of the Kulturbund zur de-
mokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural League for the De¬
mocratic Renewal of Germany) in 1945 but distanced herself from it
as it emerged more clearly as a tool of the Soviet-backed East Berlin
authorities under the leadership of the writer Johannes R. Becher (‘Jo¬
hannes Erbrecher,’ or ‘John the Vomiter,’ as punsters called him). Her
friendships with Weimar-era artists and writers, including the painter
Karl Hofer, the first postwar director, helped achieve a lectureship at
the Hochschale fur Bddende Kiinste in Berlin (West) in 1948, when
she also won the city’s prestigious Art Prize, and a full professorship
in 1955.158
Sintenis may be taken as a good example of the kind of ‘fine art¬
ist' that reformed Kunstgewerbeschulen were training by World War
I. Her work was non-traditional but nevertheless popular. As both an
artist recognized by high honors of the Weimar ‘system’ so hated by
the Nazis and a suspected ‘non-Aryan,’ she shared the fate of many
artists who were harassed and hampered by the Hitler regime but not
forced into exile or death camps. As such, she was able to reconnect
postwar Berlin to its pre-1933 traditions.
To expand on just one example, German visual artists had fol¬
lowed with interest the success of their medical and legal brethren in
achieving the creation of state-sanctioned professional ‘chambers.’
Under the law of the German Empire, professional practice was
declared ‘free,’ i.e. no longer closely regulated or tied in practice to
bureaucratic supervision. (Many learned professionals nevertheless
continued to be government employees and civil servants, including
numerous architects, painters, and sculptors.) Organizations for the

157 Barbara Lange, Joseph Beuys (Berlin, 1999), p. 48f. On women sculptors be¬
tween the wars, see Magdalena Bushart, ‘Der Formsinn des Weibes. Bild-
hauerinnen in den zwanziger und dreissiger Jahren,’ in Profession ohne
Tradition, pp. 135-50.
158 Britta E. Buhlmann, Renee Sintenis. Werkmonographie der Skulpturen (Darm¬
stadt, 1987), pp. 3-37.

153
 learned professions were initially all voluntary. They included both
state employees and private practitioners. In some cases, civil servants
(e.g., judges and state construction supervisors) also had their own
special organizations. But none of these required membership, backed
by the force of legislation. Thus professional practitioners always ex¬
isted who did not support or get directly represented by their respec¬
tive professional associations.
To extend their influence over all practitioners, many profes¬
sional groups argued for professional ‘chambers.’ After all many
learned professions still required specific training, qualifications, and
licensing, generally in consonance with government decrees or legis¬
lation. In the heyday of 'free market’ approaches during the Bismarck
Reich, however, the absence of self-regulating professional bodies
came to be viewed as a negative result of deregulation. Aside from
criminal charges leading to the revocation of licenses (almost unheard
of), there were few ways by which shady practice, incompetence, or
other individual misbehavior damaging to the profession’s reputation
as a whole could be disciplined. A less public argument for self-disci¬
plinary bodies was that they could also penalize behavior damaging to
fellow practitioners (as opposed to the public), such as advertising or
other ‘unfair competition.’ Clearly no form of collective ethics code
would work if a practitioner threatened with sanctions could simply
resign from the professional organization. Only mandatory member¬
ship, effectively required by state authority, could guarantee the ‘free¬
dom’ of autonomously exercised professional self-policing.
The doctors and lawyers of Germany - or to be more precise, of
the federal German states - persuaded governments to set up these
Kammern. They did not displace existing voluntary professional asso¬
ciations, and their governing boards overlapped significantly with
those of the latter. Effectively, they allowed the views of the latter
(which represented only a large majority of practitioners) to be im¬
posed on all practitioners. Professional groups used the term ‘cham¬
ber in advocating a quasi-official but self-administering organization
of all persons qualified to practice in a defined place. A ‘lawyers’
chamber’ regulated the practice of attorneys before certain courts, for
example, and held disciplinary powers to enforce professional ethics.
Such chambers also represented the interests of their member-profes¬
sionals in many matters, including education, qualification, and eco-

154
 nomic questions. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were
chambers for lawyers and doctors in most German states, functioning
somewhat like American or British bar and medical associations.
Given the level of public trust required of these professions, one of the
features of chambers was their mandatory membership. In effect, they
were meant to replace government bureaucratic supervision with self¬
management principles.
Before and more strongly after World War I, perhaps in conso¬
nance with a widespread interest in ‘corporatism,’ many other profes¬
sional groups (although never unanimously) also clamored for their
own chambers - engineers, dentists, even writers and artists. Cham¬
bers were seen by many ‘independent contractors’ as a way of defin¬
ing and including ‘real’ professionals and thereby disadvantaging
competitors with lesser qualifications. And because they would re¬
quire membership - and dues - by qualified practitioners, they would
notionally be better able to fight for the whole range of interests by the
profession as a whole. Calls for chambers became loud among Ger¬
man architects and artists in the years immediately before and after
World War I, as the old ADKG was increasingly seen to be ineffec¬
tive, and as architects in private practice (as opposed to the bureau¬
cratically-organized public sector Baurate or ‘building counselors’)
became numerous enough to form a guild of their own. The Bund
Deutscher Architekten (founded in 1904) published numerous articles
in its house organ Die Baugilde in the 1920s demanding mandatory
organization (and unified training) of Germany’s architects, for exam¬
ple.1'9 The publisher of Germany’s semi-official handbook of artists,
museums, and art schools, Willy Dressier, called in 1917 for the crea¬
tion of a Kiinsderkammer made up of Germany’s art academies plus
the ADKG. This entity would be recognized and consulted by gov¬
ernments as the spokesman of visual artists. Governments in turn
should control the art auction market to eliminate ‘cheap surrogates.’
Dressier renewed his call after the fall of the monarchy and coupled it
with a demand for the creation of a national arts ministry that would
look after such matters as social security and other legislation, an an-

159 See especially ‘Neue Wege der privaten Architektenschaft,’ Die Baugilde, 1
(1919), p. 1; Peter Behrens, ‘Reform der kiinstlerischen Erziehung,’ Die
Baugilde, 2 (1920), pp. 2-\\ and passim.

155
 nual art Olympics,’ tax-free art sales, and other measures to be fi¬
nanced by such means as a tax on art auctions (as in France) and even
a small poll tax for the arts. Dressler’s revised chamber was supposed
to be elected by representatives of democratically formed professional
associations (including the RVBKD and the musicians’ and writers’
associations).160 Dressler’s suggestion for membership in an artists’
chamber included a completed education at an arts school or evidence
of exhibiting at three juried shows (or the equivalent for musicians
and writers) and criticized the disunity among artists, which ‘opened
the gates to outsiders and quacks’ (literally Kurpfuscher, borrowed
from the medical profession).161
The general secretary of the RVBKD, Otto Marcus, testified and
wrote on numerous occasions in the 1920s in an ambivalent way about
an artists chamber. Himself a socialist, Marcus (and many others)
regarded the chamber as an inherently ‘elitist’ idea and feared that the
same kind of ‘privileged’ artists as had run the old ADKG (e.g. Anton
von Werner) would wind up dominating even a nominally democratic
one. ~ Nevertheless, the issue remained alive during the 1920s. The
Prussian Academy of Arts held hearings and issued a questionnaire to
German artists in 1925, but its findings were inconclusive. Tensions
between governments, culture ministries, and their art schools one the
one side and working artists on the other could be seen in the reaction
of the RVBKD, which was leery of proposals to make educational
qualifications the main criterion for admission to the artists’ cham¬
ber. ,J Indeed, the artistic press in the late 1920s showed much more

160 Willy O. Dressier, Denkschrift betreffend die Neugestaltung der Verwaltung

der Kunstangelegenheiten im Reich und in den Bundesstaaten (Berlin, 1917),
pp. 1-16; and idem, Der Eckstein in der Wirtschaft von den Werkleuten verges-
sen (Leipzig, 1921), esp. pp. 11-28.
161 Dressier, Denkschrift, p. 21.
162 Otto Marcus, ‘Kritik an Dressier,’ Der deutsche Kiinstler, 3, III (1916), p. 75.
Marcus repeated this warning after the overthrow of the monarchy in ‘Organi-
sationsfragen,’ Kunst und Wirtschaft, 2, No. 1 (1920-1), p 2
163 See Kunst und Wirtschaft, 6, No. 9 (1925-6), pp. 135-6 and'7, No. 1 (1926-7),
pp. 1-2. For a printed summary of the hearings see Arnold Ebel, ‘Eine
Ktinstleikammer in Preussen,’ Deutsche Tonkiinstler-Zeitung, 23 (1925) pp
*6n4~70’ also Archive, Prussian Academy of Arts, 2.2./154 Kunstlerkammer

156
interest in limiting enrollments at art schools than organizing their
starving graduates into a chamber.
It is important to remember that the chamber idea was acceptable
to artists of widely differing backgrounds and political attitudes, how¬
ever, except perhaps to the tiny minority already involved in labor
unions. The main hope for such a chamber was that it could speak
with one voice tor artists’ professional (especially socioeconomic)
needs, particularly to governments which, in the artists’ opinion,
should be doing more for them. The very disunity of the arts commu¬
nity, however, made agreement on who should belong to and run such
a chamber very difficult. Still, some leaders of non-visual arts organi¬
zations entertained the idea positively. One of the most prominent of
these was the composer Richard Strauss, founder of the Genossen-
schaft Deutscher Tonsetzer (Association of German Composers) in
1898 and its president from 1921 on.164 Precisely because the National
Socialists also embraced the idea of a national artists’ chamber, many
otherwise unsympathetic artists looked hopefully to the new regime of
1933. Strauss later even consented to head the Reich Chamber of
Musicians (Reichsmusikkammer) until the real intentions of Hitler,
Goebbels and company became clearer and Strauss’ continuing col¬
laboration with Jewish musicians forced his resignation. But this
occurred only after he managed to improve the methods of payment to
composers and other artists by expanding the period of copyright
protection to fifty years, a long standing demand of artists.165
Strauss’ case illustrates how the openness of German artists to
some kind of corporatist collectivity was ruthlessly exploited by the
Nazis, who were not only not undecided about who should be in¬
cluded, but had very definite ideas about who should be excluded
from the opportunity to work as an artist in the Third Reich. Generally
shoving aside even their loyal satraps who had taken over established
artists’ organizations in coups de main,166 the Nazis set up a Reichs-

164 Frank Schneider, Welt, was frag ich nach dir? Politische Portrats grosser Kom-
ponisten (Leipzig, 1988), p. 258.
165 Gerhard Splitt, Richard Strauss, 1933-35. Asthetik und Musikpolitik zu Beginn
der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft (Pfaffenweiler, 1987), pp. 190-1.
166 For an excellent study of one of these, see James A. Van Dyke, ‘Franz Radzi-
will. The Art Politics of the National Socialist Regime and the Question of Re-

157
 kulturkammer in September 1933, with sections for the various visual,
performing, musical, literary and other arts. As a top-down or¬
ganization, the RKK was most successful at doing what pre-1933
professional organizations had scrupulously avoided - laying down
parameters of style and banishing those who did not conform (as well
as artists whose political, ‘racial,’ or other characteristics displeased
the tailed writer Goebbels, the failed painter Hitler, or the artist-
nonentities who headed the artists’ chamber, such as Adolf Ziegler).
The very limited success, not to say failure, of professional or¬
ganizations of artists in 1918-33 was far from unique. Starting later
than other professions, the arts organizers had to face also in the 1920s
the major economic crises of catastrophic inflation and the Great De¬
pression. As we shall see below, they had come to realize, by the early
1930s, that some kind of radical steps had to be taken to secure the
future ot arts professionals, beyond small handouts and empty prom¬
ises. As with so many other Nazi ‘solutions’ to the problems of the
Weimar Republic, the idea of an artists’ chamber, integrated into a
larger ‘culture chamber’ (Kulturkammer) originated outside the party.
The traditional left parties did try to recruit artists, and some union¬
organizing activity did take place. Yet while ‘free’ artists might com¬
plain about their ‘proletarianization’ (as did other professionals), they
were still small businessmen economically and felt a part of the
Bildungsburgertum (cultivated middle class) socially. Few major art¬
ists showed ardent pro-Nazi sympathies before 1933. But undoubtedly
many everyday artists succumbed to promises to do something about
their economic plight, including setting up mandatory chambers.167
Still, tensions and disappointments among ‘traditional’ artists and the
Nazi-led establishment persisted, even in the ‘capital of the Nazi
movement’ and conservative ‘art city’ Munich.168
The Reichskulturkammer can only be touched upon briefly here.
It was not a true professional organization like the ones it replaced,
lacking real autonomy, free internal dialogue, and elected self-gov-

sistance in Germany’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1996), esp

Chap. 4. F'
167 Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, p. 20.
168 For examples of these dissatisfactions, see the essays in Peter-Klaus Schuster
(ed ), Nationalsozialismus und Entartete Kunst: Kunststadt Miinchen 1937
(Munich, 1987).

158
 emment. It quickly turned into a conveyor belt of orders from the top
down. It did, however, define ‘who was an artist.’ Anybody making a
living from the fine or applied arts, literature (including journalism),
music, or acting had to join. Jews and others loathed by the Nazis
(e.g., most avant-garde artists) were barred from membership and
hence from working. Under the supervision of Propaganda Minister
Joset Goebbels, the RKK quickly took its place among the welter of
agencies and organizations ‘coordinating’ German life. But with little
open opposition to suppress, the RKK became a somewhat lifeless
bureaucratic machine. Real decisions were made over the heads of its
lackluster 'leaders.’ Few of the professional reforms and securities
many artists had hoped from the ‘Nazi revolution’ came into being.
After initial gestures in the direction of a professionalizing agenda
for artists of all kinds, the RKK began to reverse course toward de¬
professionalization from the late 1930s on.169
Perhaps the only reason for any satisfaction with the Nazi regime
was a modest amount of prosperity flowing in its wake. With large
numbers of artists fleeing abroad or banished from the market, com¬
petition eased. Economic recovery from the Great Depression helped,
as did commissions for public works, from Autobahn sculptures to
murals for army barracks. If RKK estimates are to be believed, un¬
employment decreased significantly among artists of all kinds, and
the percentage of visual artists earning less than 150 marks a month
(the borderline of poverty) decreased from 61 per cent to 46 per cent
between 1936 and 1939. Visual artists may have even experienced a
modest boom in the number of exhibitions of contemporary art, espe¬
cially with a ‘hometown’ (Heimat) theme, at the beginning of the
war.170 Whether because of the continuing depression and lack of
commissions, or because of malingering about dues-paying by artists
(a customary complaint of the old RVBKD leadership during
Weimar), Reich Visual Arts Chamber President Ziegler chronically
complained to Goebbels’s ministry about member dues falling far
short of projections. Ziegler complained in 1940 that almost all his
budget was spent maintaining Berlin and regional offices. Recruiting
‘leaders’ for the lower levels of the RKK proved difficult on a

169 Ibid., p. 90-3.

170 Ibid., p. 97, 151.

159
 volunteer basis, since even Aryan artists had to earn a living.
Whatever expanded commissions and vastly inflated lip service it
provided, though, the Nazi regime’s promotion of the arts took a back
seat to its devotion to war.
Whatever disappointments the RKK brought in the first six years
of Hitler’s rule, they paled into insignificance compared to the
deprivations of the six war years down to 1945. Ziegler whined to
Goebbels days after the start of World War II about a ‘steep decline’
in commissions for architects, except on military projects, and
that ‘sales by painters, sculptors, and graphic artists have almost
completely stopped.’171 Conscription had reduced the membership in
the visual arts section of the RKK by 40 per cent (to about 22,000) by
1944,172 of which probably eight or nine thousand were not architects
or non-artists associated with the art trade. Instead of protection and
prosperity, visual artists received (with some individual exceptions)
continued underemployment and economic difficulties. Instead of pro¬
fessional autonomy and control over admission to and practice of the
careei of artist, they found themselves pawns of a manipulative and
fundamentally anti-professional regime. And many who survived the
war found that their ateliers and a lifetime of artwork had not.
Although other professional chambers set up before and during
the Third Reich were revived after World War II, none of those for
artists of any type encompassed in the RKK were. One can conclude
that the experience of an authoritarian solution to professional dis-

1 71 Adolf Ziegler to office of Josef Goebbels in Reich Propaganda Ministry, letter

of 7 Sep 1939; also see letters of 13 Jan 1937 and 5 Feb 1940, in Bundesarchiv
(Berlin), R55 (Reichsministerium ffir Volksaufklarung und Propaganda)/712
(Reichskammer der bildenden Kiinste, Haushaltsangelegenheiten, 1936-40). In
the 1940 letter, Ziegler also provided his own estimate of the incomes of Ger¬
many’s 63,000 ‘culturally productive professionals’ in 1938: 21 per cent earned
less than 80 Reichsmarks (RM) per month and paid no dues to the RKK; 67 per
cent earned between 80 and 300 RM a month, paying 0.5-0.9 per cent of their
income as an RKK contribution; two per cent had incomes between 400 and
500 RM; one per cent had incomes of 500-700 RM; one-half of one per cent
made 700-1,000 RM; and so on down to ninety individuals making over 1 000
RM a month (all paying a flat one per cent as membership fees). Even assuming
the modal monthly income to have been 150-200 RM, that translates into US
$38-50 in the most prosperous year of the Third Reich.
172 Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, p. 169.

160
 harmony taught that the solution was worse than the disharmony
itself.
In the rubble of the ‘Zero Hour,’ 1945, artists’ organizations
were treated slightly differently by Allied occupation authorities than
most other professional organizations taken over or created by the
Nazi regime. Like them, the RKK was dissolved. It took some time
for the Allies to overcome suspicion of new associations. Still, in
some parts of Germany (the British zone was particularly liberal),
local or regional associations of artists were allowed to reform, if they
abided by the rules of ‘denazification.’ A ‘working committee’ of 31
Wtirttemberg artists, shortly to become (in October 1945) the Verband
Bildender Kiinstler Wiirttembergs, for example, was allowed to re¬
sume the work of the pre-1933 local of the Reichsverband Bildender
Kiinstler Deutschlands. The committee submitted its denazification
questionnaires, even though nine of the 31 had been Nazi Party
members.17'1 The artists argued that membership in the RKK alone,
having been mandatory, could not serve as a measure of loyalty to the
regime.1'4 Nevertheless, an effective, unified, and above all nation¬
wide organization of professional artists failed to develop at first. The
local and regional associations came back to life. The old RVBKD
came back within weeks of the end of the war, at first in the form of
regional associations, such as the Wtirttemberg Verband, later joined
into the Bnndesverband Bildender Kiinstler in West Germany (1949-
present) and a separate (until 1990) Verband Bildender Kiinstler/DDR
for East Germany. But the possibility of a unified profession faded
with the Cold War division of Germany. Destruction and poverty, the
legacy of Hitler’s war, meant even fewer resources left over for
the arts than after World War I. Artists’ organizations in the west
struggled to distribute what little charity they could scrape together, to
arrange for exhibitions under terrible conditions, or to promote ‘per¬
centage for the arts’ provisions for public rebuilding projects.
The relative disappointment in the limitations of traditional vol¬
untary professional associations (even during the return of general

173 Wiirttembergisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, Bestand EA 3/201/187-189.

174 For a fascinating parallel to the clumsy and ineffective German efforts to
‘purge’ artists who had been sympathetic to the Nazi regime, see N. K. C. A.
in’t Veld, De Ereraden voor de Kimst en de zuivering van de kunstenaars (The
Hague, 1981), for the postwar Netherlands.

161
 prosperity starting in the 1950s) led in the west to alternative
organizations of artists affiliated with labor unions. The trend of
consolidating "fine’ and 'applied’ arts training continued after 1945
and served to efface further distinctions among employed and self-
employed artists. A new generation began in the 1960s to speak a
more radical language, including that of labor union solidarity.
This had been a discussion point in the Weimar Republic, and
some artists organizations either functioned as independent unions,
like the Genossenschaft Deutscher Biihnenangehdriger (GDB), or at
least described themselves as unions even when not behaving like one,
such as the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller (SDS). The ease
with which the Nazis dismantled both the German labor movement
and the myriad professional associations caused many survivors of
both to rethink the roles of ‘proletarian’ unions or ‘middle-class’ pro-
tessionals after 1945. For many reasons, including differing policies
among the occupying Allies, major political parties and professional
associations or unions themselves, initial attempts to include artists
into the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB) in the immediate post¬
war years ended disappointingly for pro-union forces. The core of the
West German DGB, arising within the British occupation zone, set
the tone for the next two decades by declaring its unsuitability for
representing authors and artists — according to some accounts, as the
price for its recognition by the Allies.175
Although courted by political leaders of the CDU, CSU, and FDP
(Federal Republic President Theodor Heuss had even chaired the
pre-1933 writers’ association SDS), many artists began to doubt the
effectiveness of their relatively small and fragmented organizations,
especially faced with the growing market power of private publishing
and media empires. Around the time of the 1968 student revolt, many
(especially younger) artists and writers expressed renewed interest in
union-like organization and action, including a first German Authors’
Congress (1970) and a first Artists’ Congress (1971). Some artists did
join unions, either going along with a part of their professional asso¬
ciations (about half the writers’ union YDS joined the DGB-affiliated

175 Hannes Schwenger, Das Ende der Unbescheidenheit. Intellektuelle auf dem
Wegzur Gewerkschaft (Frankfurt/M, 1974), pp. 15-16. See also his Schrift¬
steller und Gewerkschaft (Darmstadt, 1974).

162
Industrie-Gewerkschaft Druck in the early 1970s) or individually
(several hundred in the DGB-affiliated Gewerkschaft Kuns t)}16
Artists in the German Democratic Republic ultimately found
themselves compelled to join artists unions, too, but on the Soviet
model. Like the RKK, these served as vehicles for control of the arts
by the Party, not as autonomous representatives of free professional
opinion. Like the RKK, indeed perhaps even more markedly, it
provided material inducements for those artists who unquestioningly
followed the aesthetic party line. Quite possibly, when the history of
Soviet bloc artists' unions is written, a more nuanced picture will
emerge. The overall gray of forced conformity to some version or
other of ‘socialist realism’ may yield to a more variegated image, at
least when compared to the RKK. After all, Hitler’s regime lasted
only a dozen years, and its own arts policies soon bogged down in the
exigencies of total war. Soviet domination lasted almost a half-century
and went through a number ot distinct phases. Whenever one of these
ended, some room for open expression by artists opened up, even in
the otherwise quiescent artists’ unions. Nevertheless, visual artists
(like writers and musicians) also ‘emigrated’ (e.g. Gerhard Richter,
Gunther Uecker, Georg Baselitz, A. R. Penck).
Whether of western or eastern provenance, artists’ associations
based on or affiliated with labor unions, it could be argued, lent an
extra impetus toward fulfilling some of the basic demands of the
profession. These included achieving some form of social security
coverage for artists, gaining concessions from private and public users
of artists’ services (as in ‘percentage for the arts’ policies) and setting
some norms for remuneration.177 Solidarity with blue-collar and often

176 For a description of the organizational structure of most ‘cultural occupations’

in the Federal Republic in the 1970s, see Schwenger, Ende, pp. 32-5.
177 For an analysis of some of these improvements demanded by artists’ profes¬
sional organizations, such as the Artists Social Security Law (KSVG) of 1981
(effective 1983), improvements in copyright laws since the 1970s, tax relief
measures for artists and other concessions, see Germany. Federal Republic,
Was tut der Bund fur die Kultur? (Bonn, 1985), esp. Anhang I and a more
recent follow-up survey, Marlies Hummel, Die Lage der freien [...] Berufe.
Although artists were already discussing norms for fees (a Gebiihrenordnung
comparable to those of lawyers and doctors) before World War I, the
RWVBKD adopted a draft fee schedule in 1922, supported by diverse visual

163
 white-collar unions logically promoted the interests of the large
number by the late twentieth century, the majority of artists employed
by private firms, e.g., graphics, design, advertising, and the applied arts
generally. Many artists still find them irrelevant and continue to belong
to associations of the older, pre-1933 type. The BBK, mentioned above,
included some 12,000 German artists in 1999. By contrast, the Fach-
gruppe (specialty group) Visual Arts in the Media Union (Industrie-
Gewerkschaft Medieri) had only 1,500 members the same year.178
In comparison to other professions, unionization as a form of
pursuing group goals has not been restricted to artists, even though
they claim to be the most ‘proletarianized’ professionals in terms of
income. Schoolteachers and even many hospital-affiliated physicians
followed musician, theatre performers, and journalists into a union
model of professional representation after the war. To be sure, a
residue of the old belief that a ‘free profession’ is incompatible with
the universal compulsion of collective bargaining exists. But this has
yielded generally to acceptance of the compatibility of professional
and employee status. Belonging to a learned profession, multiple
specialized professional organizations, a bureaucratic corporate
hierarchy, and a labor union is no longer considered unthinkable.
Although artists’ organizations have undoubtedly been somewhat
moie effective since World War II in advancing their members’ inter¬
ests, they appear to bring up the rear in efficacy when compared to
most others. The reasons remain the same as discussed earlier in this
book. The fine arts still constitute the least regulated of the profes¬
sions, and the visual arts are the least regulated within them (musi¬
cians and actors must deal with licenses and union scales, for
example). The gatekeeper functions of admission, education, and aca¬
demic credentialing have hardly become more rigorous or exclusive
over the past century, although a very high percentage of artists now
have had formal higher educational training. Full credentials as a
professional practitioner lead far less automatically than in other fields
to an adequate income. Although their own esteem is an ingredient in

arts organizations of graphics, drawing, sculpture, and architecture. See Kunst

und Wirtschaft. Offizielles Organ der RWVBKD, 2 (1922), No. 16, pp. 2-7.
178 See In der Vielfalt liegt die Kraft,’ http://www.igmedien.de/vielfalt.html, p. 1
‘Struktur,’ http://www.bbk-bundesverband.de/bbk/bbk.htm, p. 2.

164
 determining who is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ artist, others on the non-creative
margins - parts of the Interest Community of Art - such as galerists,
museum curators, and critics also shape the profession. In the sense of
achieving a measure of control over the market for their professional
services, visual artists rank somewhere near the bottom. Even per¬
forming artists have achieved more control over their own working
conditions through their professional organizations.
Yet it would be too harsh to speak of ‘failed professionalization,’
particularly judging by relatively weak professional organizations.
Except tor the unhappy episodes of dictatorial organization from
above in the twentieth century, artists themselves have clung tena¬
ciously to the concept of artistic freedom. The liberty to follow a
‘vocation’ counteracts the compulsions of a successful ‘profession.’
By allowing anybody to declare himself an artist, the profession
implicitly left to the market a large, if not exclusive measure of
defining what art is. This surrender of a mandatory set of educational
qualifications and licenses in the name of the free play of imagination
is as morally high-minded as it appears unselfish. Yet there were also
compensations. The art market, as we have seen, was not a simple or
untrammeled one, as imagined by Adam Smith. From the first it had
obvious structures, involving the wider Interest Community of Art.
To make this point clearer, imagine a community in which
citizens band together to encourage, praise, and purchase the services
of lawyers. For a very long time, and in limited ways even today,
artists could influence their own clientele locally and were grateful to
work with non-artists to structure the market. Only in the shadow of
the increasingly international (and today global) art market, which
escapes the control of locally or nationally organized professionals,
does this former cooperation with ‘layman consumers’ resemble a
sign of weak professionalization.
Probably no professions are more international and cosmopolitan
than the arts. Already a century ago, German lawyers, physicians, and
engineers shared common reference points or fields of discourse
shaped by a common law code, health insurance systems, or industrial
norms. At the same time, Germans artists were calling in vain for the
creation of a national artistic renewal and style, while in reality buyers
(and indeed many artists) were looking increasingly to the inter¬
national art market. The export of German art was already well

165
 enough developed in the late nineteenth century that the arts
community protested and suffered from the introduction of high
(15-30 per cent) tariffs by the USA between 1883 and 1913. The path
to professional success clearly lay thenceforward not in clubbing
together to protect an inadequate local market, but in attempting the
individual leap into a cosmopolitan and finally global one.
We may postpone a full consideration of the strengths and weak¬
nesses of professional organization of artists until a concluding
chapter. Suffice it here to remark that artists did not have problems for
want of professional organization. The relative lack of success of
organized efforts to promote their own interests may lie rather in the
lack of weapons to apply in the social struggle for the distribution of
rewards.

166
Chapter Six
Artists in Society: Myths and Realities

You can name men of all kinds who were not

very gifted. But they achieved greatness, be¬
came ‘geniuses’ (as people say) through prop¬
erties that nobody [...] likes to talk about: they
all had that competent artisan seriousness that
leams first how to make the parts perfect be¬
fore making the whole.
- Friedrich Nietzsche179

The more talented an artist is, the more his

attitude (individuality) will appear alien to the
public. The masses will not understand him,
with the result that his works will be misun¬
derstood and find no buyers.
- Lovis Corinth180

They [artists] are capitalists incarnate. The

manufacturer, for example, produces under¬
wear, and everybody needs underwear. The
artist, on the other hand, sells black squares,
but nobody needs black squares. So the manu¬
facturer can learn from the artist how to sell
things for which there is no demand. [...] The
artist is a marketing hero. He creates some¬
thing for which there is no need.
- Boris Groys181

No profession is so wrapped in myth as the artists’. Perceptions of

other professions are often stereotypical, too. Jokes reveal much about
such perceptions. What is the difference between a surgeon and God?

179 Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 4. Hauptstiick, No. 163

(Stuttgart, 1993), p. 147.
180 Corinth, Das Erlernen der Malerei, p. 8.
181 Boris Groys, ‘Es gibt da keine Grenzen! Die Zukunft der Kiinste,’ Die Zeit, 2
Dec 1999.

167
 God does not think he is a doctor. Why don’t sharks eat lawyers? Pro¬
fessional courtesy. Jokes about artists are relatively rare, a sign that
their professional myths are taken seriously (or at least non-threaten-
ingly) by the public. The component parts of artists’ myths are not the
same everywhere and at all times, and some are contradictory. The
‘starving artist,’ for example, could hardly afford to frequent cafes and
drink away the evenings on a tide of absinthe. Did lone-wolf visionary
‘geniuses’ really give up their Saturday nights to attend the weekly
meetings of artists associations in Germany just for beer and song?
How can we reconcile artists anxieties and infantile rage at rejection
by selection juries with their utopian dreams of art literally reshaping
human society? In what other fields are vanity, posturing, outrageous
behavior or dress, and the production of work that might or might not
be a huge joke considered a part of professionalism? Why do art
schools persist and even flourish, when their professors and students
claim one cannot ‘teach’ or Team’ art?
The ‘myth of the artist’ is a relatively recent construct. The
ancient and medieval worlds respected artists as craftsmen and inte¬
grated them into the surrounding eveiyday society. Before the Renais¬
sance, atelier simply meant ‘workshop.’ Most authors investigating
the rise of artist myths agree that the Italian Renaissance began the
process of heroizing artists. From Giotto on, they began to work out a
personal style, to sign their works (departing from workshop-based
collective ‘authorship’ if not from considerable help from anonymous
assistants), to be feted as visionaries, and to have their biographies
published (from Vasari on).182
Leonardo da Vinci was not the only artist to appear as genius
personified. The uomo universale ideal projected by Renaissance
humanists became flesh in those who could paint, sculpt, design
palaces, churches, or fortresses, and make jewelry with equal ease.
Starting with Italian princes and spreading north, courts began to
compete for the services of famous multi-talented artists. Ultimately,
as we have seen above, royal courts established academies to generate

8. For classical analyses of the ‘myth of the artist’ see Rudolf and Margaret
Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New
ork, 1963) and Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the
Image of the Artist (New Haven, 1979).

168
 their own supply of glorifiers of their deeds. It is no wonder that the
argument tor artists as visionaries and creative geniuses grew out of
this context, it amounted to a professional ideology legitimating the
special status and cost of a stable of court artists.
Yet for all the showmanship and skill (both artistic and courtly)
developed by academic artists before 1800, the myth of the artist
belonged more to the genre of professional secrets and craft lore
common to most learned professions (and indeed to many other
skilled occupations). It took another academic discipline, emerging in
the eighteenth century as "philosophy,’ to create a high-minded role
for artists in the form of aesthetics. From Lord Shaftesbury’s writings
concerning noble sensibility to nature, through Kant’s passages on art
and genius, on through dozens of critics and philosophers of the
Romantic era, Art emerged laden with ideal values. Hence the artist,
seeking to interpret Nature, or the Ideal, or the eternally True (whether
in the classics of antiquity or religious scripture) now faced a role
exalted well above the mere requirements of good craftsmanship.
Artists themselves did not much resist these attempts to heroize
their profession. The concept of inspiration by genius lent an invisible
and mysterious dimension to works of art. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ art could
now be distinguished not only by the skills apparent to any connois¬
seur, but also by judgments of taste made below the threshold of con¬
sciousness (yet often suggested by critics or artists themselves). Just
as ‘prestige’ originally meant disorienting the viewer by (metaphori¬
cally) pressing thumbs into his eyes, the presence of ‘genius’ in an
artwork seems largely a judgment both subjective and collective, as in
a delusion. But without the aesthetic theories denoting ‘genius’ as the
wellspring of ‘true’ creativity, the cult of the artist as hero and seer
would hardly have thrived during and even after the nineteenth cen¬
tury.
According to an outdated textbook truism, the nineteenth century
underwent a crisis of religious faith - one need only mention the name
Darwin - but also reactions to that crisis. While men (and a few
women) of science were increasingly looked to by the public for sec¬
ular answers to the puzzles of the universe, artists (including writers
and composers) were expected to provide non-scientific suggestions
as extensions of or alternatives to faith. Many artists (it is today easy
to forget) made their reputations and livings by dealing in the imagery

169
 of the divine (Biblical or Homeric) or the secular awesome, including
human heroes and heroines, and symbols of new doctrines of faith
(e.g. nationalism, liberalism, or socialism). It seemed only natural for
artists to extend this imagery and symbolism. Just three familiar
artworks spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may serve to
illustrate a new kind of symbolic art: Goya’s ‘Sleep of Reason,’
Munch’s ‘Scream, and Picasso’s ‘Guernica.’ To be sure, these
examples incorporate more a dystopian than utopian vision (and are
perhaps for that reason so well known to the culturally disillusioned
contemporary world). But they show how modem artists could create
powerful new images to interpret the world.
Whether as visionaries to paint the symbols of utopia, or as
Cassandras preaching the mination of all such dreams, artists took on
the role of social critic. Some, indeed most, of this art was ‘apolitical’
in that it did not directly comment on contemporary or historical
events. The Romantics’ exaltation of Nature, though, was a tacit
criticism of the tawdry and unjust activities of its opposite, human
(especially urban) society. The Realists and Impressionists aroused so
much furor and resistance not merely because they painted and
sculpted in unconventional ways, but because their subject matter
often reflected ordinary life, including its suffering and injustice. This
de-idealization of the world appeared to conservative circles as
socially critical, even politically subversive. In this context, Kaiser
Wilhelm’s remarks about modem art being ‘from the gutter’ often get
mentioned in passing but are rarely cited fully, as they deserve:

Art should help to shape the people educationally, to give the lower classes —
after their hard effort and toil - the chance to unlimber with ideas. [...] But if
art, as now often happens, does no more than represent misery as even more
dreadful than it is, then it is sinning against the German people. The mainte¬
nance of ideals is also the greatest cultural task, and if we want to be and remain
a model for other peoples, the entire German nation has to work together, and if
art wants to do its job fully, then it must penetrate into the lowest strata of the
people. It can only do that if art reaches out its hand to the task, if it elevates in¬
stead of descending into the gutter.183

183 Wilhelm II, ‘Die wahre Kunst’ [Speech after the dedication of the Siegesallee
statuary in Berlin, 18 Dec 1901], in Ernst Johann (ed.), Reden des Kaisers
(Munich, 1977), p. 104. For an especially egregious example of bootlicking ap-

170
 It artists were to take on the role ot visionaries for society, then
they would have to reflect the aspirations of their contemporaries to be
effective. It is no accident that historicism, Darwinian evolutionary
theory, a bourgeois liberal taith in progress, and Impressionism all
reached their zenith in the last third of the nineteenth century. By
1900, artistic avant-gardes were proclaiming that each stage of devel¬
opment in human history should have its own style. This could be read
over the entrance to Olbrich’s exposition hall of the Vienna Secession
To each Age, its Art’ - as well as in the directives of Hermann
Muthesius reforming arts-and-crafts education in Prussia.184 How long
an ‘age’ might last was left tacit in 1900 - it presumably lasted longer
than a generation. But by the 1920s an ‘age’ seemed to take on a
new, revolutionary dynamic. The ‘spirit of the age’ (Zeitgeist) was no
longer measured, in artistic terms, in centuries (e.g. quattrocento,
Renaissance, Baroque) but by units of a generation or less.
Those artists and members of the Interest Community of Art who
accepted the notion of stylistic evolution could and did argue that any
departure from canonical traditions in effect ‘expressed’ the spirit
of a new age. Such expressions did not have to link up overtly with
political ideologies, although some artists specifically tried to engage
in propagating them, as we will see later. Mere awareness of the
expanding horizons of a rapidly changing environment could inspire
significant stylistic experiments. The flow of artifacts from sub-
Saharan Africa and Asia into Europe in the wake of nineteenth-
century imperialist exploration and trade, for example, spurred many
artists to rethink the fundamentals of symbolic representation. The
invocation of ‘primitive’ or at least alien art forms, at a time of
widespread European and American acceptance of a divinely or
biologically determined cultural superiority, affronted the public.
Artists who did so were themselves ridiculed as ‘Fauves’ (wild ones)
at the beginning of the twentieth century. The game of identifying,
denouncing, labeling, and - ultimately - marketing new artistic move¬
ments was off and running.

proval of the Kaiser’s ‘patriotic’ tastes, see Georg Malkowsky, Die Kunst im
Dienste der Staatsidee (Berlin, 1912)
184 Hermann Muthesius, Kultur und Kunst. Gesammelte Aufsatze iiber kiinst-
lerische Fragen in Deutschland (Jena, 1904), esp. pp. 1-38.

171
 Yet we find only limited evidence of artists’ affiliating them¬
selves with specific ideologies or political programs, let alone revolu¬
tionary ones, before World War I. Many artists might live on
proletarian incomes, as we have seen, but they did not therefore adopt
revolutionary socialism or anarchism. Nor, in fairness, did all ‘real’
proletarians. War and revolution on an unprecedented scale from 1914
forward did drive a few artists to denounce reigning social ideologies,
as did the Dadaists, and to make propaganda for revolutionary change.
Some of this art — one only need mention Georg Grosz or some of the
brilliant collage posters of John Heartfield - is so often reproduced
that we almost take it as representative. But for every ‘revolutionary’
partisan in the ateliers there was another yearning for a restoration of
order, such as the Nazi sympathizer Emil Nolde or the protofascist
Futurists in Italy. Symptomatically, perhaps, the ASSO (Assoziation
revolutionarer bildender Kiinstler Deutschlands or Association of
German Revolutionary Visual Artists), founded in 1928 and close to
the German Communist Party, could claim only 500 members at its
peak in the Depression year 1932, and Dix, Grosz, and Heartfield
among the few relatively prominent participants at one time or
another.
For each of those committed (however abstractly) to radical
political and social transformation, dozens of others remained essen¬
tially apolitical. These masses of artists might, like other educated
professionals, have their hopes raised by some historical turning point,
like revolutions or seizures of power by fascists or communists. But it
would be misleading to read into such vague and situation-bound
hopes a consistent ‘artistic’ ideology, let alone a party-political prefer¬
ence. Contemporary survey literature185 supports the generalization
that artists generally do not identify with right-wing politics and tend
to feel rather ‘left, where the heart is.’ But that could be said of the
intellectual strata of Europe generally since World War II. Although
no reliable surveys exist for the period before World War I, one could
assume from the tone of the artistic professional press that most artists
remained loyal if sometimes critical citizens, fundamentally accepting

185 See Thum, Kiinstler in der Gesellschaft, p. 79.

172
 the existing social order. Although D. D. Egbert186 could fill hundreds
of pages of his excellent study with examples of‘social radicalism in
the arts’ over the last two centuries, a parallel work devoted to social
conformism in the arts would take dozens of volumes.
The same can be said for the myth of Bohemianism. Popularized
by Puccini s opera and Murger’s novel depicting cheap, cold garrets,
fiscal irresponsibility, moral laxity, and disease in Parisian artistic
circles, La boheme carries an enduring stereotype. In its Parisian
setting, bohemianism was a synonym for ‘artistic, youthful, un¬
attached, inventive, or suspect’ and the opposite of ‘bourgeois.’187
The term originally referred to gypsies, another tribe whose alien
habits, dress, speech, poverty, and tendency to change addresses often
aroused bourgeois suspicion.188 Compared to other educated pro¬
fessionals, as we have seen, artists did not usually start earning a
bourgeois income soon after concluding their studies. They often
sought accommodation in low-rent areas of urban art centers because
of their need for studio space. Unlike other professionals they often
congregated in certain parts of a city, such as Montmartre in Paris or
Schwabing in Munich. In such a milieu artists could pop around the
comer for a meal or some drinks in their working clothes, which
would likely be shabby and paint-stained. Some artists, perhaps as a
way of distinguishing themselves from a crowd of rivals, perhaps
because of a professional penchant for costume and design, dressed
outlandishly. As the biographies of many artists also attest, they
sometimes struck up liaisons with members of the opposite sex,
although more likely with emancipated fellow artists than dance-hall
girls and other members of the demi-monde.
All these phenomena might offend bourgeois bluenoses, who
professed shock or bemusement at such departures from propriety.

186 Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism in the Arts: Western Europe. A Cul¬
tural History from the French Revolution to 1968 (New York, 1970).
187 For the origins and development of Bohemianism in France, see Jerrold Seigel,
Bohemian Paris. Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-
1930 (New York, 1986). The citation is from p. 5.
188 Parisian artists led the way after 1830; they ‘became fascinated with gypsies
and transformed them into a mythic prototype of the social outcast.’ Marilyn
Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians. The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-
Century France (Ann Arbor, MI, 1985), p. 5.

173
 One can understand how the impression could arise, especially in
neighborhoods close to major art schools, full of students and young,
single graduates, that most artists were ‘Bohemians.’ The myth has
been nurtured, also, by successive generations of artists as well as
non-artistic groups who have reinforced their group identity by
adopting ‘Bohemian’ life-styles or symbols.I<sg Enthusiasm for nudism
by many German avant-garde artists around 1900 or the embrace by
‘beat artists of drugs and Zen Buddhism a half-century later are good
examples. Indeed, by the 1960s the unconventional styles and dress of
many artists (especially such popular performers as the Beatles in their
psychedelic phase) had become the norm for emulation by a whole
generation of young people. To the horror of ‘square’ parents from
Berkeley to Berlin, ‘Bohemia’ had moved into their children’s rooms.
And yet bourgeois fear/fascination in the face of ‘artists’ has been a
recurring theme in German literature from Goethe’s Werther through
Mann’s Death in Venice on to much of Thomas Bernhard’s opus.
Bohemianism’ has also proven useful. For unrecognized visual
artists themselves, conformity to reigning styles of anti-bourgeois
dress, diurnal rhythms, use of alcohol or drugs, and even jargon can
provide a comforting sense of solidarity in the face of a hostile or in¬
different world. For that world, ‘Bohemianism’ could provide an ex¬
ample of ‘degeneracy,’ of squalor, addiction, perhaps even ‘madness’
as a result of abandoning sensible bourgeois ambitions about work and
family. Like most stereotypes, it has provided generations of on¬
lookers with a substitute for thinking. What is art for, and what do
artists do? It’s all a joke, or a scam - just look at these work-shirking,
unbathed, self-indulgent Bohemians. Because of the ‘artist’s freedom’
and indulgence nevertheless accorded those claiming to be artists,
adopting this pose was often the only ‘artistic’ thing about many of
these figures, a way of identifying themselves as real artists both to
themselves and the people they are scandalizing.

189 How little the ‘scene’ can have to do with serious art production is well docu¬
mented in the interviews with denizens of former East Berlin’s fashionable
‘artists’ quarter’ and most recent target of ‘gentrification,’ Prenzlauer Berg, in
Baibara Felsmann and Annett Groschner (eds.), Durchganszimmer Prenzlauer
Berg. Eine Berliner Kunstlersozialgeschichte in Selbstauskiinften (Berlin,

174
 The main problem with the Bohemian myth is that it reflects only
a fraction of reality. While some ‘Bohemians’ were artists, most artists
were not ‘Bohemians.’ The historical record shows artists came
mostly from the bourgeoisie and aspired to live normal middle-class
lives. Paintings and photographs of artists partaking in common
activities, fiom judging works for exhibitions to taking meals together
almost invariably show men and women indistinguishable from other
bourgeois contemporaries. The vast majority of artists wanted nothing
to do with the avant-garde, nor to epater la bourgeoisie and con¬
sciously scandalize middle-class people, because that meant driving
away some of their best customers. As we have seen above, the art
leagues embracing local art lovers and promoters comprised members
of local professional, financial, and governing elites. Respectability
held a high value in these circles (as also in the domain of public
commissions and museum acquisitions). Even avant-garde artists who
gained recognition did not remain long in cheap, shabby studios, but
moved upscale to living and working spaces where a wealthy collector
would feel comfortable during a visit. While even Pablo Picasso
stayed in the infamous bateau /avoir, the shabby Montmartre
laundry building during his first few years in Paris, thereafter he
lived and worked in perfectly respectable apartments and often
dressed in three-piece suits.
If the artist as Bohemian belongs largely to myth, the artist as
visionary contains a grain of truth. If for no other reason than their
training and metier, artists dealt constantly with imagination. Artists
do not, strictly speaking, reproduce reality as the camera supposedly
does. Even the most realistic painting refines and recomposes what
chaotic nature offers the eye, often charging everyday objects with
symbolic meaning. Choices of subject matter, style, and mood could
express a whole new view of life. This was true even before the ad¬
vent of non-representational art around 1900. From the stonebreakers
and gleaners of Corot and Millet to Leibl’s peasant women or Lieber-
mann’s Dutch orphans, even paintings one could call Impressionist
upset contemporaries with a view of the world obviously different
from that inhabited by the stylized, saccharine nymphs and goddesses
of such academic stars as Bouguereau, or the glorious battlefield
scenes of Anton von Werner. The visions later offered by the Fauves,
Cubists, Expressionists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Futurists, and so on

175
 literally constructed the world according to new ideas about the
physical universe and feelings rather than what the eye ‘perceives’ in
nature. So alarming were these visions, so threatening to the social
order, that they provoked denunciations as outgrowths of mental
illness and, in Nazi Germany at least, confiscation as ‘degenerate’ and
dangerous. One could hardly cite stronger evidence of artists offering
- even in forms not clearly consistent with contending political
ideologies - alternate visions than the repeated attempts by authorities
to censor, ban, or exile them, seize and destroy their work, and, if all
else fails, kill them. Still, the aura of martyrdom and the heroic status
of victim belonged to a minority of artists. The majority continued, at
least through the 1960s, to share more conventional visions and to
cooperate, however grudgingly, with their political masters. In this, it
must be said, they resembled most other learned professional groups,
as well.
Why have so many artists since the 1960s - and in retrospect,
avant-gardes going back to the late nineteenth century - wanted to
appear visionary or even prophetic? One factor is surely the pressure
to produce novelty. As several astute sociologists and historians of art
have pointed out,190 the search for new styles, media, messages, iconic
signs, or artistic ‘personalities’ dominates and drives the contem¬
porary art market, to the extent that today’s sensation is tomorrow’s
old hat.
A familiar example might be cited in the career of Josef Beuys
(1921-86), arguably Germany’s best-known postwar artist, but also
arguably a prime symbol of deprofessionalization in the arts. Beuys’
work included happenings, sit-ins, installations, his own invariable
costume (including old hat), political manifestos, and a number of
autobiographically-keyed materials as good as his signature, including
felt, fat, and blackboards. Beuys managed to catch the eye of the
media for over two decades, an eternity by the standards (‘fifteen
minutes of fame’) pronounced by his contemporary Andy Warhol.
None of these individual ingredients of a novel ‘brand’ was really
new, either. Perhaps the most telling difference between Duchamp’s
signed urinal (‘Fountain,’ 1917) and Beuys’ signed ‘readymades’ of

190 For an excellent recent analysis, see Raymonde Moulin, L ’artiste, /’institution
et le marche (Paris, 1997).

176
 the 1960s and 1970s is that the latter had entered the mainstream
rather than being a conscious provocation and send-up of the conven¬
tional art market. It is worth noting, too, that Duchamp did not, as did
Beuys, achieve a professorship at one of Europe’s most prestigious art
academies. But it was symptomatic of Beuys’s deprofessionalizing
tendencies that he provoked his own dismissal from such a prestigious
position and turned it into a coup from the viewpoint of fame and
recognition by the art market.
Beuys’ work is still being interpreted and argued about. Highly
personal and idiosyncratic, self-styled ‘actions’ (performance art) and
installations, often filling large spaces with recurrent objects from the
artist’s life, including his being shot down in World War II and nursed
back to health by Crimean Tatars with such crude aids as felt and fat.
Despite his eccentricity and often misunderstood manifestoes and
statements ( Everyman is an artist’) Beuys underwent a traditional
Gymnasium education (intending to become a doctor) with Abitur,
then training in the postwar Diisseldorf Academy (1947-51), where he
was also later a professor (1961-72). He joined or co-founded several
organizations, including the international Fluxus (from 1960), devoted
to erasing boundaries between visual art on the one hand and all the
other arts and well as life on the other; a student political party (1967)
and the Green Party. But Beuys was better at visions and manifestos
than political leadership and ultimately remained on the margins of
such groups.
In an era of student protest and reform demands, Beuys
repeatedly encouraged students rejected for admission by the academy
to occupy its administrative offices and brought the institution to the
edge of ruin. Although student protests were common all over
Germany at the time, Beuys was dismissed from his post in 1972
(incidentally by a socialist North Rhine-Westphalia state minister,
Johannes Rau, later elected President of the Federal Republic). Beuys’
mistrust of establishment institutions led him to found his own
‘international university’ in Diisseldorf.

177
 As a shaman, tireless performer,191 and enigmatic speaker, Beuys
became world famous and his art with him. Understood as a seeker of
redemption and resurrection in his prime, he has also drawn accusa¬
tions that his art actually carries on some dark strains of the Nazi
past.19- Most critics agree that Beuys’ life and art (as he preached)
formed a unit.19’ In almost every way he defied the aspirations and
concerns of professionalized artists.
We should also not overlook economic motives associated with
avant-garde innovations. There are many conflicting definitions of
avant-garde art, ranging from the aesthetic to the xenophobic. What
most experts can agree on, though, is the function of innovation in the
North Atlantic (and most recently, global) art market in the past cen¬
tury. What began as experiments, sometimes coupled with a
‘Bohemian’ desire to shock conventional sensibilities (epater la
bourgeoisie), often fulfilled one of the developing needs of the emerg¬
ing entertainment industry for ever more outrageous novelty. The need
tor publicity beyond the art world became a feature of the marketing
of avant-garde art. With the acceptance as art of photography,
cinemato- and videography, and computer-generated imagery, the
possibilities for innovation and the developing artists’ visions seem
almost limitless today.

191 For a catalogue of photographs and descriptions of Beuys’s ephemeral ‘actions’

(his version of happenings), see Uwe M. Schneede, Joseph Beuys: Die Aktionen
(Ostfildem-Ruit, 1994).
192 Frank Giesecke and Alberto Markert, Flieger, Fliz und Vaterland. Eine er-
weiterte Beuys-Biographie (Berlin, 1996) find Beuys’s outlook based in right-
wing ideology with echoes of blood-and-soil and volkisch (i.e. racist-populist)
identity. An ‘anti-bourgeois habitus’ allegedly masked these throwbacks from
Beuys’s early experiences in the Hitler Youth and military service. (See pp. 12,
216.) See also the refreshingly hard-nosed estimation in Lange, Joseph Beuys.
193 For an example, see Joseph Beuys: zeige deine iVundc: ’ Katalog der Aus-
stellung im Kunstforum in der Fussgdngerunterfuhrung Maximilianstrasse-
/Altstadtring in Munchen 1976, 2 vols. (Munich, 1976-80), which details the
‘Environment’ placed in a pedestrian underpass inviting the public to ‘show
your wound.’ The objects installed by Beuys all had some symbolic connection
with his life (or at least the symbols of his life-myth), including medical
stretchers, lamps smeared in fat, tools, boxes of fat, blackboards, and Italian
newspapers. The installation became controversial and notorious, how-ever,
chiefly when it was learned that city funds to the tune of DM 270,000 had been
spent to buy it for the municipal gallery in the Lenbachhaus.

178
 Most avant-garde artists (like Beuys) typically scorned profes¬
sional associations as well as other political and social ties to the
broader mban, middle-class societies from which they largely sprang.
Flirtations with anti-establishment ideologies aside, most avant-garde
artists in twentieth century Germany (as elsewhere) were socially an¬
archistic while being aesthetically elitist.154 Their universal prophetic
visions, rambling or mysterious manifestoes, and appeals to examples
outside the boundaries of contemporary Western civilization (e.g. to
primitive tribes, dreams, childlike viewpoints) often drew denuncia¬
tions, including — even in France — charges of being unpatriotic.195
(This is not to deny some avant-garde artists have been dedicated po¬
litical partisans, ranging all over the ideological spectrum, from Georg
Grosz to Emil Nolde.) Yet for the increasingly speculative contempo¬
rary market, there seems no such thing as bad publicity.
Establishing the ‘rarity’ necessary for ‘marketability’ via trade¬
mark eccentricities became a necessity for most successful avant-
garde artists. The need to make the artist, not the artwork, into the
center of attention could also result in the defeat of the artwork in an
unequal rivalry. One of the enduring market values of art has been the
relative permanence (under proper care) of the ‘unique’ artwork. The
appearance of artists bent on destroying their own works (e.g. Tin¬
guely’s machine sculptures designed to self-destruct or his dynamiting
of others) merely points out the relatively ‘irreplaceable singularity’ of
the avant-garde auteur}96
The ultimate triumph of the market even over the highly-mar¬
keted avant-garde artist may be seen in the development of postwar
Germany s contemporary art exposition documenta over the years.
Starting in the 1950s as a way to show the public what Germany has
been missing during the years of Hitler art-dictatorship, the show
(held every four to five years) evolved by the 1980s into one that in
principle refused artists it had once shown another chance to show

194 See, for example, the biographies summarized in Theda Shapiro, Painters and
Politics. The European Avant-Garde and Society, 1900-1925 (New York
1976).
195 See Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde
and the First World War, 1914-1945 (Princeton, 1989).
196 Dario Gamboni, Un iconoclisme moderne. Theorie etpratiques contemporaines
du vandalisme artistique (Zurich, 1983), p. 86.

179
later work. This represented the exact opposite of practice in nine¬
teenth-century salons, where prizewinners from previous shows were
usually accorded special privileges (jury-free submissions, for exam¬
ple).197 One might here distinguish between the ‘authentic’ early and
the ‘decadent’ recent neo-avant-garde, typified by

the belief that the artist’s charismatic publicity image is more important than his
actual work [...], to the extent that the image has come to be regarded cynically
- without moral embarrassment or intellectual irony - as ‘the central document’
in his career.198

The vision that artists were supposed to provide society has thus
changed over time. Few today would argue that they interpret the Sub¬
lime, reflecting only the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Some still
argue that art is a realm unto itself, beyond questions of social utility -
ars gratia artis. Particularly since the advent of non-representational
art, many artists hope they provide signs and symbols for their age,
from the bleak formalism of Mondrian to expressive splashings of
Jackson Pollock (‘Jack the Dripper’). This argument certainly gets
validated by the vast and lucrative market for art applied to ad¬
vertising. The new widespread practice of setting aside a small per¬
centage of building costs to commission artworks in public spaces has
provided endless examples of stimulation and controversy among the
taxpaying ‘clients.’ Yet public reactions often range from the negative
to the amused. Studies of many contemporary developed societies
show that art museums and public galleries draw their visitors almost
exclusively from the educated middle class, indicating that the masses
of taxpayers subsidizing them lack a desire to use them.199 At the

197 See Mythos documenta. Ein Bilderbuch zur Kunstgeschichte [Kunstforum Inter¬
national, vol. 49] (Cologne, 1982).See also the amusing critique by the brilliant
political poster-artist Klaus Staeck, Befragung der documenta oder die Kunst
soil schon bleiben (Gottingen, 1972), in which he uses such terms as ‘super¬
market of art’ and ‘fair of vanities’ for the controversial German quinquennial
show (p. BIO).
198 Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 20-

199 See the pathbreaking work of Pierre Bourdieu, L’amour de l’art, les musees
d'art europeenes (Paris, 1969), translated as The Love of Art. European Art Mu¬
seums and their Publics (Stanford, 1990).

180
 opposite extreme of arguments about artists’ impact on society, some
have begun to claim that artists’ chronic underemployment and
autonomous life-styles may foreshadow the life and work styles of an
emerging IT (information technology) society.200
Providing a new career model for twenty-first-century profes¬
sionals is a far cry from the dominant theme heard when artists’ im¬
pact on society has been discussed during most of the twentieth:
alienation. The term implies that artists have little impact or even
meaningful contact with the world around them. On one hand, the
typical citizen is less likely to have personal contact with the artist
whose works decorate his home or office than with his physician,
lawyer, pastor, or teacher.
On the other, measuring the social utility of art remains very elu¬
sive. One cannot assess the effect of the presence of art in the same
way as a successful cure from a disease, a wrong righted, or a degree
earned at university. (Yet considerable evidence shows the therapeutic
effect ot art on the emotionally disturbed.) Not even penny-pinching
philistine politicians who begrudge taxpayer subsidies to the arts
argue that art is inherently worthless.
Part of the problem of assessing the social impact of artists is
conceptual. We tend to think of artists as individuals (part of the he¬
roic myth), then try to measure how ‘Picasso’ or ‘Kandinsky’ affected
his world. If instead we think of the whole profession, conceptualizing
answers becomes less daunting. Remove all artists, and there would be
no advertising, no television, no music, theater, or film. There would
be no novels, poems, or plays, not even soap operas. If one distin¬
guishes between ‘creative’ and ‘performing’ artists in the broadest
sense, the former make up a small minority. But the majority involved
in performing or marketing art, teaching it, distributing it, and other¬
wise being involved in it professionally makes up large numbers and
contributes significantly to the gross domestic product. In the field of

200 Such is the thesis of Robke, Kunst und Arbeit, p. 216. ‘Artists are examples in
both a positive and negative sense. Negative, because they always had a special
individual status in modem industrial societies and will be more seriously
threatened by the progressive deregulation of work than other professions.
Positive, because out of this precarious situation they have invented and fleshed
out a life-style allowing them remarkable artistic impact despite all economic
obstacles.’

181
 music alone, all forms of music production in the German Federal Re¬
public contributed 1.6 per cent of GDP in 1981, for example.201
When discussing artists in society, one must also consider the
status of artists. As we have seen, the inherited social status, as meas¬
ured by their parents’ social standing, does compare roughly with that
of other learned professions. Although the state of statistics allows no
systematic comparisons over time, one can generalize that graduates
of law faculties came from the higher end of the middle class (espe¬
cially the administrative and educated elites) in Germany; graduates of
medical schools did, too, but with more children of the propertied
middle class. When one compares the social origins of engineers and
schoolteachers, however, one has the impression they are similar to
that of artists: a mixed spectrum reaching from the Bildungs- and Be-
sitzburgertum down into the artisanal bourgeoisie. Before the effective
upgrading of applied-arts education to university level in the second
quarter of the twentieth century, many ‘artists’ were still regarded as
mere artisans,’ not exactly the same class as judges, civil servants,
lawyers, or professors. All that is being suggested here is that any
lower level of social status perceived when comparing artists to so¬
cially high-ranked learned professionals (notably those with legal
training) may derive in part from the relatively humble rank of their
parents, at the ‘tradesman and artisan’ end of the bourgeoisie.
Another reason for blurred social status, at least in a title¬
conscious European setting, remains the sponginess of educational
qualifications among artists. Educational certification is still highly re¬
garded today in Germany, as in most of Europe, despite decades of
social leveling and the explosion of the population earning such quali¬
fications. Yet many trained artists lack higher degrees of certificates of
educational ‘completion,’ and the Abitur or equivalent is still not a
precondition for entering art academies. To be sure, there are certifi¬
cates for completion of certain specialized programs and for arts
teachers, and of course university degrees in art history, musicology,
and similar related disciplines. But Germany lacks even the American

201 Karla Fohrbeck and Andreas J. Wiesand, ‘Strukturen des Musiklebens,’ in

Fohrbeck and Wiesand (eds.), Musik, Statistik, Kulturpolitik (Cologne, 1982), p.
33. The number of West Germans earning their living in some connection with
music alone was estimated at 225,000 for the same year, out of a population of
roughly 60 million.

182
 M.F.A. or the completion certificates now offered by French art
schools. For many Gennan artists, ‘completing their studies’ after
years at an art academy without a ‘final degree’ constitutes an anom¬
aly in a credential-conscious society and contributes to some diffuse¬
ness in artists’ social standing under the circumstances. The fact that
98 per cent of Germany’s visual artists in the 1990s studied at art
schools or some other higher educational institutions still does not
count much in public perceptions about their academic qualifica¬
tions.202
Based on some of the first sophisticated polling of artists (still a
fledgling subspecialty in the 1970s) one can entertain the idea that the
artist’s role in contemporary society may actually entail the risk of
status loss over a lifetime. As students, artists are still treated as privi¬
leged and promising. As young artists they are treated with skepti¬
cism, since the market, rather than objective criteria, often withholds
its judgment on the value of their work. A ‘young artist’ enters this
market at about 30 in today’s Germany (a bit younger a century ago).
It takes a decade or more to establish a reputation. At 45, however,
survey research indicates contemporary artists beginning to report a
decline in their income from artwork. By 65, many worry that their
unsold oeuvre will become a burden to their children or other heirs.203
In a market conditioned to grasp at novelty, an ‘old artist’ has often
come to be socially discarded before retirement age.
It may be that the profession of artist has changed from one of
upward social mobility to downward. In the decades after 1900 many
a son and daughter of the artisan class rose in status by attending an
art school, and enrollments boomed. Indeed, for women before their
access to art academies and universities, attendance at the socially
unprestigious Kunstgewerbeschulen offered such rare opportunity that
the early women’s divisions of these colleges could seem bastions of
social privilege. The first class of women at the Saxon Kunstgewerbe-
schule in Dresden in 1906 consisted, for example, of 31 students with

202 According to a 1998 survey, 59 per cent of the visual artists had attended an art
academy or school, another 23 per cent a specialty college, and another 13 per
cent some other type of college. Only a quarter reported themselves chiefly self-
taught as artists. See Marlies Hummel, ‘Lebt sich’s mit der Kunst allein?’,
Kulturpolitik, 3 (1999), pp. 7-10.
203 Robke, Kunst undArbeit, pp. 97-8.

183
 an average age of 25, largely from professional families (doctors, law¬
yers, judges, civil servants, and pastors) or other socially prominent
backgrounds (military officers, businessmen).204
Another upturn in art-school enrollments in the 1980s drew in a
largely middle-class student body. Studies in the 1990s indicate,
though, that incomes of these graduates lag far behind those of other
university-level professionals. Those of independent (‘free’) visual
artists lag even further behind their colleagues in the performing
arts. 5 The disparity between artists’ professional training and in¬
comes, while nothing new, seems shocking in an era that has brought
prosperity to other professionals (and indeed to ordinary laborers).206
What makes the arts professions so hard to classify socially is the
persistence of different levels of income among practitioners and the
fact that they are the only ones with a minority (albeit a large one) of
Tull-time’ practitioners (whether as independent contractors or em¬
ployees). In late twentieth-century capitalist societies, income has be¬
come a more significant marker of social status than ever. It thus does
not help artists social standing that they have to jobben (a new Ger¬
man word), i.e. to ‘moonlight’ in low-paid job such as waiting tables
or renovating kitchens to make ends meet.
Another factor determining the status of artists in society in¬
volves gender. At the end of the nineteenth century, what had been an
almost exclusively male profession began to include significant num¬
bers of women. Since women were consistently underpaid and under¬
recognized even when doing the same work as men, the ‘feminization’
of professional groups tended to pull down their statistical averages of
income and status. In the visual arts, as the percentage of women has
increased (a disproportionate number of them unmarried), so has the
number of part-time and low-income artists. Women consistently

204 Letter from Kunstgewerbeschule Director Lossow to Interior Minister, 18 Jan

1907, Sachsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, and III.3.6. Ministerium fur
Volksbildung, 17984, Kunstgewerbeschule Schiilerinnenabteilung, 1899-1915.
205 Ibid., p. 94; Haak/Schmid, Arbeitsmarkte, pp. 22-A.
206 According to 1992 income tax figures, only one per cent of German artists - of
all types, not just visual - earned over DM 200,000 (about $67,000)- 83 per
cent reported less than DM 30,000 ($10,000); about 20 per cent reported a net
negative income from artistic work. See Robke, Kunst und Arbeit, p. 100. By
way of comparison, the average net income of physicians in Germany was close
to the top one per cent of artists.

184
 comprise a disproportionate percentage of artists working under the
most adverse conditions.207
Like certain other highly ‘feminized’ professions (e.g. nursing,
school teaching) the fine arts offer a comparatively low threshold of
educational entry. More than many others, the fine arts also offer
women a ‘ladylike’ profession (a perception starkly contrasting to the
‘bohemian’ image cultivated by many non- or would-be artists) con¬
sistent with the ‘cultivated’ values of bourgeois homes. On the other
hand, once in the profession, its women members encountered hos¬
tility from males that started as overt during most of the nineteenth
century only to become more subtle, but still entrenched, in the twen¬
tieth.
As noted earlier, women found acceptance in Kunstgewerbe-
schulen decades before their admission to academies. Once inside,
however, they usually encountered resistance and discrimination from
some part ot the faculty and at least some resentment from many male
students. Even very progressive arts schools of the 1920s, such as the
Bauhaus, left distinct traces of an unequal treatment of male and fe¬
male students.208 Once out of school, women artists have constantly

207 The number and relative percentage of professional visual artists who were
women have grown enormously over the last century. From the time of the
1895 German census, when women constituted a mere five per cent of the
9,400 counted, to the 1907 census, when they comprised 13 per cent of 14,000
artists, women’s share varies with the political and economic climate of the
years between the world wars and immediately after the second. By the 1980s,
some studies claimed ever-increasing unemployment among women artists,
who had come to form a third of all working artists. By 1995, their proportion
had risen to 45 per cent. In contrast, women made up only 35 per cent of artists
of all kinds, including literary and performing. See Gunther Salje et al.,
Bildende Kiinstlerinnen heute. Lebenslage und Selbstverstandnis (Frankfurt/M.,
1992), pp. 11-13 and Robke, Kunst und Arbeit, p. 95. By way of comparison,
of the more than 12,000 visual artists belonging to the French Maison des Art¬
istes in 1996, women constituted only 29 per cent (slightly more than their pro¬
portion among authors). Within the various branches of the visual arts,
however, women constituted 87 per cent of textile designers but only 26 and 24
per cent respectively of painters and sculptors. See Vesillier-Ressi, La condition
d’artiste, pp. 349-51.
208 Despite its egalitarian aspirations, the Bauhaus still counted large percentages
of its female students in traditional ‘women’s specialties’ such as textiles and
relatively few in those traditionally dominated by males before 1918. See Anja

185
 complained about inferior opportunities to reach the market. Many
studies have indeed documented their disproportional under¬
representation in all kinds of art shows. Partly to remedy a situation
they shared with male artists, partly because of hostility from male-
dominated professional organizations, they resorted in many cases to
founding or joining separate organizations for women artists, some of
which (like GEDOK, the Gesellschaft deutscher und osterreichischer
Kiinstlerinnen or Society of German and Austrian Women Artists)
still thrive today.
It the fine arts - and especially the visual arts - went from being
a highly male preserve to a highly ‘feminized’ profession just over the
last century, we cannot document any major changes in ethnic re¬
cruitment. At first glance, the very question of ethnic origin of artists
might seem as irrelevant as socioeconomic origins. Surely all that
matters for art is talent, and surely this is randomly distributed through
the population. So, at least, runs an assumption shared by artists and
their public alike. But a glance at other professional groups indicates,
for example, a certain correlation between social standing of the pro¬
fessional group and the social background of its membership. So it is
with ethnicity, here taken to mean narrowly national and religious
identity.
The fine arts properly enjoy a reputation for cosmopolitanism.
The ‘Gothic’ style praised by German nationalists as a pure product of
the national genius turned out (with scholarly research in the new field
of art history) to have come from France. Even in the Middle Ages,
artists moved about to carry out commissions. True, the French Acad¬
emy of Fine Arts did not admit foreigners throughout most of its his-
toiy. That did not prevent its professors from giving private lessons to
them, however. Art schools in Central Europe did admit foreigners
and seemingly favored international exchange. (The history of Ameri¬
can art in the nineteenth century would have looked very different
without the Diisseldorf Academy, for example.) While graduate phy¬
sicians, lawyers, clergymen, or engineers rarely studied abroad after
completing higher education, foreign study definitely belonged to the
aspirations and achievements of many arts graduates. Paris and Rome

Baumhotf, Zwischen Berufung und Beruf: Frauen am Bauhaus,’ in Muysers

(ed.), Profession ohne Tradition, pp. 113-20.

186
 counted as the principal foreign centers for Germans. In turn, German
art cities such as Dresden and Munich attracted conspicuous numbers
of foreign students from further north, east, and south.
In Germany one can also discern a long-standing disproportion
between the ‘confessional’ (religious-denominational) composition of
the general population and that of the learned professions. With the
exception of clergy and schoolteachers in certain parts of the country,
the Catholic population has generally been underrepresented in
German professional life. After the removal of civil restrictions by the
German Empire and Weimar Republic, German Jews gained a stun¬
ningly disproportional presence in the ‘free’ professions generally,
while continuing (as elsewhere) to face unofficial barriers in public
and private employment. Jews later paid the price for this partial suc¬
cess by being barred from professional practice, public employment,
and ultimately life itself by the Hitler regime
The loud and angry charges by antisemites to the contrary not¬
withstanding, there is little evidence of a significant ‘overrepresenta¬
tion’ of Jews in the visual arts even during the 1920s. Although Jews
reached prominence - for example, Max Liebermann was chosen
President of the Prussian Academy of Arts - they did not constitute a
significant minority of visual artists. Somewhat more visible in the
musical, performing, and literary arts, Jews nevertheless did not attain
even here their prominence in the fields of medicine and law.
If there was also little impetus from Jewish religious traditions to
attract German Jews into the visual arts, there was a strong urge
among German Catholics. The unbroken tradition of religious art
alone, amplified by the strong emphasis on the visual in Catholic doc¬
trine since the age of Baroque, set Catholic Germany off from the
more austere and even icon-suspicious Protestant tradition. As one
would expect, recruitment into the arts followed regional patterns to
some degree, with artists trained in Bavaria, for example, coming
from mostly Catholic backgrounds.
Another factor in the artist-society nexus was geography. In no
other learned profession did practitioners concentrate so densely in a
few urban areas. By origin, artists appear to have been bom in all
kinds of places, down to villages. But where most lived and practiced
as adults came down to a relatively small number of cities known as
art centers. In the twentieth century as in the nineteenth, a few urban

187
 centers provided a home for the majority of professionals. In the cases
of France and Britain, the number of cities has been very small indeed,
with Paris and London hugely dominant. In Germany, the lack of po¬
litical unity and a single capital city over many centuries promoted the
fragmentation (some would use the more positive term federalization)
of cultural activity among several regional centers, a tradition not even
Hitler’s centralizing dictatorship could efface.
Let us look briefly at some examples of these very different
urban art centers. We might begin with the preeminent German ‘art
city’ during much of the nineteenth century. Munich, the old Bavarian
capital, did not even have an art academy until 1808, but the ruling
Wittelsbach dynasty had for centuries patronized artists of all kinds
and maintained a large family collection of art. Successive members
of the (now royal) dynasty pursued lavish art and architectural projects
in the nineteenth century to offset Bavaria’s relatively small weight as
a military and economic power (at least compared to Prussia and
Austria) and thereby assert at least an unequal cultural leadership in
Germany. The personal patronage of Ludwig I, even after being de¬
posed in 1848, or that of ‘mad’ Ludwig II (although more significant
for architecture and Wagner’s music than the visual arts) are well-
known. Less widely known is that the Prince Regent Luitpold (1886—
1912) was ‘in cash terms Munich’s most important collector’209 and a
major patron of local, living artists, outstripping publicly-funded pur¬
chasers. With its urban building projects, museums (the 1830 Glypto-
thek and 1836 Pinakothek were the first public museums of their kind
in Germany), art and applied art schools, first national (1858) and in¬
ternational (from 1863) exhibitions held mostly in its version of
London s Crystal Palace, the Glaspalast, Munich managed to become
the acknowledged premier art center of German-speaking Europe
during the last half of the nineteenth century.
Munich s artist community was the first major one to take over
the task of organizing public salons and international exhibitions and
had the highest per-capita population of visual artists in any Central
European city. Perhaps because of its long-term attractiveness to art¬
ists and success in marketing their work, Munich also had a thriving
branch of the national Kiinstlergenossenschaft (ADKG) as well as the

209 Lenman, Artists and Society, p. 154.

188
 first serious split of such as organization over ‘broad’ vs. ‘elite’ exhi¬
bition and jurying policies, leading to the first Sezessiori in Central
Europe (1892). Revolts of the artistic ‘rank and file’ recurred in
Munich against such dominant figures as the academy directors Peter
Cornelius and Wilhelm Kaulbach, but even some of the rebel clubs,
such as the Allotria, chaired from 1879 on by the enormously success¬
ful portrait painter Franz Lenbach, would themselves become objects
of scorn as ‘establishment bastions.’ As would many of its imitators,
whether called by the same name or others, the Munich Secession was
essentially a separate exhibiting society. It ‘repudiated the democratic
ethic of the Genossenschaft, frankly stating that fairness and equality
for all were not its governing principles.’210
The situation of Munich artists did not improve as a result of or¬
ganizational splits and stylistic ferment. A century after the creation of
the Bavarian Fine Arts Academy in 1808, Munich had too many and
too frequent exhibits, declining sales, and a stunning overconcen¬
tration of visual artists (nearly 1,900, up from 1,200 in 1895) com¬
peting for steady-state or diminishing public and private patronage.211
The increasing influence of Catholic political organizations sus¬
picious of the royal government’s traditional liberal cultural policies,
exacerbated by a suffrage reform in 1906 that diluted the strength of
bourgeois liberalism, the fall of the monarchy in 1918, counterre¬
volution, and the domination of conservative mentalities in the 1920s
contributed to Munich becoming a bastion of particularism and anti-
modernism in the interwar period. It was no accident that the national
headquarters of the Nazi Party was located there (across the street
from Munich’s most important art museums), or that Hitler built the
House of German Art in the city in an attempt to revive ‘healthy’ (but
stylistically traditional, anti-modem) art.
Post-1945 Munich reconstituted its pre-1933 artists’ organiza¬
tions and groups, but also added new ones. By the 1950s abstract art
had arrived, and the city once again became an international art center.

210 Maria Makela, The Munich Secession. Art and Artists in Turn-of-the-Century
Munich (Princeton, 1990), p. 60.
211 Ibid., p. 139. By comparison, the number of painters and sculptors resident in
Munich’s great rival Berlin rose from only about 1,200 to 1,500.

189
 At an opposite extreme from the royal and Catholic Residenz
Munich, within sight of the Alps, lay bustling, mercantile, cosmopol¬
itan and Protestant Hamburg facing the North Sea, anything but an ‘art
city by tradition. The ancient Hanseatic port, patrician republic, and
(in more recent times) second largest city of Germany long enjoyed a
reputation of importing its art, along with everything else from coffee
to gentlemen’s fashions, from abroad. Lacking kings, princes, and rich
prelates to patronize the arts, the commercial circles that ran Hamburg
lett them largely to the free market and volunteer work, in a manner
consistent with other nineteenth-century bourgeois republics on both
sides of the Atlantic.212
Hamburg did have its home-grown society for the promotion of
the arts (1765), however, an active Kunstverein (1817), and a pri¬
vately-launched but publicly-administered museum devoted initially
to contemporary and local art, the Kunsthalle (1869), which Alfred
Lichtwark began to build into a major international institution. By the
end ot the nineteenth century, arts-and-crafts education had crystal¬
lized into a state-financed Kunstgewerbeschule (1896) supported by
an excellent Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe. These undoubtedly
helped the local art community out of a slump it had reached by 1880,
when demand for local portrait, genre, marine, still-life, and landscape
painting (monumental canvases and statues had never been a local
specialty for want of official patronage) had sunk further in competi¬
tion with photography.
Throughout the interwar period, Hamburg struggled to complete
a wish expressed by Lichtwark in 1904: ‘We must have artists, and we
can only educate them ourselves. Once they have gotten used to the
cafes and beer-gardens of Munich, they won’t be able to stand it here
any longer.’213 The Kunstgewerbeschule added a division for fine art
m 1914 (to its courses on applied art and art education), renamed the
school Landeskunstschule in 1928, attempted but failed under the

212 For a critical insider view of the conservative, philistine habits of the Hamburg
bourgeoisie and art scene in one local connoisseur’s lifetime (1857-1935), see
?985)V Schiefler’ Eine HamburSische Kulturgeschichte, 1890-1920 (Hamburg,

213 Letter to the painter Count Leopold von Kalckreuth, director of the Stuttgart
Academy, 7 Jul 1904, cited in Volker Heydom, Maler in Hamburg 1886-1945
3 vols. (Hamburg, 1974), I, 57.

190
 Nazis to create a university-level degree for its graduates, and finally
declared it to be a state college of visual arts in 1955.
Hamburg paralleled other German art centers in having its own
local professional organization (with changing names, but stabilized
as the Hamburger Kiinstlerschaft in the interwar years) as a branch of
the RVBKD, taken over first by Rosenberg’s Kampfbundfur Deutsche
Kultur, then dissolved into Goebbels’s competing Reichskammer der
Bildenden Kunste in September 1933. Hamburg also had its own
Sezession, interwar left-wing ASSO, and numerous splinter groups
and circles. Many of these reappeared after 1945, but the difficult
postwar economic situation left many artists in dire straits. Cold War
fears of socially-engaged or even normal representational art being
considered ‘socialist realist,’ many artists went along with the fashion
of ditferent torms of abstract art. The increasing prosperity from the
1960s on, and Hamburg’s emergence as the major media and adver¬
tising city ot Germany, have once again transformed the scene.
Let us look briefly at the career of two of the activists in the
Hamburg professional artists’ associations, Arthur lilies (1870-1952)
and Friedrich (Fritz) Ahlers-Hestermann (1883-1973). Their careers
began similarly, both were highly active in professional organizations,
and their lives were affected in different ways by their attitudes to¬
ward Nazism.
A Hamburg native, lilies was the son of a grain merchant. After
attending the Johanneum Rea/gymnasium, he persuaded his skeptical
father to let him become an apprentice in a decorating firm specializ¬
ing in ceiling paintings. Ultimately, since Hamburg had no art
academy at the time, he went to Munich and attended its Kunstge-
werbeschule for a short time before switching to the art academy
(1889-92). Under the guidance of Alfred Lichtwark, he developed
into a painter and graphicist of north German landscapes, joining the
local professional association and Kunstverein in 1893. He was a
founding member of the Kiinstlerclub formed to back Lichtwark’s
program of bringing modem art to the culturally conservative com¬
mercial city.
lilies took on a teaching post in 1895 in the private painting
school for young ladies founded by Valesca Rover (later continued
under Gerda Koppel) and continued teaching there until 1906. Among
other pupils he met both his wives at the school. By 1907 the Kiinst-

191
 lerclub had dissolved after mounting disagreements over the ‘French’
versus ‘German’ style of open-air and landscape painting, with lilies
and some others opposing their old patron Lichtwark and his alleged
preference for contemporary French art. In 1908 lilies was hired as a
professor by the Hamburg Kunstgewerbeschule. In 1920 he was
elected president of the newly-organized professional artists’
association Hamburger Kiinstlerschaft, a post he held until 1924. In¬
creasingly disturbed by the loss of ‘Germanness’ in the arts, he even
accused his successor as president, Ahlers-Hestermann, of ‘treason’
for distancing himself from racist and antisemitic sentiments.214
Despite his public statements in favor of Alfred Rosenberg’s
Kampfbund fur deutsche Kultur, his antisemitic remarks, and his
vblkisch ideas about the national culture wedded to the national soil,
making him a rare pre-1933 ally of the Nazis among Hamburg artists,
lilies was dismissed from his teaching post in 1933 and complained
later (not truthfully) that he was denied opportunities to show his
work. He certainly did not prosper during the Third Reich, however.
The monumental pseudo-religious and mythological works that had
replaced his landscapes were simply universally disliked. He came
close to losing his pension during postwar denazification investiga¬
tions, but in the end charges of active collaboration with the Nazi re¬
gime were dropped.
Bom in Hamburg as the child of a commercial family, Ahlers-
Hestermann attended the humanistic Johanneum Gymnasium. Since
Hamburg’s modest foundations for a later full art school had only just
been laid, at the recommendation of his father’s acquaintance Licht¬
wark, he then trained (1900-04) under the local artist and member of
the Hamburg Kunstlerclub Arthur Siebelist. He followed this with
three years of study in Paris, including a year in the private school of
Matisse. He traveled to Italy, England, and Russia before World War
I. The war drove him out of Paris, but hostility to his Russian life-
partner in Germany caused the couple to move repeatedly during
the war (into which he was not drafted because of tuberculosis.)
He lived with and eventually married his fellow Paris art student, the

214 Carsten Mayer-Tonniesmann et al.. Die Maler Arthur lilies. Friedrich Ahlers-
Hestermann, Karl Kluth (Hamburg, 1989), p. 19.

192
 St. Petersburg-born painter Alexandra A. Povorina (1888-1963) and
returned to Hamburg (1918) to work.
In his Hamburg years he painted, wrote, and taught in the private
arts-and-crafts school for women run by Gerda Koppel. During this
time he was also chairman of the Hamburg professional artists’ asso¬
ciation, the Hamburger Kiinstlerschaft. Hired by Riemerschmid to
teach at the Cologne Werkschulen in 1928, he was dismissed by the
Nazis in 1933, presumably because of his associations (his Russian
wife painted in a non-representational style and was wrongly assumed
to be a ‘Bolshevik,’ for example). In addition to paintings influenced
by Matisse and the Cubists, he made lithographs and textile designs
and published widely as an art writer. He was active in the Werkbund,
Deutscher Kunstlerbund, and the Berlin Secession before and after the
Nazi period. He was a member of both the Berlin and Hamburg
branches ot the postwar BBK. As a modernist of the second rank, he
was unable to exhibit from 1933 on but nevertheless was able to
publish his major book, Stilwende, in 1940, and he was in demand for
privately-commissioned portraits. His wife, who exhibited under the
name Kovorina, was one of the founders of the professional women’s
artist association GEDOK in 1929.
After World War II he was active in refounding suppressed
artists’ organizations, such as the Hamburg branch of the BBK. He
was made an honorary member of the Berlin branch of the BBK. As
director of the Landeskunstschule (Kunstgewerbeschule) in Hamburg
from 1946 to 1950, he supervised the rebuilding and expansion of the
bombed-out school. In 1950 he retired and moved to Berlin, where his
wife was teaching at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Weissensee (GDR).
He continued to paint and received numerous German honors, in¬
cluding the Berlin Art Prize.21'
Hamburg and other German cities maintained keen rivalries and
measured their own importance to some degree by their rankings as
art centers. Today, for example, reunified Berlin is trying to mount a
challenge to the postwar dominance of the Cologne-Dusseldorf area as

215 Hans Vollmer, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Kiinstler des XX. Jahr-
hunderts, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1953-69), I, 16-17; Heydom, Maler in Hamburg,
III, 118; Anke Manigold, Der Hamburger Maler Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann,
1883-1973. Leben und Werk (Hamburg, 1986), pp. 6-43; Staatsarchiv
Hamburg, Bestand 622.-1.

193
 the premier German art center. A century ago, Berlin mounted a
similar challenge to Munich, which had held the blue ribbon for five
decades. Such reputations have never been quantifiable, but they rest
on a combination of factors that are. How many artists live there (and
how many famous ones)? What is the state of local art education?
How many exhibitions and galleries exist (for performers: theaters,
orchestras, etc.; for writers, how many publishers)? The list goes on to
include such mundane questions as the availability of affordable atel¬
ier space.
Not surprisingly, primary and secondary art centers tend to form
around an academy or fine arts school(s), a princely court or state gov¬
ernment interested in distributing arts patronage and/or a significant
private patrons, a sympathetic or at least tolerant municipal gov¬
ernment, and a functioning system of art marketing (including mu¬
seums and art journalism). Many of the capitals of larger German
states had all these. Berlin and Vienna had the largest populations in
German-speaking Europe, although artists could easily get lost in their
metropolitan bustle. Munich and Dresden, the capitals of Bavaria and
Saxony, could maintain the claim of being ‘art capitals’ in a way
Berlin and Vienna (busy with other imperial and commercial activi¬
ties) could not. Prussia’s Rhine Province, blessed with the wealth of
early industrialization, could claim Diisseldorf as an international art
center.216 Other states had to struggle a bit harder to come from behind
and build a major arts center from humble beginnings, such as Baden
did in Karlsruhe or - much later - Hesse in its ‘art colony’ of Darm¬
stadt. Some cities with enough wealth had often first focused on
commercial success and joined the ‘art city’ race late, or fitfully, like
Hamburg, Frankfurt, and the Wiirttemberg capital, Stuttgart. There
were also regional art centers (and academies) in the former German
cities of Konigsberg and Breslau.
Even smaller cities and large towns could boast colonies of art¬
ists. With at least a Kunstgewerbeschule, a Kunstverein, an exhibition
hall (Kunsthalle), and/or museum, cities from Bremen to the Ruhr,
Ulm to Leipzig, Kassel to Nuremberg could attract at least a few
dozen resident artists. Although not always the case, these centers

216 For a somewhat mosaic picture of the Rhenish academy, see Eduard Trier (ed.),
Zweihundert Jahre Kunstakademie Diisseldorf (Diisseldorf, 1973).

194
usually also featured an active musical, literary, or perhaps theatrical
scene. Artists ot all kinds usually find it congenial to live in cities
where specialists in other branches of the arts live and work. (The few
rural or village colonies, such as Worpswede near the North Sea and
Dachau near Munich, were either exceptions to the rule of urban con¬
centration, or ‘suburban’ and part-time locales for the members of the
colony.)
The geographical dispersal of artists throughout Germany has
traditionally been decried as well as praised. Diversity and regional
specialization (for example, the landscapes of the Dtisseldorf School
or the marinescapes of Hamburg) offered an alternative to the domi¬
nation of a single fashionable style, more likely in such national art
centers as London and Paris in the nineteenth century. But they also
promoted provincialism, conservatism, and (ca. 1890-1945) even
xenophobia in both the arts community and the public. Artists who
specialized in genre, landscape, and historical painting and sculpture
(as well as their customers) had a vested interest in cornering the mar¬
ket on depicting the local Heimat. This could go to absurd extremes,
such as claiming that ‘French’ Impressionist styles and theories of
light were inappropriate to depict ‘German’ landscapes. In well-
meaning efforts to promote local living artists, state and municipal
governments, museums, art unions, and individual collectors often
unwittingly promoted a smug, provincial mediocrity in the visual arts.
Artists in Russia, Eastern Europe, and America, however, would have
no doubt welcomed such relatively lavish support.217

217 One of the most successful American artists’ associations succeeded in part by
copying the German art leagues’ method of purchasing contemporary works
from living artists and distributing them by lottery to its members. The Ameri¬
can Art-Union thus outlasted many other early-nineteenth century foundings
(the Pennsylvania Academy being one of the few exceptions), only to be out¬
lawed by New York courts in 1852. Its success, and to some extent that of its
rival the National Academy (founded by Samuel F. B. Morse, now better re¬
membered for telegraphy than painting), came ironically in the wake of Ameri¬
can collectors losing money buying a flood of fake ‘old masters,’ especially
from one of the first American art dealers - the German immigrant Michael
Paff. For an excellent account of German and European dealers, artists, and
other matters linking the art markets of the New and Old Worlds, see Malcolm
Goldstein, Landscape with Figures. A History of Art Dealing in the United
States (Oxford, 2000), esp. p. 25 and p. 6.

195
 The geographical concentration of artists leads to another inter¬
esting but unfortunately virtually unanswerable question: how many
artists are optimal in a modem society? The question is unanswerable
in contemporary society simply because its employment and skills
needs change so rapidly. But it is also unanswerable for the more
slowly changing nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, German statisticians still thought they could project the social
need for learned professionals into the future. They hoped thereby to
give guidance to students entering the already ‘overcrowded’ profes¬
sional fields. These projections were not completely wrong. Their
fundamental error lay in assumptions about how many learned profes¬
sionals per unit of population could be gainfully employed.218
If the ‘market for services’ by doctors and lawyers could be so
badly underestimated, at least that market could be guessed at, based
on relatively constant human needs for medical care or the normative
settlement of civil or penal conflicts. Guessing what the ‘market for
art services’ demands or will demand has defeated all attempts by
economists and statisticians. For one reason, a ‘reserve elasticity’ ap¬
pears built into the artist’s profession. If market demand increases,
artists can step up the pace of production, using capacities that
otherwise lie dormant. For example, an artist whose work suddenly
becomes ‘hot’ can stop doing odd jobs and devote full time to produc¬
tion.
As the Dutch Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (BKR) ex¬
periment in public arts support showed, even a ‘threshold’ level of
production by most artists in the nation can quickly fill all public
buildings with artwork. The BKR was a sort of Netherlandic Federal
Arts Project that ran from 1949 to 1987 but had even older roots. The
simplest way of describing it is as a social security subvention for
artists, paid for largely by the national government (but 25 per cent by

218 Germany had 33 physicians per 100,000 population in 1911; 74:100,000 in the
last years of the Weimar Republic; 159 in 1959; and 443 in 1999. All of these
ratios were considered ‘catastrophic’ by contemporary observers and far more
than the profession ‘needed.’ Similar ratios for attorneys were 13:100,000 in
1900; 24 in 1928; 32 in 1959; 62 in 1980; 94 in 1989; and 127 in 1999. By way
of international comparison, the USA - notorious as having the most lawyers in
the world - had a ratio of 250:100,000 in 1980. See Charles E. McClelland, The
German Experience of Professionalization (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 137, 155.

196
local communities), administered by local committees comprised in
large part by representatives of arts professional organizations, and
devoted chiefly to buying artworks from the deserving poor among
professional artists. The purchased works were divided equally among
the communes and the national government. Because of some weak¬
nesses in the law and its administration, the BKR ultimately became a
kind of perennial funding agency for professional artists (indeed, who
was a ‘professional’ came largely to be defined by being on a BKR
grant!), whose works fetched an average of three times as much from
the state purchase as the free market could offer. The number of
beneficiaries grew from 200 per year in 1960 to 3,500 in 1983; in the
same period, the subventions had grown from one million to 130
million guilders (about a half million to $65 million at today’s
exchange rates.) The Ministry of Culture, which had its own budget to
purchase what it considered works of quality, was by contrast able to
spend only ten million guilders by 1983. To give some idea of the
scale, one might note that the Culture Ministry’s budget just to buy
artworks when relativized to the population of the USA would have
been about $100 million (close to the entire budget of the American
National Endowment for the Arts) but the art ‘purchases’ from the
Dutch Social Security administration was the equivalent of $1.3
billion.The Dutch became scandalized when so much art was being
produced that municipalities and the national government were unable
to find suitable homes for it. Some of it was warehoused (costing even
more money); some was turned over to its creators for storage in their
homes; and - critics exploded - some was foisted off on Dutch
madhouses, where, jokes suggested, its artistic merits might finally be
appreciated. The BKR was eliminated in 1987.219
The BKR raises in exemplary form a large number of questions
of vital interest to contemporary societies (let along social scientists).
For example, how many professionals (whether doctors, lawyers or
artists) does a society ‘need’? In periods of economic recession or de¬
pression, art, whether viewed as a speculative commodity or a dispen¬
sable ‘luxury,’ does not sell well. One must hasten to add, though, that
demand for professional medical, legal, engineering, or teaching ser-

219 For a careful summary of the career of the Dutch BKR, see Moulin, L ’artiste,
l’institution et le marche, pp. 374-6.

197
vices have also declined historically in periods of economic crisis. Yet
in normal times, most learned professions have been better able to
regulate the output of services to maintain standards and incomes.
Some have occasionally succeeded in even withholding services.
When German doctors went on strike in 1911-13, they quickly got
what they wanted.2~° There has never been an effective artists’ strike
(except in the performing arts) because the public would hardly notice
the interruption of ‘services.’
One could possibly accept arguments of neo-liberal economics
that the number of artists a society needs is the number its market will
bear. This is, however, not very satisfying. Either it means the number
of artists at any given time is the ‘right’ number (a sort of Dr. Pan¬
gloss argument) or it means reclassifying ‘artists.’ If the latter, one
would have to argue (by analogy with the learned professions) that
only artists who can support themselves fully from their art production
count. The majority of part-timers (despite professional training, ex¬
hibiting, and other achievements used by professional artists’ organi¬
zations as requirements for membership) would thus be classified as
non-artists or amateurs.
Even if such a clumsy free-market model could determine the
‘correct’ number of artists needed by modem societies, it suffers from
several critical weaknesses. The most obvious is that it equates the
ability to pay for art with a society’s ‘need’ for art. Much art is shared
with those who buy it and by those who merely enjoy it, whether as
the design of buildings they use, art they see in public places, or im¬
ages they see reproduced. Just as many doctors (at least at some stage
of their careers) forego some professional fees for treating the needy,
most artists forego adequate remuneration for supplying the public
with more artworks than can be sold at a profit.
Another hypothetical way to determine society’s need for artists
would be to regulate practice, somewhat on the same order of licens¬
ing doctors or lawyers. Such measures have never, as we have seen,
met with the enthusiastic approval of artists themselves or the gov¬
ernment bodies that would have to do the licensing. That objection
notwithstanding, the criteria for admission to the major German pro¬
fessional organization for visual artists, the BBK, continuing those set

220 See McClelland, German Experience, p. 142.

198
by the RVBKD, already include evidence of art school training and
exhibition in juried shows. Yet most BBK members would agree these
criteria do not guarantee a reduction in the number of under-rewarded
artists competing for a clientele.221
Of course much of the art produced by members of national pro¬
fessional associations has come to be defined by the international art
market (run by a network of ‘connoisseurs’ - dealers, collectors,
curators, and critics) as non-art: especially representational art that
would, except for the artist’s signature, be hard to distinguish from the
landscapes and still lifes of hundreds of others. Such artists are
regarded as mere artisans by these arbiters of taste.222 Thus it may be
that society needs only a few hundred ‘name’ artists, such as the
300 or so co-opted into the German Kimstlerbund, all prosperous and
recognized. The Kimstlerbund, it may be recalled, traces its origins
back to 1903-4 and a quarrel between some artists (many affiliated
with various ‘secessions’) and the Kiinstlergenossenschaft about the
selection of works for the St. Louis World Exposition. In the words of
Count Harry Kessler, this consciously elitist group set itself apart from
the mass of everyday artists. Kessler bluntly wrote: ‘In art only the
exceptional has value; no amount of hard work, ideology, or “school,”
only uniqueness. Everything else is not only worth less, it is worth¬
less.’223
The difficulty with letting a self-coopting elite decide ‘who is an
artist’ is and always has been the confusion of commercial success
and public ‘name recognition’ with professional accomplishment. It
confuses an elite of the profession with the profession at large. While
such elites may serve their own marketing interests, they do not offer
a real index of how many artists a society needs, only how many the
network of dealers, collectors, curators, and critics wants to bother
with. Yet it might serve as a useful indicator of how few artists, at a

221 These criteria, most recently accepted by a national Congress of Artists in

Frankfurt, include evidence of art-school training, exhibition or comparable
‘publication’ activity, and continuous occupation in visual-arts creativity. See
Kongress der Kiinstler in der Frankfurter Paulskirche (Frankfurt/M., 1971),
Beschliisse, III. 3.a-c.
222 See Raymonde Moulin, Le marche de la peinture en France (Paris, 1967), pas¬
sim.
223 Kessler, Kimstlerbund, p. 3.

199
 minimum, a rich industrial society at the end of the twentieth century
can actually support in full-time and well-remunerated activity. If one
adds another 100-200 young and emerging artists, who will inevitably
have to replace the aging members of the elite, one could arrive at a
number of 500 for a country the size of the pre-1990 Federal Republic
of Germany (or France or Britain).
A further difficulty with this elite number of visual artists re¬
quired by a society lies in its ignoring the market success and social
importance of so many ‘applied’ artists. The old snobbism of the
nineteenth-century art academies lives on here in denying the title
‘artist to anybody who does not create work for the narrow collec¬
tor/speculator markets. The social value of applied (and performing)
arts is reflected in the sizeable aggregate sums spent on them. Several
times as many visual artists make a comfortable income as the mem¬
bers of the art elite and would have to be included in any answer to the
question, ‘How many artists does a society need?’
Another answer to the question might be, ‘More than society can
support. This answer might seem less silly if we consider how many
lawyers get trained and licensed. It is highly unlikely that Germany
‘needed’ ten times the number of lawyers per capita in 1999 than it
supported in 1900, or that the USA really ‘needed’ a million lawyers
at the end of the twentieth century. Many obviously will be unable to
practice law as their principal profession. Yet contemporary ‘post¬
industrial’ societies encourage and subsidize the overproduction of
legal professionals. In such increasingly normatized societies, legal
training is in wide demand. Precisely in the face of such numbing,
bureaucratized uniformity, the availability of art, especially affordable
and accessible art, produced by ‘too many artists,’ may be a serious
social good.
In the last analysis societies in Europe and North America will
probably always produce more artists than they can support as full¬
time professionals. As long as ‘art is free’ (as the Basic Law of
Germany states) and no restrictions apply to entering the profession,
and as long as part-time work outside the professional field is
accepted as normal by public and clientele, more artists will be called
than chosen. Indeed, much contemporary evidence suggests that
artists today regard art as a calling more than a profession. Given the
precariousness of artistic careers, young practitioners have often

200
entered the field late, after acquiring other skills they can use to earn
their daily bread. In this they have finally followed the advice of many
art-education reformers from the end of the nineteenth century
onward.
A feeling of being called or irresistibly drawn to this career often
emerges in interviews with artists.224 It is, of course, also nothing new.
All learned professions have generated a justification by ‘calling,’
richly amplified in Germany by the theology and ethics of Luther,
Calvin, and other reformers. Indeed, the German word for profession,
Beruf is more accurately rendered by its original meaning, ‘calling.’
Beyond the general ethical requirements of doing work and trying to
do it well, a calling implies a particular blend of aptitude and ethical
commitment in the person ‘called.’ Given the particularly uncertain
parameters of a career in the visual arts today, a feeling of having a
‘calling’ undoubtedly supplies internal motivation to become a visual
artist in the face of scant promise of external material success or even
collegial esteem. It is not difficult to imagine why artists confess more
readily to feeling ‘called’ to their profession than do those in relatively
lucrative and secure ones such as law or tax accountancy. If entering a
career in medicine or engineering requires some careful consideration
about one’s match of aptitude to interest, becoming an artist resembles
more making a leap of faith.
Ironically the number of young people who feel ‘called’ to the
arts continues to rise dramatically just as organized religious bodies
encounter increasing trouble attracting new clergy. The clergy, one of
the oldest academic professions in the world, has long shared low
economic rewards and minimal lobbying effectiveness with artists, as
well as an element of other-worldly ‘calling.’ Aside from not requir¬
ing chastity or obedience, the arts do hold out the allure of serving a
transcendental purpose in a world drowning in triviality and material¬
ism. Finally, the number of clergy needed (at least in German society)
remains regulated by church hierarchies, so that a glut of pastors or
priests is practically unthinkable. The arts, including the visual arts,

224 For recent German examples, see Robke, Kunst und Arbeit. For French exam¬
ples, from contemporary as well as older statements, see Vessillier-Ressi, La
condition d ’artiste.

201
 however, offer limitless potential for following a subjective ‘calling’
tinged with the mystical and creative forces associated with religion.
The one historical case in which the number of artists needed in
German society was effectively established by public policy involved
the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As in most other profes¬
sional fields, admission was carefully controlled through the educa¬
tional system and the VBK (Verein Bildender Kunstler) professional
organization, as well as a virtual state monopoly on patronage. In such
conditions the membership of the VBK could be considered roughly
equal to the number of visual artists in the GDR ‘needed.’ That figure
varied between 1,800 and 2,500.22i
The type of social engineering tried and abandoned in the USSR
and, for a few decades, in East Central Europe did not establish a
completely reliable professional cadre of artists, despite considerable
efforts. Not only did artists rebel against Central Committee-ordered
styles. There was still the problem of the wider Interest Community of
Art, especially of amateurs. Although contemporary usage (especially
in North America) has largely lost the second meaning of the term, an
‘amateur’ was not only an active dabbler or non-professional practi¬
tioner, but also a passive ‘lover’ and/or collector of art.
The ‘amateur’ artist is largely a phenomenon of modem capitalist
societies, although it survived in modest ways under Soviet social or¬
ganization, too. To be sure, amateurs have always existed, but the lei¬
sure and wealth involved restricted their numbers. To take merely one
pre-industrial example, Frederick II (‘the Great’) of Pmssia was both a
prolific composer and writer, at a time (he died in 1786) when both
metiers were just beginning to achieve modem professional status.
Voltaire, his guest at the Potsdam court, is widely held to be the first
modem writer to make a fortune with his pen. ‘Real’ professionals,
particularly in the visual arts, were still tied to the corporate structures
of guilds and academies. It might seem charming and even heart¬
warming that crowned heads, aristocrats, or even the occasional patri¬
cian might dabble in the arts. But they were expected to do so more as
patrons of professional artists than as competitors to them.

225 Michael Rrejsa and Ursel Wolff, ‘Griindungsgeschichte und Organ-

isationsaufbau des Verbandes Bildender Kunstler,’ in Feist et at. (eds.), Kunst-
dokumentation SBZ/DDR, pp. 837 —43.

202
 The abolition of corporate privileges in the wake of the French
and American Revolutions coincided with the rise of new forms of
bourgeois (as well as industrial worker) culture. The former in par¬
ticular (but not exclusively) emphasized the cultivation of literature,
music, and drawing as household leisure activities and status symbols.
Particularly in Germany, lacking a single political, economic, and
cultural capital, bourgeois elites (with some aristocratic allies) organ¬
ized in Kunstvereinen played a major role in promoting the arts - and
through cooperative traveling shows among different regions of the
country, a first mobile market for artworks - in the nineteenth century.
These 'amateurs’ were not all themselves active painters or sculptors,
but liked to discuss art and demonstrate their cultivation with their
support.
As one recent analyst argues, the ‘art loving’ German bourgeoi¬
sie was probably more interested in attending expositions as social
events than in filling its living rooms with paintings.226 Whatever their
conscious or unconscious motives, however, these passive ‘amateurs’
provided at least the framework for a market, some collectors, many
benefactors, and an essential source of taxes and political backing for
public arts projects of all kinds. That support included (and still does)
a high level of public education in the visual and performing arts, with
the result of widespread abilities to sketch and draw, play an instru¬
ment (including in family ‘house music’), and write poetry. Such arts
education not only provides a significant portion of the regular income
of artists acting as teachers, but also reproduces, generation after gen¬
eration, a demand for acquiring ‘symbolic capital’ in the form of
amateur status in the arts.
Urban high school and college graduates undoubtedly have come
to constitute the bulk of amateurs - both active as producers or per-

226 Wilhelm Schlink, “‘Kunst ist dazu da, um geselligen Kreisen das gahnende
Ungeheuer, die Zeit, zu toten.” Bildende Kunst im Lebenshaushalt der
Griinderzeit,’ in M. Rainer Lepsius (ed.), Bildungsburgertum im 19. Jahr-
hunderl, Teil III, Lebensfiihrung und standische Vergesellschaftung (Stuttgart,
1992), p. 74.
227 See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Le marche des biens symboliques,’ L dnnee sociologique,
22 (1971), pp. 49-126. For a rare recent European survey of amateurs’ activi¬
ties, see France. Ministry of Culture, Les amateurs. Enquete sur les activites
artistiques des Franqais (Paris, 1996).

203
 formers and passive as museum-goers and audiences. But we should
also mention another, at least notionally more rural, amateur tradition
in ‘folk art.’ In the teims used by today’s art connoisseurs, this is not
art at all, but at best a kind of traditional handicraft, or at worst dread¬
ful kitsch.“8 And yet we should recall folk art of cultures exotic to
Europe inspired many of the twentieth century’s most innovative vis¬
ual artists, from Picasso and the German Expressionists onward.
It is very difficult to establish what percentage of those calling
themselves artists in censuses and surveys are really practicing folk
arts. These run the gamut, too, from serially hand-made designs (for
example wooden toys and Christmas ornaments from the Erzgebirge)
to unique pieces (for example, naive paintings and woodcarvings).
They can be produced by full-time practitioners, or sporadically by
hobbyists, or by craftspeople working only in the winter months to
supplement a non-artistic occupation such as farming. Occasionally
folk artists develop a style and reputation, with their works being
signed and collected even by museums. More commonly, though,
their work joins a river of objects meant for household decoration,
most ot it manufactured. As a part of ‘housewares’ it is undoubtedly a
significant factor in economic terms, and to some degree it competes
with designs by professional applied artists. Beyond such generalities,
however, it is hard to place folk art into the broader picture of either
professional artistic activity or the broader Interest Community of Art.
Finally, we should at least mention the vast field of ‘entertain¬
ment’ or popular arts that evolved (or divorced) from folk art. The
multi-billion-dollar international popular music industry, for example,
evolved from folk art, just as ‘synthetic’ rock-and-roll evolved from
‘authentic’ rhythm-and-blues. The visual arts have not been as deeply
affected by mass marketing as the performing arts, but by the last third
of the twentieth century many visual artists began experimenting with
‘performance art,’ one-time events which aimed at legendary status
(and could of course be vicariously relived by video or other re¬
cording). Jean Tinguely’s self-destroying machine at the New York

228 In more sophisticated interpretations, it is one form of art, the one defined by
ethnologists. Others include recognized ‘old masters’ (art savant), avant-garde
(mostly a matter of fashion, but with the artist’s signature guaranteeing some
‘rarity’), and photography. See the interesting argument of Raymonde Moulin,
‘La genese de la rarite,’ Ethnologie franqaise, 8 (1978), pp. 241-58.

204
Museum of Modem Art is a good example of this kind of stunt art.
Nevertheless, audiences for this type of art remain small compared
to a rock concert. Even the massively popular German art show
documenta in Kassel, held every four or five years since 1955, draws
only 600,000 visitors.22g The popular cliche, of all rock bands con¬
sisting of self-taught musicians who started out playing (badly) in
garages may contain a grain of truth, but even the most ‘popular’
visual artist, like Andy Warhol, enjoyed formal artistic training.
The role of the artist at the end of the twentieth century has
become more deeply enmeshed with society’s increasing appetite for
entertainment than ever. That implies a constant need for innovation,
for the new and startling, to catch the public’s attention before it
wanders off to the next sensation. The pressure on artists to be
creative and even constantly to transform their own styles, to try new
media or combinations of media, is much greater than in the era of
fixed ‘academic’ canons. Mastering the canonical, although most
artists still do it, seems less central than to many other professions
depending more on routine competence than experimentation.
The atomization of styles and approaches and the rapid change in
a globalizing art market have shattered the nineteenth-century idea of
tightly unified professional standards as well as the programmatic
visions worked out by successive challengers to those standards, from
the Impressionists to the Abstract Expressionists. And yet there are
more artists per capita in today’s society than ever before. They are
better organized than at any time since the demise of the guilds.
Markets, with or without steering from professional arbiters of
taste who are rarely themselves artists, decide - if ever more fleetingly
- ’what is art.’ Yet those who produce most of this art are undeniably
trained professionals. Ironically it is harder today to answer the
question, ‘What is art?’ than ‘Who is an artist?’ One could legiti¬
mately ask: does this not mean art is not really a learned profession

229 Kunstzeitung, 52 (2000), p. 5.

230 Results of a 1995 micro-census in Germany show over 75,000 visual artists, of
whom 21,000 were in independent practice and nearly 54,000 employed in
applied-arts enterprises. This works out to about 96 artists per 100,000
population, more than five times as many as in 1895. Some prognoses foresee a
doubling of these numbers between 1995 and 2010. See Robke, Kunst und
Arbeit, pp. 96-7.

205
 today, even if it once was one? We cannot approach this question
without pointing to a parallel decline in control by other learned
professions over the definition of their ‘art,’ too. Mass public demon¬
strations by doctors and even dentists in Berlin as recently as the
autumn of 2002 have come to vocalize a nagging claim that
government and health-insurance funds now largely determine what is
‘good medicine.’ Although representatives of national professional
groups are of course consulted about the harmonization of standards in
law, medicine, engineering, teaching, and many other ‘old’ and ‘new’
professions down to the level of tax advisors, setting standards today
lies ultimately with the remote and largely faceless bureaucracy of the
European Union in Brussels. If this erosion of autonomous standard¬
setting may be considered a sign of ‘deprofessionalization,’ then
recent trends among the visual arts may not appear as such clear signs
of failure.
Indeed it can be argued that the progressive recent bureau¬
cratization, routinization, and interchangeability of much of the work
that earlier lent learned professionals independence and autonomy
(and justified their claims to social and economic privilege) has not
afflicted the visual arts profession to the same degree. While the BBK
may lack monopolistic controls over the art market, comparable pro¬
fessional organizations in other fields cannot claim to control their
service markets, either. On the contrary, at the price of guarantees of
economic security and a calculable career ladder, visual artists today
may be among the last independent and autonomous professionals.
Embedded perhaps more than ever before in the what one might
call the ‘knowledge industry,’ artists today undoubtedly still feel
‘called’ to their profession in part because many believe they may be
able to express values to clienteles that perceive and bemoan the
fading away of values. The roles of prophet and pauper, largely
tailored by the Romantics to fit modem artists, nevertheless borrow
some of the aura of traditional seers, prophets, and holy men and
women. Although no artists literally need waste away from hunger or
untreated illness under Germany’s contemporary welfare state, the
relative deprivation of artists compared to other professionals does
lend credibility to any claim they wish to make about offering spiritual
values to a society suffocating from too many material ones. To be
sure, many artists — especially those dependent on employment related

206
to their artistic production - see their autonomy limited by their
employers, and almost all artists have to be conscious of the wheel of
fashion. This is also true of many other professions today. But the
very market demand for innovation and breakaway visions - so much
stronger today in the arts than in other learned professions - provides
a strong incentive for many to try to follow their own internal voices
and assert their independence from the mass of practitioners. The
professionals in the world of visual art may not be able to control the
market, but the market for their services has not yet managed to stifle
all autonomy among the professionals: it is not in the interest of the
market to do so.
The myth of the artist-as-hero may have faded away, but the
myth of the artist-as-outsider, an autonomous individual with a
different perspective to bring to bear, still clings to the profession.
The visual arts, objects of curiosity during the infrequent opportunities
for public scrutiny in the nineteenth century, such as salons and other
temporary exhibitions, have become everyday and omnipresent by the
end of the twentieth century. This relative pervasiveness, it can be
argued, is the most significant sign of the professionalization of art.

207
Chapter Seven
Conclusion

L 'art pour I’art, art for art’s sake, was a dream, a nineteenth-century
ideal. In fact, I have argued here, artists have always been anchored in
social reality. Ironically, perhaps, some of the most interesting and
memorable art from the late nineteenth century onward has constituted
an attempt to weigh that anchor and escape from the confines of that
‘reality’ and its supposed connection to ‘nature.’ One can mention the
literary symbolists and ‘decadents’ as well as Cubists, Fauves, and
Germany’s special contribution, Expressionists. Yet increasing atten¬
tion to the novel and often consciously provocative merely placed the
majority of traditional visual artists in the shadows of public attention,
without however reducing them to insignificance. Artists had long
been defined socially by their guilds, when they were clearly mostly
artisans, in other words by the corporative action of artists themselves.
Later they were additionally defined by privileged princely academies.
In the later industrialized age, Kunstgewerbeschulen effectively sub¬
stituted a formal school curriculum for the more personal training of
the former guilds. At least through the eighteenth century, European
artists were regulated much like other skilled professionals.
Even in the last half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of
European liberalism, when art was said to be ‘free,’ the combined
force of state authorities, academies, and artists’ professional associa¬
tions and art unions (not to mention censors and the police) clearly
determined what art could be displayed to the public and, hence, also
sold. Recognition through admission to shows, prizes, and medals
constituted the almost invariable precondition to successful careers,
commissions, and sales.
The weakening, not to say disintegration, of this professional
system by the eve of World War I contrasts markedly with the con¬
temporary successes of most other Teamed professions’ in promoting
their own autonomy and privileged status. As doctors, lawyers, and

209
 even teachers began to assert more control over the market for their
services, visual artists began to lose more of this kind of control over
theirs.
The reasons for this slippage of control are complex. Clearly art¬
ists could not compel the purchase of their ‘services’ by 1910: the
German market was saturated, complicated further by increasing
competition from an emerging international art market on the one
hand and inexpensive reproductions on the other. Not only did
German art academies and schools share in the liberal refusal by other
higher-educational institutions to limit enrollments (by introducing a
so-called numerus clausus) and thereby possibly curb competition; to
have done so would have probably made no difference, since excluded
students could still study privately. The growing importance of finan¬
cial speculation as a moving force in the art market, which clearly
came to include the avant-garde, not just ‘old masters’ any more, led
to further splits among visual artists along the lines of aesthetic ‘ten¬
dencies’ (Richtungen). These passionately felt divisions undermined
the cohesion of the old Kiinstlergenossenschaft and by 1913 brought
on calls for a new kind of professional organization that would place
economic self-interest ahead of stylistic quarrels and be ‘tendency-
free’ (richtungsfrei).
The hopes of economic improvement were of course dashed in
the aftermath of the disastrous war of 1914-18. The failure of the
RVBKD to promote successfully the economic and social interests of
all visual artists, continuing and ever more bitter divisions over style,
compounded now by ideological and political fractionalization, and
the failure to achieve a mandatory ‘chamber of artists’ in the fifteen
years between the last Kaiser and the Fuhrer had their parallels in
other professional groups, to be sure. But the Nazi Gleichschaltung
struck few other professions with the force applied to artists (including
non-visual ones). Not only could one’s ‘race’ or political sympathies
terminate one’s professional career, but also one’s Richtung. Even
Nazi sympathizers who painted in certain styles, including ‘patrioti¬
cally German’ Expressionism, were banished from their profession.
(Ernst Nolde is perhaps the best example.)
While the Nazi regime undoubtedly reaped some support from
visual artists for its xenophobic protection of the domestic market
from much foreign competition (a policy ignored in its leaders’ loot-

210
 mg of European art treasures after 1939!), the international market
returned with a vengeance after 1945 and evolved into a globalized
market by the end of the century. Other professionals, such as doctors
and teachers, could still maintain some monopoly over the national or
local market. Visual artists could not, and had to learn to paint like
New Yorkers or guess at the tastes in Tokyo. Finally, while all occu¬
pations have their share of ‘stars,’ most of the other learned profes¬
sions provide (at least since the 1950s in Germany) a living income to
most of their active practitioners. Only a minority of visual artists of
the first and second rank (or those with outside sources of income)
could claim that distinction. The sole consolation for visual artists
might be that the autonomy and status of other learned professions has
also begun to erode under the assaults of powerful socioeconomic
forces, such as insurance funds dominating medical practice con¬
ditions.
In terms of professionalization theory, then, there were ‘starving
artists’ because artists were unable to maintain control over the market
for their services. Since the erosion of guild privileges (and their vir¬
tual elimination by the early nineteenth century), then the erosion of
art academies’ monopoly over certain kinds of art (e.g. ‘official’) in
the later course of that century, artists could be ‘formed’ by private or
vocational school training as well, or (though more rarely than widely
believed) autodidactically. Some of these artists, perhaps a large ma¬
jority, were able to find professional employment opportunities during
the era of rapid economic growth and urban expansion in Geimany
between 1850 and 1914. The decoration of millions of new public and
private buildings and apartments alone provided a little-studied
‘boom’ for artists of all kinds. During this same period, though, artists
began to lose their ability to define who they were through the mecha¬
nism of public exhibitions (salons). As long as artists (or their profes¬
sional organizations) ran the salons, they also defined who was a
successful artist (and therefore what good art was). When artists could
no longer agree and the salon system went into steep decline, non¬
artists increasingly defined what was good art and which artists were
inversely to be consigned to an ‘artistic proletariat.’
A work of art requires skill and ‘imagination’ (even if not neces¬
sarily the artist’s own), but, once finished, it is also a commodity.
Artists rarely profited fully from the appreciation in value of these

211
 commodities, once sold and ‘alienated’ from their possession. More
troublesome still, such commodities have always been reproducible,
whether as forgeries or, within the last century or so, by mechanical
means.
The educational revolution in the visual arts underway by the
turn of the twentieth century also contributed to rising competition.
Without the terminal degrees and certifications common in other
learned professions, visual artists had to accept a flood of students
from reformed applied arts schools as equals. To be sure, not all and
not even most such students aspired to be ‘fine’ artists; but many did,
and did so successfully. The relatively attractive lack of high tuition
fees at both academies and applied arts schools (even universities,
while ‘free’ of registration costs, levied fees for individual courses)
also guaranteed a steady flow of recruits. Lack of an adequate market
for services only acted as a limited deterrent if - as many art educators
urged their students from about 1910 onward - the artist also had ar¬
tisanal skills to earn a living. Painting and redecorating apartments
between ‘fine art’ projects did not come to be considered a badge of
loss of professional status. Finally, the admission of women to schools
and the profession in growing numbers - what one might call the
‘feminization’ of the profession by the end of the twentieth century -
was arguably both a cause and a symptom of the statistically low in¬
comes of visual artists, especially compared to the rising incomes of
other professionals with comparable higher education.
All that said, there seems as much myth as reality to the image of
the ‘starving artist.’ Much of the complaining in the twentieth century
took place against a very real background of economic crises and dis¬
asters, as well as against a widespread view that the last half of the
nineteenth century had constituted a comparatively ‘golden’ age. If we
apply the measures of profession and class, we can see that artists
were rarely worse off than manual laborers, with whom, however,
they were never confused. Their ‘starvation’ myth makes more sense
if they are compared to other learned professionals, among whom they
were, as a group, undoubtedly among the most under-rewarded - and
irregularly, incalculably rewarded. Despite ritual and loud warnings
over two centuries about the economic risks of becoming a fine artist,
people still pursued that path. The internalization of the myth by the
profession has indeed become so strong that financially successful

212
artists are regularly suspected and accused of ‘selling out’ their talent
(if any).
Are artists really a profession, or more an anarchistic tribe? I
have noted a comparative lack of ‘professional solidarity,’ although it
has varied over time. Clearly other learned professions have not had to
labor under quite as many, and as pronounced, distinctions between
mere journeymen and masters close to the seats of power, products of
lengthy higher-education and trade-school absolvents, a ‘proletariat’
of most practitioners resenting self-styled ‘elites’ (painter-princes,
secessionists, even non-members of the profession sitting in judgment
as critics), between ‘traditional’ and ‘advanced’ artists, among both
traditional and advanced artists, and between the taste of the profes¬
sion and the public. In other professions, radical departures from an
agreed canon of practice can lead to exclusion; in the fine arts, they
had the opposite effect, at least in the twentieth century.
Many (not least individual artists themselves) have looked to
artists to be prophets, visionaries, and interpreters of signs, a priestly
role for a new modem spiritual turn. Yet the market requirement of
individual innovation and stylistic novelty since Modernism ran
counter to establishing a new symbolic consensus. Not even the cleri¬
cal profession was expected, in Germany at least, to depart signifi¬
cantly from the canons taught in seminaries and theological faculties.
The cult of art lacks a central credo, if not rich ritual, relics, and
shrines. If museums are its churches, artworks its relics, and selected
artists its saints, it is also supported in part by a this-worldly profit
motive for wealthy speculators and seekers of tax havens (individual
and corporate). Does this cult offer ‘salvation by taste’? In any case
the move away from traditional ‘representational’ interpretations of
nature, history, or mythology during the last century has opened wider
the gate of possibilities for artists to manipulate signs and portents in
the manner of a cultic clergy.
Some artists have also hoped to change the world around them,
not merely to interpret it. While few have actually founded serious
political parties, as Beuys did, many German artists have come to
share the view of one of his students: that artists ‘always stand on one

213
 clear side of the political struggle.’231 From the (Eighteen-) ‘Forty-
eighters’ and Richard Wagner through the (Nineteen-) ‘Sixtyeighters,’
German artists have joined revolutionary movements and sometimes
played prominent roles in them. But their aim has usually been to
open a path for art, not to take over the running of political affairs. As
with other learned professionals, most visual artists were ‘apolitical’
in aggregate, with individual exceptions being located all over the
partisan spectrum. Their loyalty was primarily to their patrons, and
that inclined them to be staatstreu, that is, friendly to the state. Such
loyalty could mean supporting conservative government in Prussia,
liberals in Bavaria (where the Catholic Center Party was suspicious
of secular art funding and began to dominate cultural policy after
the franchise reform of 1906), or republicans in Hamburg during the
same time period before World War I. They could sympathize with
armed revolutionaries like Menzel in 1848, join a radical-sounding
Novembergruppe like Gropius and his friends in 1918, support the
SPD like Baluschek and Zille, join the Communist-dominated ASSO
in the 1920s, the Nazis in the 1930s, the SED in the 1940s, and
everything from the SDS to the Greens in the last few decades. (Many
have even supported the conservative CDU and liberal FDP or their
pre-1933 forerunners.)
But in a hypothetical election in a fanciful republic of visual
artists, the majority party would always have been that of anarchy.
Pride, envy, and passionate disagreements over style have made the
notion of party discipline especially irrelevant to the collective
behavior of German artists. In this, however, they seem to differ little
from their colleagues in other European countries with a strong visual-
arts tradition. At best one can discern a tendency to start using the
‘political process’ for the effective furtherance of their own interests
in the last thirty years.
All professional groups display internecine ‘politics,’ to be sure,
and visual artists’ ‘aesthetic politics’ made up in sound and fury for
what their ‘interest politics’ often lacked. Secessions from the local
branches of the ADKG in the 1890s, the creation of dozens of local

231 Jorg Immendorff, Hier und Jetzt, Vorwort. Few West German artists dedicated
their works, however, ‘to the liberation struggle of the Indochinese peoples
against imperialists.’ Ibid.

214
artists’ ‘circles’ and a rival elitist Kiinstlerbund in 1904 foreshadowed
continuing battles over style that frustrated any sustained focus on
common economic and social problems. Both Nazis and German Sta¬
linists hated the avant-gardes. But that does not mean all, or even
most, traditional artists rushed enthusiastically to support these dicta¬
torships. At the same time, many of them undoubtedly agreed that the
great Nazi mockery of avant-garde art in 1937, the ‘Degenerate Art
Exposition,’ was well named. One of the crude but effective tech¬
niques of the show was to hang an avant-garde masterpiece next to a
similar work produced by a mental patient - a ‘biological degenerate.’
Most mass audiences do not need much encouragement to think any
art in an unfamiliar style is ‘crazy,’ and neither did the German audi¬
ences of 1937. Cold War fissures, pitting ‘national’ traditions against
‘intemational/proletarian’ ones, continued to split and weaken any
attempts to reestablish a unified German visual arts profession after
1945, just as feuds had undermined the effectiveness of the RVBKD
by the early 1930s. Such fissures could also be found in other profes¬
sional organizations, but not usually to the extent of quarreling over
the proper way to set a broken leg, design a railway bridge, or write a
legal brief. When each ‘practitioner’ believes he has to practice differ¬
ently from the rest to succeed in the market, a common professional
mentality is made problematical. These fissures produced an aesthetic
politics only faintly related to the real political world of Germany, but
just as fractious and destructive of cooperation.
Another factor in the difficulty of professionalizing visual artists
lay in the vast changes in the scale and differentiation of the ‘indus¬
try.’ Even by the broadest definition, there were fewer artists of all
kinds (visual, musical, theatrical, and literary) per capita in 1850 than
in 2000. The publishing, broadcasting, film, music, entertainment,
advertising, and similar industries, employing the talents of various
kinds of artists, comprise a significant and growing part of the German
economy. In 1850, they either did not exist or differed vastly in qual¬
ity and quantity. A few hundred visual artists painted or sculpted a
few objects each year for a limited clientele of patrons or a salon¬
going public. One hardly needed boundaries, controls, and organ¬
izations: art was local and limited to a few urban centers. Most artists
and patrons knew each other personally. By 2000, the situation had
changed beyond recognition. Artists need unions and professional

215
 organizations to protect their rights, agitate for their economic and
other interests, and show a common front to large and intimidating
forces of government and economy. Yet their organizations continue
to demonstrate comparative weakness. Does this lie in the ‘indi¬
vidualism’ of the artistic occupation?
From the viewpoint of social historians, the problems of the pro¬
fession as a whole may come down to divisions within it according to
the sectors of the market served. For example, art serves the public
less than in an age of churches and monuments but has become a sign
of ‘distinction’ for elites who can afford it. (The ‘people’ get Norman
Rockwell, advertising, and other mass-culture art products but are not
even expected to appreciate what they buy - as taxpayers - for public
museums.) ‘Fine art’ must be ‘decoded,’ and the possession of the
codes is one of the few types of class marking (other than wealth) not
only allowed but also encouraged in a democratic society. The dis¬
tinction made between serious and popular music could be applied to
the visual arts, as well. But it would not parallel the distinction be¬
tween ‘fine and ‘applied’ art, since codes are necessary for some
types of both (and superfluous for others). Put another way, one does
not need to learn codes to judge quality in medicine, law, or engi¬
neering, and although the arcana of those professions are also coded,
they are readily leamable. To become a successful visual artist - or to
judge one - remains more than ever a matter of luck, a process out of
the hands of the professionals themselves.
We have seen that the visual arts represent the bottom end of the
scale of successful professionalization under modem conditions. The
keys to professionalization used by other highly-educated occupa¬
tional groups - educational exclusiveness, certification to practice,
standards largely set by the profession in concert with (and enforced
by) public authority, with consequent economic independence and
even a claim to high professional ethics and altruistic ‘disinteredness’
- were never fully claimed or used by artists. Medieval guilds had of¬
fered some control, but without the social cachet of higher (university
or academy-type) education. But they had been destroyed by the lib-
eial piinciple of careers open to talent.’ The schools succeeding guild
instruction, the Kunstgewerbeschulen, had a Janus face. They were
supposed to turn out as many pupils as possible, and cheaply. But they
were, in the view of their later reformers, also supposed to train artists

216
able to compete in the ‘fine arts’ with academy students. The fine arts
academies themselves were long able to control the output of gradu¬
ates (if only by doing little to counteract their reputations for bad
teaching) and the art market via control of official salons. But they
relinquished, rather than tightened, such controls in the last decades of
the nineteenth century, and modest curriculum reforms (such as those
introduced by von Werner in Berlin in the mid-1870s) actually in¬
creased enrollments. Professional artists - especially younger, yet un¬
recognized ones - were increasingly unhappy with the old academy
‘monopoly’ and ready for ‘alternative’ marketing as such as secession
shows or private galleries. The ‘official’ art market, by the 1890s, no
longer offered adequate opportunities. By the same token, the profes¬
sion was never really able to control its educational institutions or set
them up as gatekeepers. As with most other learned professions, a
mounting chorus of calls for enrollment limits (numerus clausus) from
the rank and file of practitioners fell on deaf ears at the professorial
level. Such official admissions restrictions would have had little prac¬
tical effect in visual art, because aspiring students (unlike those in
medicine or law) could obtain private instruction for a fee, often from
the same professors teaching at tuition-free art academies. Indeed,
according to German law, anybody (anticipating Beuys’s ‘everybody’)
could be an ‘artist.’ Lastly, while a modicum of ‘talent’ undoubtedly
plays a role in many professional success stories, in no profession
does it play such a central role as in the arts. Contrariwise, in few
other professions is a reputation for ‘skill’ - and nothing else - consid¬
ered denigrating. Having ‘imagination,’ or more crassly put in the re¬
cent art market, a ‘gimmick,’ as well as social skills and ‘networks,’
rather than teachable professional competencies, is the path to success
in the fine arts.
In the last analysis, the common distinction between ‘science’
and ‘art’ may provide the key to the weakness of professionalization
among visual artists. The notion of individual ‘genius,’ originated in
the Renaissance and anchored especially firmly by German philoso¬
phers from the eighteenth century on, clashes with the primacy of ho¬
mogenous, learned, and certifiable ‘skills’ that other professions offer
the public. The practice of the everyday, ordinary physician, lawyer,
or engineer is rarely called ‘malpractice.’ But the products of everyday
artists - equally adequately trained and skilled - are often dismissed

217
 as ‘bad art.’ Not only critics, curators, and collectors - mostly non¬
artists themselves - but many artists encourage the denigration of
everyday, professionally produced art. The exaltation of the novel,
exotic, and anti-canonical offers too many exciting chances for fame
and fortune for speculators in art trends to resist.
This ‘failed professionalization,’ if it can be called that, is also
rooted in the fact that most works of visual art, once completed, are
meant to leave the artist’s control. Artists may be ‘commissioned’ to
execute a work, just as other professionals are ‘engaged’ for a fee. But
the result of the ‘client service’ is qualitatively different. A cure ef¬
fected, a case won or lost, even a railway bridge cannot be considered
a commodity available for sale, transport, and endless resale, let alone
an object of economic speculation. Nor can the works of most non-
artistic professionals be ‘pirated,’ reproduced without permission or
compensation to the copyright holder.
This obvious fact has made it much easier for the market in art¬
ists’ ‘services’ to be shaped by customers and ‘tastemakers’ rather
than by the artistic guild itself. As long as this market was relatively
small and stable, with a canonical set of product standards and a pa¬
tronage system dominated by the state, church, and a small wealthy
private elite, the profession could function well enough. The opening
ot artistic careers to anybody, the increase in numbers of academy,
arts-and-crafts, and other school-trained artists, a technological revo¬
lution in art reproduction, and a cultural revolution producing Mod¬
ernism and all its sub- and post-movements changed all that.
Successive organizations of visual artists in Germany have attempted
and failed to dominate the market completely, whether the ADKG (fo¬
cused chiefly on running major art exhibitions for the maximum expo¬
sure of members), or the RVBKD of the Weimar Republic, or the
BBK ot the post-war period. The exceptions to this generalization
were the Nazis’ Reichskammer der Bildenden Kiinste and the Com¬
munist VBK, but both of these were top-down mandatory organs of
control not run according to the free choices and interests of the pro¬
fessional membership. Indeed, while those artists who survived purg¬
ing may arguably have been a little more secure economically, the
price of ideological regimentation and public taste directed by one po¬
litical party was too high for most active artists to regret the passing of
these experiments.

218
 Given the long march through constant change in the working
environment over the past century and a half, the visual arts profes¬
sionals in Germany have nevertheless reached some of their goals.
Their organization may have been weak, their calls for support from
state and society far from clear and unified, and their weapons - such
as threatened strikes - few and ineffective. But in the last quarter of
the twentieth century, they had achieved many of their goals as ar¬
ticulated for at least a century. The inclusion of artists in health, old-
age, and disability insurance, adequate regulation of copyright and
other legal matters, public programs for exhibiting, commissioning,
and purchasing the works of contemporary artists, subsidized ateliers
and workspaces, public acceptance of their professional organizations’
definition of ‘artist’ (at least for social security purposes), fair tax
treatment, and dozens of other demands have been addressed. The
current answers to professional artists’ long-standing demands may
not please everybody, but they are clearly the result of long-term ne¬
gotiations between artists’ groups and those representing the political
and societal stakeholders in the art world. One of the signs of the
recent modest success of this ‘professionalization project’ is the rapid
expansion in the number of young people embarking on careers as
artists. Ironically, success may produce another round of ‘overcrowd¬
ing,’ unsellable artworks, and ‘starving artists.’
If a century and a half of German experience tells us anything, it
is that the visual arts need the framework of an autonomous profession
to meet the needs of their larger society. Neither pauperization and the
semi-myths of bohemian life-styles, nor the posturings (whether sin¬
cere or mere ‘marketing’) of visionaries and prophets suffice to attract
and keep dedicated men and women as artists. Yet the profession has
not developed sufficiently secure and predictable career patterns to
become a refuge for the unadventurous. Indeed, even today most art¬
ists accept the necessity of being only ‘part-time professionals,’
needing a ‘day job’ or some other source of income than the sale of
their creative work and services. The very insecurity of the profession
may keep it from stagnation and give it the edge of novelty that both
fascinates and repels contemporary society.

219
 .

-
Further Reading
(in addition to works cited in the text)

Allgemeine Deutsche Kiinstlergenossenschaft, Materia/ien zu einer

Neugestaltung des Gesetzes betreffend das Urheberrecht an den
Werken der bildenden Kiinstler (Munich, 1902).
Batschmann, Oskar, Ausstel/ungskiinstler: Kult und Karriere im
modernen Kunstsystem (Cologne, 1997).
Bartmann, Dominik, Anton Werner. Zur Kunst und Kulturpolitik im
Deutschen Kaiserreich (Berlin, 1985).
Beck, Rainer (ed.), Kunst im Brennpunkt der Akademie (Munich,
1988).
_, and Natalia Kardenar (eds.), Trotzdem Neuanfang 1947. Zur
Wiedereroffnung der Akademie der bildenden Kiinste Dresden
(Dresden, 1997).
Becker, Howard S., Art Worlds (Berkeley, 1982).
Behrmann, S. N., Duveen und die Milliondre. Zur Soziologie des
Kunsthandels in Amerika (Munich, 1960).
Bell-Vilada, Gene H., Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life (Lincoln,
NB, 1996).
Belting, Hans, The Germans and their Art. A Troublesome Relation¬
ship (New Haven, 1998).
Boberg, Jochen, Tilman Fichter, and Eckhard Gillen (eds.),
Industriekultur in Berlin im 19. Jahrhundert: Exerzierfeld der
Moderne (Munich, 1986).
Bologna, Ferdinando, Dalle arti minori all’industrial design. Storia di
una ideologia (Bari, 1972).
Bourdieu, Pierre, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris,
1979).
_, ‘L’invention de la vie artistique,’ Actes de la Recherche en
Sciences Sociales, 2 (1975), 67-94.
Brenner, Hildegard (ed.), Ende einer burgerlichen Kunst-Institution.
Die politische Formierung der Preussischen Akademie der
Kiinste ab 1933 (Stuttgart, 1972).

221
Brohan, Margrit, Hans Baluschek 1870-1935 (Berlin, 1985).
Bruhns, Maike, Anita Ree. Leben und Werk einer Hamburger Maler-
in, 1885-1933 (Hamburg, 1986).
Buddensieg, Tilman and H. Rogge (eds.), Industriekultur. Peter
Behrens und die A.E.G., 1907-14 (Berlin, 1979).
Corinth, Lovis, Selbstbiographie (Leipzig, 1926).
Crow, Thomas E., Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-century
Paris (New Haven, 1985).
De la Gorce, Jerome, Framboise Levaillant, and Alain Merot (eds.), La
condition sociale de l’artiste: XVI-XXsiecles (St. Etienne, 1987).
De Lajarte, Isabelle, Les peintres amateurs: etude sociologique (Paris,
1991).
Der deutsche Kiinstler. Offizielles Organ der wirtschaftlichen Ver-
bande bildender Kiinstler Deutschlands (Leipzig, 1914—20).
Deutscher Ktinstlerbund, Durchsicht. 40 Jahre Bundesrepublik
Deutschland und der Deutsche Kiinstlerbund (Kiel, 1989).
Dollichon, Elfi, Kunstpolitik im ostlichen Nachkriegsdeutschland
(Hamburg, 1992).
Durth, Werner, Deutsche Architekten (Braunschweig, 1985).
Feist, Peter H., Harold Olbrich et al., Geschichte der deutschen Kunst,
4 vols. (Leipzig, 1987-90).
Fischer-Defoy, Christine, Kunst. Macht. Politik. Die Nazifierung der
Kunst- undMusikhochschule in Berlin (Berlin, 1988).
Fleidl, Gottfried et al., Kunst und Lehre am Beginn der Moderne. Die
Wiener Kunstgewerbeschu/e, 1867-1918 (Vienna, 1986).
Gaber, Bernhard, Die Entwicklung des Berufsstandes der freischaff-
enden Architekten (Essen, 1966).
Gaehtgens, Thomas W., Die Berliner Museumsinsel im Deutschen
Kaiserreich. Zur Kulturpolitik der Museen in der wilhelm-
inischen Epoche (Munich, 1992).
Ualode, Gilles, Les ecoles d’art en France (Dijon, 1994).
Gerlach, Peter (ed.), Vom realen Nutzen idealer Bilder. Kunstmarkt
und Kunstvereine (Aachen, 1994).
Gillen, Eckhart (ed.), German Art from Beckmann to Richter. Images
of a Divided Country (Cologne, 1997).
Gimpel, Jean, Contre Part et les artistes (Paris, 1991).
Heffen, Annegret, Der Reichskunstwart. Kunstpolitik in den Jahren
1920-1933 (Essen, 1986).

222
Heskett, John, Design in Germany, 1870-1918 (London, 1986).
Hinz, Berthold, Die Malerei im deutschen Faschismus (Munich,
1974).
Hubrich, Hans-Joachim, Hermann Muthesius. Die Schriften zur Arch-
itektur, Kunstgewerbe, Industrie in der ‘Neuen Bewegung ’
(Berlin, 1980).
Hutt, Wolfgang, Die Diisseldorfer Malerschule 1819-1869 (Leipzig,
1995).
lilies, Arthur, Aus Tagebuch und Werk: 1870-1952 (Hamburg, 1981).
Jeffries, Mathew, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany. The
Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford, 1995).
Kater, Michael H., Composers of the Nazi Era. Eight Portraits (Ox¬
ford, 2000).
_, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany
(New York, 1992).
Kiel, Hanna, Renee Sintenis (Berlin, 1956).
Lenman, Robin, Die Kunst, die Macht und das Geld. Zur Kultur-
geschichte des kaiserlichen Deutschlands (Frankfurt, 1994).
Letheve, Jacques, Daily Life of French Artists in the Nineteenth Cen¬
tury (New York, 1972).
Ludwig, Horst, Kunst, Geld und Politik um 1900 in Miinchen (Berlin,
1986).
Marten, Lu, Die Kiinstlerin (Munich, 1919).
_, Die wirtschaftliche Lage der Kiinstler (Munich, 1914).
Meister, Helga, Kunst in Diisseldorf {Cologne, 1988).
Mommsen, Wolfgang J., Biirgerliche Kultur und kunstlerische Avant-
garde. Kultur und Politik im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1870 bis
1918 (Frankfurt, 1994).
Monnier, Gerard, L ’art et ses institutions en France de la Revolution a
nos jours (Paris, 1995).
Muller, Sebastian, Kunst und Industrie. Ideologic und Organisation
des Funktionalismus in der Architektur (Munich, 1974).
Nebehay, Christian M., Gustav Klimt. Dokumentation (Vienna, 1969).
Nipperdey, Thomas, Wie das Biirgertum die Moderne fand (Berlin,
1988).
Oechslin, Werner, Stilhiilse und Kern. Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos und
der evolutiondrer Weg zur modernen Architektur (Zurich, 1994).

223
 Paas, Sigrun, ‘Kunst und Kiinstler 1902—1933. Eine Zeitschrift in der
Ausandersetzung um den Impressionismus in Deutschland’ (PhD
dissertation Heidelberg, 1975).
Petropoulos, Jonathan, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill,
1996).
Pevsner, Nicolas, Academies of Art, Past and Present (New York,
1973).
Potter, Pamela, Most German of the Arts. Musicology and Society
from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New
Haven, 1998).
Renn, Wendelin (ed.), Siidwestdeutsche Kunst zwischen Tradition und
Moderne, 1914 bis 1945 (Dresden, 1993).
Rheims, Maurice, La vie d’artiste (Paris, 1970).
Rotkirch-Trach, Johann, ‘Die Unterrichtsanstalt des Kunstgewerbe-
museums in Berlin zwischen 1866 und 1933’ (PhD dissertation
Bonn, 1984).
Sachsischer Kunstverein, Hundert Jahre Dresdner Kunstgenossen-
schaft (Dresden, 1938).
Schrader, Barbel, The Golden ’ Twenties. Art and Literature in the
Weimar Republic (New Haven, 1988).
Schuster, Peter-Klaus, Christoph Vitali, and Barbara Butts (eds.),
Lovis Corinth (Munich, 1996).
Schiitte, Jurgen and Peter Sprengel (eds.), Die Berliner Moderne,
1885-1914 (Stuttgart, 1987).
Shedel, James, The New Art Movement in Vienna, 1897-1914 (Palo
Alto, CA, 1981).
Sloane, Joseph C., French Painting between the Past and the Present
(Princeton, 1951).
Steiner, Wendy, Venus in Exile. The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-
Century Art (New York, 2001).
Stuwe, Elisabeth, Der ‘Simplicissimus ’-Karikaturist Thomas Theodor
Heine als Maler (Frankfurt/M., 1978).
Teeuwisse, Nicolas, Vom Salon zur Secession. Berliner Kunstleben
zwischen Tradition und Aufbruch zur Moderne 1871-1900
(Berlin, 1986).
Thieme, Ulrich and Felix Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bild-
enden Kiinstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols.
(Leipzig, 1907-50).

224
Uhr, Horst, Lovis Corinth (Berkeley, 1990).
Vaisse, Pierre, La troisieme republique et les peintres (Paris, 1995).
Verband Bildender Kunstler der DDR, Weg zur sozialistischen Kiinst-
lerorganisation (Berlin, 1985).
Verein Berliner Kunstler, VBK. Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme von
1841 bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1991).
Weber, Jurgen, Entmiindung der Kiinstler. Geschichte und Funktions-
weise der biirgerlichen Kunsteinrichtungen, 3rd edn. (Cologne,
1987).
West, Shearer, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1937. Utopia and
Despair (Manchester, 2000).
Wick, Rainer and Astrid Wick-Kmoch (eds.), Kunstsoziologie (Co¬
logne, 1979).
Die Wiener Sezession, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1986).
Willett, John, The New Sobriety, 1917-1933. Art and Politics in the
Weimar Period (London, 1978).
Windsor, Alan, Peter Behrens. Architect and Designer (London,
1981).
With, Christopher, The Prussian Landeskunstkommission 1862-1911.
A Study in State Subvention of the Arts (Berlin, 1986).
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(Giitersloh, 1963).

225
Index
Aachen, 67-68, 222
Abitur, See certificates, school-leaving
Academie Julian, 47, 86
academies, art, See individual cities
Adenauer, Konrad, 120
advertising, 15-18,51, 113, 132, 143,
154, 164, 180-81, 191,215-16
agriculture, 34
Ahlers-Hestermann, Friedrich, 191-93
Akademischer Rat (Saxony), 136
Albers, Josef, 78
alienation, 22,43, 110, 139, 181
Allies, 50, 83, 120, 161-62
amateurs, 18-19, 37-38, 85, 109, 125—
26, 152,198,202-04,222
America, 10, 14, 16, 23-25, 28, 59-60,
74, 84, 93, 109, 152, 155, 166, 171,
182, 186, 195-197, 200, 202
American Medical Association, 115
Amsterdam, 11
Anhalt, 78
antisemites, 48, 150, 187, 192
applied arts, 19, 36, 41-42, 69-77, 80-
85, 99, 107, 132, 145—47, 152, 159,
162, 164, 182, 200, 205,212
apprentices, 16, 41^12, 60, 70-71
aptitude, 18, 57, 90, 201. See also talent
architecture, 19, 24, 40^14, 52, 58-64,
69, 73-84, 94, 100, 112, 153, 155,
160,164, 188
Art Education Movement, 42, 73, 77, 82
art history, 11, 15, 36, 63, 129, 176
Art Prize (West Berlin), 153, 193
art schools, 15, 36, 40—43, 47, 51, 57,
61,69, 72, 84-100, 106, 111, 151-
57,168,174,183,188
art styles
abstract, 23,25,79, 84, 142, 189,
191
abstract expressionism, 84, 205
art deco, 25
art nouveau, 18, 25, 42—43, 74-75
brutalism, 84
constructivism, 25
cubism, 25, 105, 175, 193, 209
dadaism, 25, 172, 175
expressionism, 25, 77, 129, 175,
204,209-10
fauvism, 105, 175, 209
functionalism, 41
futurism, 25, 150, 172, 175
impressionism, 25, 53, 105, 131,
141, 144, 170, 175, 195,205
modernism, 24, 36, 40—45, 58, 69,
84, 131-38, 142, 193,213,218
naturalism, 24
neoclassicism, 41
neogothic, 67, 75
new objectivity, 25
plein-air, 131
postimpressionism, 105
realism, 24, 42, 49, 64, 84, 105,
163,170, 191
representational, 41, 53, 58, 84,
139, 145, 175, 180,191,
193, 199,213
romanticism, 10, 19-20, 24, 32, 41,
44, 59, 135, 169-70, 206
surrealism, 25, 175
artisans, 28-33, 40-41, 54, 60, 71-77,
82-84, 93-95, 167, 182-83, 212
art unions (Kunstvereine), 34, 37, 125—
29, 140, 190-94, 203,222-24
Artists’ Congress, 121, 124, 162
artists’ organizations, See organizations
Arts and Crafts Movement (England),
73
Arts-and-crafts schools, 36, 45, 58, 62-
82, 89-100, 106-07, 146, 151-53,
183-85, 190-94, 209,216, 222
227
 associations, professional, including
artists, 16, 22, 27, 30, 37, 47, 54,
77,87, 88,106-29, 134-35,140,
144—49, 154-68, 179, 191-99, 209
Allgemeine Deutsche Kiinstler -
genossenschaft (ADKG -
General German Artists
Association), 103, 116-20,
127, 140-48, 155-56, 188,
199,210,214, 221
Assoziation revolutionarer
bildender Kiinstler Deutsch
lands (ASSO -Association of
German Revolutionary Visual
Artists), 64, 150, 172, 191,
214
Berufsverband Bildender
Kiinstler (BBK - Federal
Association of Visual
Artists), 113, 121-25, 150,
164, 193, 198,206,218
Bund deutscher Architekten
(BDA - League of German
Architects), 41, 82-83, 155
Bund deutscher Landesbenifs-
verbande Bildender Kiinstler
(Federation of German
State Professional
Associations of Visual
Artists), 121
Deutsche Biihnengenossenschaft
(DBG - German Stage
Actors Association), 146, 149—
50,162
Deutscher Architekten- und
Ingenieurenverein (DAIV
- Association of
German Architects
and Engineers), 73
Deutscher Biihnenverein (DBV
- German Stage Union), 149
Deutscher Kiinstlerbund (DKB -
German Artists League),
118-20, 120, 125, 142, 193,
199,215, 222
228
Deutscher Schriftsteller- Verband
(DSV - German Writers
Association), 148, 162
Gesellschaft deutscher und
osterreichischer Kunstlerinnen
(GEDOK - Society of
German and Austrian
Women Artists), 125, 186, 193
Genossenschaft zur Verwertung
Musikalischer
A uffiihrungsrechte(GEMA
- Collective for Musical
Performance Rights), 112-13
Genossenschaft Deutscher Ton—
setzer (GDT - Association of
German Composers), 157
Gewerkschaft Kunst (Art Labor
Union), 125, 163
Hamburger Kiinstlerschaft, 87,
129, 191-93
IG Druck und Papier (Industrial
Union Printing and Paper),
125,163
IG Medien (Industrial Union
Media), 125, 164
Kiinstlerclub (Hamburg), 191-92
Reichskammer der Bi/denden
Kiinste (RKBK - Reich
Chamber of Visual Arts), 120,
160, 191,218
Reichskulturkammer (RKK -
Reich Culture Chamber), 37,
48-52, 112, 128, 150, 158-63
Reichsverband Bildender Kiinstler
Deutschlands (RVBKD -
Reich Association of Visual
Artists), 38, 88, 121, 129,
146-61, 191, 199,210,215,
218
Staatsanstalt fur die Genehmigung
Musikalischer Auffuhrungs-
rechte (STAGMA - State
Institution for Granting
Musical Performance
Rights), 112
 Schriftstellerverband (VDS -
Association of German
Authors), 125, 162
Schutzverband Deutscher Schrift-
steller (SDS - Protective
Association of German
Writers), 162,214
Verband Bildender Kiinstler
Wiirttembergs
(Association of Visual Artists
Wurttemberg), 161
Verband Bildender Kiinstler/DDR
(Association of Visual Artists
GDR), 161,202
VERDI (United Service Industries
‘Super-union’), 125
Verein Berliner Kiinstler (VBK —
Union of Berlin Artists), 108,
142,146,152,225
Verein Berliner Kiinstlerinnen
(VKB - Union of Berlin
Women Artists), 146, 151-52
Werkbund, 11, 42-45, 76-78, 82,
193
Atattirk, Kemal, 68
ateliers and studios, 31, 36, 40, 44, 61-
68, 72, 80-85, 91,98-100, 110-11,
122, 137, 160, 168, 172-75, 194,
219
auction houses, 50, 104
Austria, 28, 41, 52, 67, 188
Austro-Hungarian Empire, 62, 116
Authors’ Congress, 162
autodidacts, 58-59, 211
avant-garde, 48, 58, 72, 77, 119-20,
128, 132—41, 150-52, 159, 171-79,
204,210,215
backgrounds, social, 40, 44, 98, 116,
157, 184, 187
Baden, 10, 126, 128, 194
Baluschek, Hans, 147-48, 214, 222
Baselitz, Georg, 163
Basic Law (German Constitution), 50,
200
Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 67
Bauhaus, 41-45, 69, 77-84, 185
Baumeister, Willi, 120
Bavaria, 11,81, 130, 187-88, 194,214
Becher, Johannes R., 153
Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (BKR
- Netherlands Federal Arts
Project), 196-97
Behrens, Peter, 44-M5, 76, 100, 155,
222,225
Berend, Charlotte, 98
Berlin, 10-11, 43-47, 52-57, 61-84, 88,
95-100, 106-24, 130-43, 146-56,
159-60, 170, 174, 178, 189,
193-94, 206,217, 221-25
Berlin National Gallery, 68, 130
Bernhard, Thomas, 174
Beruf See calling
Beuys, Josef, 84-85, 153, 176-79, 213,
217
Bildung, 32, 42, 73
Bildungsburgertum (cultivated middle
class), 16,46, 158,203
Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider group), 58,
131
Bohemians, 34, 108, 145, 173-78, 185,
219
Boll, Heinrich, 125
Bonheur, Rosa, 94
Bosch, Robert, 44
Bouguereau, Adolphe William, 94, 175
bourgeoisie, 21, 41, 97, 109, 114, 126,
175, 178, 182, 190, 203. See also
Bildungsburgertum
Brecht, Bert, 113
Bremen, 130, 194
Breslau, 69, 76, 88, 194
Breuer, Marcel, 78
Britain, 20-21, 30, 33, 67, 74-76, 116,
155, 161-62, 188, 200. See also
England
Briicke (,Bridge’ group), 58, 131
Bruckmann, Peter, 44
Brunschwig, Henri, 32
Budapest, 47
budgets, arts, 69, 131, 159, 197
Biilow, Joachim von, 99
229
 Burckhardt, Jakob, 139
calling, 10,38,42,57,91, 115, 165,
186,200-01
Calvin, Jean, 201
canon, traditional aesthetic, 20-24,
28-31, 39, 52-58, 66, 80, 84, 105,
110, 205,213
career, as professional pattern, 9, 15-18,
24, 32, 45-51, 55-59, 64-67, 75-
76, 86-87,90,94,99,104-08,
138, 141, 147, 152, 160, 176, 180-
81, 191, 197-201,206-10,216-19
Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 14
Carolsfeld, Julius Schnorr von, 64
Cassirer, Bruno, 139
Cassirer, Paul, 134, 136-37
Catholics, 34, 187-89, 190
Catholic Center Party, 214
Christian Democratic Union (CDU),
121, 162,214
certification, professional, 16, 34-35,
46, 54, 58, 61, 65, 87, 91, 95, 182-
83, 216
school-leaving, 57, 94, 177, 182
chambers, professional and artists’, 116,
148, 153-60,210
charlatans, 35, 38, 102
chemists, profession, 23, 34, 46
Chicago, 32, 78
Churchill, Sir Winston, 18
clergy, profession, 16, 18, 22, 29, 89,
186-87, 201,213
collections, art, 34, 53, 126, 130-32,
138
collectors, influence of, 11, 15, 19, 37-
38, 97, 109, 118, 133, 137, 195,
199, 203,218
Cologne, 45, 49, 76, 91, 99, 124, 180,
182, 193,221-25
commissions, art, 30, 39, 67, 79, 84, 98,
100, 119-24, 130, 136-37, 145,
159-60, 175, 186, 209
commodity, art as, 22, 33, 104, 197,
211,218
communism, 49, 64, 77, 193, 214, 218
230
compensation, professional, 48^19, 71,
218
composers, 9, 93, 100, 103, 112, 157,
169, 202
computer-generated media, 17, 25, 84,
113,178
connoisseurs, 11,24, 34, 109, 129, 131,
133,199,204
coordination (Nazi Gleichschaltung),
69, 150, 159,210
copyright, 22, 103, 112-13, 117, 146—
49, 157,163,218-19
Corinth, Lovis, 98, 108, 119, 167, 224,
225
Cornelius, Peter, 189
Corot, Jean B, 175
corporatism, 21, 48, 111, 1 13, 155-57,
209
creativity, 18, 42, 70-73, 80, 96, 123,
169,199
credentials, professional, 87, 94, 164
critics, art, 11, 15-23, 38, 44, 49, 53, 66,
71,77, 107, 110, 117-19, 132-35,
165, 169, 178, 197-99,213,218
Crystal Palace, 70, 127, 140, 188
curators, 11, 15, 30, 38, 53, 129-33,
138, 165, 199,218
curriculum, 35, 60-65, 71-72, 81, 94,
100, 106, 142, 151,209,217
da Vinci, Leonardo, 168
Dachau (art colony), 195
Dante Alighieri, 10
Darmstadt, 162, 194
Darwin, Charles, 90, 169
David, Jacques Louis, 11, 64, 94
day jobs, 18, 48, 51, 100, 219
dealers, art, 11, 19, 38, 53, 58, 101, 122,
134-38, 148, 195, 199
Degenerate Art Exposition, 109, 215
degrees, higher educational, 16, 24, 29,
37-38,49-50, 55, 105, 128, 133,
136, 181-87, 191-93,204-06
M.F.A., 183
denazification, 161, 192
dentists, 23, 46, 93
deprofessionalization, 159, 176-77, 206
design, professional, 14-18, 41-46, 70-
89, 100, 107, 113, 132, 140, 145,
149, 164, 168, 173, 185, 198,215,
221
Dessau, 78
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB -
German Federation of Labor
Unions), 162
dictatorship, 48-50, 179, 188,215
Diederichs, Eugen, 44
dilettantes, See amateurs
distribution, cultural and artistic, 14, 34,
39,124,166
Dix, Otto, 64, 172
doctors, profession, 16-27, 30, 35-38,
57, 86-90, 96, 100-06, 116-17,
126, 145-48, 154, 163-68, 177,
181-86, 196-98, 206-11,217
documenta (Kassel), 120, 179-80, 205
drawing, 46-47, 52, 59-63, 70, 82-87,
152,164, 203
Dresden, 11, 43, 58, 61-65, 73, 81, 88,
90, 97-98, 131, 137, 183-87, 194,
221,224
Dressier, Willy, 155
droit de suite, See succession law
Duchamp, Marcel, 20, 85, 176-77
dues, professional, 116, 125, 155-60
Durand-Ruel, Paul, 137
Diirer, Albrecht, 15, 70
Diisseldorf, 11, 58, 63-67, 76, 84, 91,
108-09, 117, 120, 177, 186, 193-
95, 223
education, professional preparation, 15-
19, 31,46, 50, 73-74, 83, 95, 154-
56, 164-65, 182,186
Ein Protest deutscher Kiinstler, 133
employees, professionals as, 51-55, 90,
99,122,128,144,149, 153-54,
184
engineers, 16-23, 34-37, 41,46, 79, 82,
96, 100, 105, 110, 117, 145-47,
155,165,182-86, 197, 201-06,
216-17
England, 29, 46-47, 66, 73-75, 192
engraving, 19, 22, 39, 61-63, 101, 128
entertainment industry, 19, 149, 178,
204-05,215
entrepreneurs, artists as, 21, 51, 100,
103, 110, 145, 150
commercial, 43^14, 53, 102, 128
estates, artists’, 94, 97-98
ethics, and professions, 20, 115, 148,
154, 201,216
European Union (EU), 206
examinations, 41, 82-83, 87
exhibition practices, 15, 20-21, 30-32,
44-53,87,91, 102, 111, 116-29,
134-40, 144-46, 151-52, 159-61,
175, 188-89, 194, 199, 207,211,
218
expositions, 18, 21, 67, 70-76, 99, 116,
120,129,137-40,171,179,203.
See also salons, shows
fascism, 25, 48, 84
Free Democratic Party (FDP), 121, 162,
214
Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),
44, 50, 54, 72, 83, 89, 99, 120-21,
150, 162-63, 177, 182, 200
fees, professional, 19, 22, 35, 46, 48, 72,
104-12, 146-48, 160, 163, 198,
212, 217-18
Feininger, Lyonel, 77-78
feminization, of professions, 184,212
Feuerbach, Anselm, 114
fdm, 18, 149, 181,215
Fluxus (group), 85, 177
Folgerecht, See succession law
foundations, 21, 38, 76, 192
France, 14, 21,23, 28-33, 40, 45-47,
54, 66,67,97, 114, 116, 131, 133,
139, 143, 156, 173, 179, 186, 188,
199-203,222-23
Frankfurt am Main, 43, 45, 62, 96-97,
111, 121, 162, 185, 194, 199, 223-
24
Frederick II, 32, 202
Frederick III, 108, 141
231
 Friedrich, Caspar David, 64, 114
furniture, 18, 22, 43-44, 53, 74-75,
137
galleries, 53-54, 104, 111, 118, 124,
127, 137-39, 165 , 180, 194, 217
Gautier, Theophile, 21
gender, 46, 151, 184
genius, as desideratum for artists, 9-10,
14-25, 32-33, 51, 59-60, 90, 96,
100, 141, 167-69, 186,217
genres, 14, 21, 30, 39, 67, 127-28, 169,
190, 195
Gennan Communist Party (KPD), 64,
172
German Democratic Party, 44
German Democratic Republic (GDR),
49-50, 63, 102, 111, 161-63, 193,
202
German Empire, 34, 53, 62, 68-72, 89,
99, 103,116, 143, 153, 187
Gennan General Electric (AEG), 44,
100
Germanic Confederation, 27, 117
Giotto di Bondone, 168
Giuliani, Rudolf, 20
Glaspalast, 127, 188
Gleichscha/tung, See coordination, Nazi
Goebbels, Josef, 112, 128, 150, 157-60,
191
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 31-33,
174
Goya, Francisco de, 170
graduates, as candidates for professions,
9, 22, 29-36, 41, 45^16, 61-68, 72,
79, 83,90-95, 107, 157, 174, 182-
86, 191,203,217
graphics, 22, 39, 63, 75, 101, 111-13,
125-28, 160, 164,
Grass, Gunther, 125
Great Berlin Art Exposition, 133, 147
Great Depression, 88, 106, 158-59
Green Party, 177, 214
Gropius, Walter, 44, 77-78, 214
Grosz, Georg, 172, 179
Grundig, Lea, 64
232
Grundig, Hans, 64
guilds, 27-33, 42, 70, 93, 202, 205, 209,
216
Gutenberg, Johann, 111
Gymnasium, 59, 63, 82, 94, 97, 138,
147, 177, 192
Hamburg, 10,42, 87, 126, 129, 133,
190-95,214, 222-23
handicrafts, 28, 33, 40^14, 63, 70, 77-
85, 89,97,101,168-69,204
Hauser, Arnold, 11
Heartfield, John, 64, 172
Heckel, Ernst, 58, 120
Hegel, Georg W. F., 60
Heimat, as subject, 159, 195
Heine, Thomas Theodor, 10-11, 136,
224
Heisig, Bernhard, 49
Hellwag, Fritz, 44
hero, cult of, 10, 14, 30, 36, 96, 167-70,
181,207
Hesse (state), 194
Heuss, Theodor, 44, 162
Hippocrates, 27
history painting, 30, 38-39, 67, 84, 145
Hitler, Adolf, 9, 18, 20, 23, 48, 58, 64,
69, 84, 107, 150, 153, 157-63,
178-79, 187-89, 224
hobby artists, 37-38, 59, 93. See also
amateurs
Hofer, Karl, 120, 153
Holy Roman Empire, 29, 31, 126
Holz, Amo, 147
honoraria, 22
Hook, Sidney, 10, 14
House of Gennan Art, 189
Hungary, 49, 67
lilies, Arthur, 191-92
inclusiveness, practitioners in
professional organizations, 37-38,
51,54, 117-18, 148
incomes, professional, 18, 28, 34-38,
47, 51-55, 61, 86, 94-115, 118,
123, 126, 137, 144-45, 159-60,
 172-73, 182-84, 198-203,
211-12,219
independent contractors, 19,41, 144,
155,184
inflation, 105, 128, 152, 158
Ingres, Jean Auguste, 94, 102
innovation, artistic, 10, 15, 20, 24-25,
28-36, 40, 43, 66, 69-71, 79-80,
93, 132,142,173-78,183,205,
207, 213-19
insurance
contributions, 21-22, 55, 132, 145,
151
disability, 50, 53, 144, 219
illness, 35, 53, 144, 176, 206
old age, 50-53, 122-23, 144
social security, 50-55, 96, 104,
113, 117, 122-25, 143-51,
155, 163-65, 196, 206,
211,219
intellectual property, 113, 117
Interest Community of Art, 38, 47, 59,
66, 129, 165, 171,202-04
interest groups, 112, 115, 146
Italy, 29, 61, 67, 139, 141, 172, 192
Itten, Johannes, 77-78
Jackh, Ernst, 44
Janssen, Peter, 67
jewelry, 41, 70, 102, 168
Jews, 48, 134, 152, 159, 187
journalists, profession, 38, 122, 125,
139,159,164, 194
journals, art, 39, 95, 139
Dresslers Kunsthandbuch, 95, 139,
148
Der deutsche Kiinstler, 148, 156,
222
Kunst fur Alle, 118, 131, 139
Kunst und Kiinstler, 139, 224
Kunst und Wirstschaft, 148
Kunstchronik, 139
Kunstwart, 139
Propyl den, 31, 33
Sachses Salon der Kunst, 139
Werkstatt der Kunst, 148
journeymen, 28, 213
judges, profession, 20, 30, 51, 135, 146,
154,182,184
Jugendstil, See art styles, art nouveau
juries, 19-20, 52, 67, 117-19, 133, 135,
140-41, 168, 180
Kalckreuth, Count Leopold von, 119,
190
Kammern, See chambers, professional
Kampf um die Kunst, 59, 133-34, 138
Kampfbundfur Deutsche Kultur, 150,
191-92
Kandinsky, Wassily, 77-78, 181
Kant, Immanuel, 10, 31-33, 60, 169
Karlsruhe, 10,47, 120, 126, 128, 141,
194
Kassel, 45, 88, 194, 205
Kaulbach, Wilhelm, 189
Keats, John, 60
Kerschensteiner. Georg, 44
Kessler, Count Harry, 76, 118-19, 138,
199
Kiefer, Anselm, 39, 102
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 58
Klee, Paul, 77-78
Klinger, Max, 119, 136
Kokoschka, Oskar, 64, 136
Kollwitz, Kathe, 47, 136, 147, 151
Konigsberg, 27, 69, 88, 194
Koppel, Gerda, 191, 193
Kulturabgabe, 104
Kunst am Bau, See percentage for the
arts
Kunsterziehungsbewegung, See Art
Education Movement
Kunstgewerbeschule, See arts-and-crafts
schools
Kiinstlerfonds, 125
Kiinstlerkammer, See chambers
Kunstverein, See art unions
labor, organized, 19, 22, 27, 33-38, 50,
88, 107-10, 121-25, 157, 162-64,
213
Lachnit, Wilhelm, 64
233
 Landeskunstkommission (Prussia), 136,
142, 225
Landeskunstschule (Hamburg), 190, 193
landscape (genre), 14-16, 39, 46, 63,
100-01, 127, 152, 190-95, 199
Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry, 94
Langbehn, Julius, 73
Lange, Helene, 152
Larson, Magali S., 115
law, profession, 16-22, 29-37, 46-47,
57, 86-96, 100-05, 109-10, 114-
17, 122-26,135,148-54,163-68,
181-87, 196-206, 209,216-17
Leibl, Wilhelm, 175
Leipzig, 74-75, 95, 105, 156-57, 193-
94, 222-24
Leistikow, Walter, 98, 119
Lenbach, Franz von, 73, 94, 114, 141,
189
licensing, professional, 16, 35-37, 46,
52, 87, 116, 154, 164-65, 198
Lichtenstein, Roy, 113
Lichtwark, Alfred, 42, 73, 129, 133,
190-91
Liebermann, Max, 94, 102, 119, 131—
36, 146, 175, 187
life classes, See nudes
lithograph (genre), 39, 101, 154, 193
lobbying, professional, 34, 115, 146,
201
London, 11-10, 21-23, 32, 37, 47, 52,
70-75, 87, 140, 188, 195, 223, 225
lotteries, of artworks, 126, 151
Louis XIV, 32
Ludwig I, 126, 188
Ludwig II, 130, 188
Lueger, Karl, 48
Luitpold (Regent of Bavaria), 188
Luther, Martin, 201
Macintosh, Charles Rennie, 75
Macke, August, 58
Malkasten, 117
malpractice, professional, 20, 52, 217
Manet, Edouard, 94, 109
Mann, Thomas, 174
234
Marcks, Gerhard, 77-78
Marcus, Otto, 103, 146-50, 156
Marees, Hans von, 113
marginalization, social, 96, 110
marinescape (genre), 39, 132, 195
market for artists’ services, 14-17, 20-
27, 30-40, 50-51, 68, 85-90, 100-
16, 124, 131, 134, 137—40, 144,
154-55, 159-66, 176-86, 190,
195-218
marriages, artists’ 18, 67-71, 94, 98,
107-08
master classes, 66, 83
masters, 28, 34, 59, 60, 147, 176, 195,
204,213
Matare, Ewald, 120
Matisse, Henri, 192, 193
Mayer, Hannes, 78
medals, 40, 67, 102, 209
media, artistic, 17, 23, 39^40, 84, 101,
113, 125, 162, 176, 191,205
medicine, profession, 17-23, 29, 34-38,
46^7, 110, 116, 187,201,206,
216-17
Meier-Graefe, Julius, 15, 21
Menzel, Adolf von, 67, 138, 214
Millet, Jean F., 175
Modersohn-Becker, Paula, 47, 151
Moholy-Nagy, Lazslo, 77
Moltke, Count Helmuth von, 59
Mondrian, Piet, 180
monopoly, as professional strategy, 17,
28-30,35,46,91, 144, 202,211,
217
monuments, 22, 66-69, 84, 131, 190—
92, 216
moonlighting (secondary employment),
18,184
Morisot, Berthe, 109
Morris, William, 73, 75, 77
Muche, Georg, 77
Munch, Edvard, 131, 143, 170
Munich, 11, 15,21,31,36, 47, 52,58-
63, 72-79, 94-103, 110, 117, 126—
31,140-45, 158, 170-78, 187-95,
221-24
Miinter, Gabriele, 47
murals, 14, 67, 74, 84, 101, 159
Murger, Henry, 173
museums, 22-24, 30, 34, 53-54, 70,
122-127, 130-31, 139, 155, 180,
188-189, 194-95,204,213-16
directors, 58, 136
Glyptothek (Munich), 188
Kunsthalle (Hamburg), 126, 129,
133, 190, 194
Museum of Modem Art (New
York), 113, 205
Nationalgalerie (Berlin), 130-31
Pinakothek (Munich), 188
Victoria and Albert (London), 71
music, profession, 15, 19, 50, 59-60,
103, 112-13, 125, 134, 145-49,
156-59, 163-64, 181-82, 188,
203-05,215-16
Muthesius, Hermann, 43—45, 71, 74-76,
100, 107, 171,223
mutual aid, 117, 144
myth of the artist. See hero
mythology, 60, 213
name recognition, 104-05, 199
Napoleon, 31, 34, 67, 130
National Endowment for the Arts, 197
National Socialist German Workers’
Party (NSDAP), See Nazis
Naumann, Friedrich, 44
Nazis, 37, 48-52, 63-72, 78-79, 84, 89,
103, 109-12, 120, 147-62, 172,
176-78, 189-93, 210, 214-18, 223
Netherlands, 29, 30, 161
Neumann, Eckhard, 96
New York, 14, 20, 46, 60, 74, 98, 109,
110, 127, 138, 141, 168, 173, 179,
195,204,211,223-24
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73, 167
Nolde, Emil, 136, 172, 179,210
North Rhine-Westphalia (state), 10, 121,
177
Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Kunst
(Emergency Community of German
Art), 121
Novembergruppe (group), 214
nudes, in art and education, 47, 60, 151
numerus clausus (admission limit), 210,
217
Nuremberg, 70, 194
official art, 49, 67-68, 86, 135, 152
Olbrich, Josef, 171, 222
old age, See insurance
old masters, 137, 210
originality, as desideratum for artists,
10, 14, 48, 131. See also
innovation; rarity
organizations, professional, 10, 18-19,
52, 87, 96, 112-30, 139, 144-58,
166, 186, 191, 197-98, 202-19
artists’, 15, 18, 23-24,38-40,
50-55, 87-88, 104, 157-65, 189,
193, 198. See also associations
ornamentation, 44, 71
overhead, professional expense, 40, 99-
100,110
overproduction, professional services,
28, 57, 89-90, 95, 118, 196-200,
219
painter-princes, 94, 213
Paris, 11, 20-23, 30-32, 40, 47-52, 58,
61, 67, 86, 93-94, 135-45, 173-80,
186, 188, 192-203,221-25
Parsons, Talcott, 115
pastors, profession, 30, 47, 184, 201.
See also clergy
patronage, 19-21,29-35 50-53, 79, 93,
101, 113, 122-25, 130-38, 143,
188-94, 202,214-18
Paul, Bruno, 44, 76, 81, 95, 132, 136,
140
Pechstein, Max, 136, 146
Penck, A. R. (Ralf Winkler), 58, 102,
163
pensions, 37, 149, 151-52, 192. See also
insurance
percentage for the arts, 122, 161, 163
performance, artistic, 9, 50, 54, 61, 84,
112,125,149, 177, 204
235
 Pevsner, Nicolas, 11, 224
photography, 17, 22-24, 36, 39, 47, 59,
66, 178, 190, 204
physicians, See doctors
Picasso, Pablo, 11, 39, 58, 102, 138,
170, 175, 181,204
Plato, 29
Poelzig, Hans, 69, 76
Poland, 49
Pollock, Jackson, 180
portrait (genre), 14, 39, 47, 67-68,
98, 101-07, 114, 152, 189-93,
223
poverty, among professionals, 17-20,
50, 79, 95-100, 137, 159-61, 173 ,
206
Povorina, Alexandra A., 193
practical training, 83-86, 107
practitioners, professional, 15-17, 24,
34-38, 57, 87, 99-105, 114-15,
154-55, 164, 184-87, 201-04, 207,
211-17
prestige, 22, 36^10, 47, 61, 80, 86, 142,
169
prices, for art works, 17-18, 28, 39,
101-10, 135—44
prints, See graphics
private instruction, 46-48, 53, 64-66,
70, 78,85-90,132,151,190,193,
210,217
Prix de Rome, 47, 61, 86
prizes, 20, 30, 47, 55, 86-91, 102, 124—
25, 146, 152, 209
professional organizations, See organza-
tions, professional
professionalization, 19, 34-35,46, 115,
144, 165,207,211,216-19
professors, 20, 30, 36, 46-51, 58-72,
77-91, 99, 114, 119-22, 136, 151,
168, 182, 186, 217
proletariat, 84, 90-99, 117, 147, 158,
162, 172,211-15
prophets, 206, 213, 219
Prussia, 28, 32, 69-80, 88, 95, 106, 116,
130, 136, 151, 171, 188, 194, 202,
214
236
publishers, 54, 103, 104, 112, 122, 148,
162, 194, 215
Puccini, Giacomo, 173
quacks, 16, 35, 87, 156
radicalism, artists’, 122, 173
rarity, as desideratum in the arts, 14, 41,
61,97-99, 111, 139, 144, 168, 179,
183, 192, 203-04. See also
innovation; originality
Rau, Johannes, 177
Rea/gymnasium, 74, 82, 191
rectoral constitution, 63-65, 81
Renaissance, 19, 28-30, 42, 67, 70, 139,
168, 171,217
reproduction, methods and rights, 15,
22, 39, 54, 101-03, 111-12, 122-
27, 131, 149,210,218
resale, art works, 22, 104, 122, 218
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 94
Richter, Gerhard, 163
Riemerschmid, Richard, 44, 81, 100,
136,193
Rockwell, Norman, 39, 216
Roeber, Fritz, 66
Rosenberg, Alfred, 150, 191-92
Rousseau, ,Douanier’ Theodore, 58
Rover, Valesca, 191
Royal Academy, 29, 73, 87, 94
royalties, 112, 125, 146, 149
Rupprecht, Tini, 47
Ruskin, John, 75
Russia, 28-29, 192, 195
Sachs, Hans, 77
sales, art, 99, 102, 106, 111, 122-23,
133, 138-39, 156, 160, 189, 209
salon des refuses, 140
salons, 20-21,30-34, 52, 67, 116, 126—
27, 135—44, 180, 188, 207,211-17
Saxony, 11, 62-63, 88, 97, 136, 183,
194
Schiller, Friedrich, 10, 128
Schlemmer, Oskar, 77
Schmidt-Hellerau, Karl, 44
Schmitt-Rottluff, Karl, 58, 120
Schultze-Naumburg, Paul, 44
Schumacher, Fritz, 44
Schwitters, Kurt, 20
scientists, 10, 16, 93, 110, 197
sculpture (genre), 14, 19, 22-24, 40-41,
49, 60-67, 84, 94, 100-03, 111-12,
131, 139, 145-53, 159-60, 164,
170, 179, 185, 189, 195,203
secessions, 44, 52-53, 68, 82, 118-19,
129, 132, 141-46, 189-91, 199,
213-14, 225
Berlin, 119, 134, 147
Munich, 52, 189
Vienna, 171
Sedlmeyer, Hans, 110
Semper, Gottfried, 64, 73
Seneca, 27
sensibility, 14, 27, 28, 169
Sezession, See secessions
Shaftesbury, Anthony A. C., First Earl
of, 169
Shakespeare, William, 10, 128
shows, art, 15-22, 48-55, 61, 65, 70,
90-91, 109, 116-18, 126-41, 148,
152, 156, 170-81, 186, 192, 199,
203-05,209,215-17
shysters, 20, 87
Siebelist, Arthur, 192
Sintenis, Renee, 152-53, 223
Slevogt, Max, 119, 136-37, 146
Smith, Adam, 33, 165
Social Democratic Party (SPD), 147, 214
social security, See insurance
Socialist Unity Party (SED - East
German Communists), 64, 111,
214
solidarity, professional, 15, 162, 174,
213
Sonderweg, 9
Soviets, 25, 48, 64, 84, 113, 153, 163,
202
Sozialabgabe, 54
Spain, 28-29, 58, 67
specialization, professional, 38, 44, 116,
195
speculation, in art, 102-04, 109, 128,
137, 179, 197, 200,210-18
St. Louis, 74, 118-19, 143, 199
Stalin, Josef, 49, 69, 84
Stalinists, 48, 50, 52, 215
starving artists, 16-18, 34, 114, 168,
211-12,219
statistics, on professions, 53-55, 88-89,
90, 96-97, 108, 182-84
status, social, 16-18, 28-31, 37-38, 47,
65, 80-85, 94, 97, 100, 110, 118,
146, 164, 169, 176, 181-84, 202-
04, 209-12
still life (genre), 39, 127, 152, 190, 199
Strauss, Richard, 113, 157
strikes, as professional weapons, 30, 84,
125, 146-50, 198,219
students, 19, 36, 40, 46-101, 107, 128,
145-51, 162, 168, 174, 177, 183—
87, 196,210-17
Stuttgart, 11, 15,61, 111, 120, 140, 161,
167, 190, 194, 203,221,224
succession law, 104, 112, 122
surgeons, 35, 38, 167
Switzerland, 116
talent, as desideratum for artists, 10, 14-
16, 24, 32-33,51,57-60, 80, 85,
90, 98,135,141,167-68,186,
213,216
taxes, 19, 53-54, 96, 104, 122-23, 146-
48, 156, 163, 184,201,206,213,
219
teachers, 15-23, 34, 49-51, 57-65, 71-
90, 97-108,116-22,126,142-53,
181-85, 191-93, 197, 203-11,217
technical colleges, 40, 36, 58,66, 80-82
television and broadcasting,
17, 84, 145, 181,215
Tessenow, Heinrich, 64
textiles, 70, 185
Third Reich, 9, 20, 79, 110, 157, 160,
92, 224. See also Nazis
Thoma, Ludwig, 119
Tinguely, Jean, 179, 204
Tokyo, 75, 211
237
 Tschudi, Hugo von, 131-32, 143
Turner, Joseph M. W., 94
Typisienmg, 76-80
Uecker, Gunther, 163
Uhde, Fritz von, 119
Ulm,78, 194
underemployment, 160, 181
unions, and professionals 38, 48-50, 73,
95, 116-25, 129, 149, 158-64
universities, 9, 22, 29-36, 46, 57-66, 71,
80-87, 94-97, 110, 151, 177, 181-
84, 191,212,216
utopianism, 42, 168, 170
van de Velde, Henry, 44, 76, 119
van der Rohe, Mies, 78, 79
Vasari, Giorgio, 22, 168
Vereinigte Staatsschule, 68, 71, 81, 146
Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst,
113,125
video (genre), 18, 25, 149, 204
Vienna, 41, 48, 58, 62, 71, 110, 145,
194, 222-25
Viktoria (Empress of Frederick III), 132
Vinnen, Carl, 133, 134, 136
vocation. See calling
Voltaire, Franyois M. A., 202
Wagener, Joachim, 130
Wagner, Richard, 28, 41, 188, 214, 223
Wallot, Paul, 64
Warhol, Andy, 15, 85, 102, 176, 205
Weimar, 31, 50, 53, 64, 68-69, 76-79,
238
87, 112, 132, 147-59, 162, 187,
196,218, 224-25
Weimar Republic, 50, 53, 69, 79, 87,
112, 147—48, 158, 162, 187, 196,
218,224
Weiss, E. R., 152
Weissensee, 193
welfare, 51-55, 88-90, 146, 206
Werner, Anton von, 57, 62, 67-68, 81,
117-18, 141-42, 156, 175,217,
221-23
Wettin (dynasty), 62
Whistler, James A. McN., 137
Wilhelm I, 67
Wilhelm II, 67, 75, 119-20, 131-34,
141-M2, 147, 170
Winterhalter, Franz Xaver, 94
Wittelsbach (dynasty), 188
women, in the arts, 17-18, 35, 41, 45-
48,71,78-80, 86, 89, 97-100,
108-09, 114, 125, 151-53, 169,
175, 183-86, 193,206,212,219
woodcuts (genre), 39, 63
workshops, 43, 71, 74, 77, 122
160-64, 172, 177, 192-93,209
Worpswede (art colony), 133, 195
writers, profession, 9, 14, 19, 49-50, 57,
100-03, 111-12, 125, 148, 153-55,
162-63, 169, 194
Wurttemberg, 161, 194
Ziegler, Adolf, 158-60
Zille, Heinrich, 214
Zola, Emile, 21
German Linguistic and Cultural Studies
Edited by Peter Rolf Lutzeier

At a time when German Studies faces a serious challenge to its identity and
position in the European and international context, this new series aims to
reflect the increasing importance of both culture (in the widest sense) and
linguistics to the study of German in Britain and Ireland.
GLCS will publish monographs and collections of essays of a high scholarly
standard which deal with German in its socio-cultural context, in multilingual
and multicultural settings, in its European and international context and with
its use in the media. The series will also explore the impact on German society
of particular ideas, movements and economic trends and will discuss curricu¬
lum provision and development in universities in the United Kingdom and
the Republic of Ireland. Contributions in English or German will be welcome.

Volume 1 Peter Rolf Lutzeier (ed.): German Studies: Old and New Challenges
Undergraduate Programmes in the United Kingdom
and the Republic of Ireland
249 pp. 1998. ISBN 3-906757-59-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-3411-6

Volume 2 Nicholas Railton: German Evangelical Alliance and the Third Reich
An Analysis of the «Evangelisches Allianzblatt»
265 pp. 1998. ISBN 3-906757-67-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-3412-4

Volume 3 Felicity Rash: The German Language in Switzerland

Multilingualism, Diglossia and Variation
321 pp. 1998. ISBN 3-906757-68-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-3413-2

Volume 4 Eva Kolinsky: Deutsch und tiirkisch leben

Bild und Selbstbild der tiirkischen Minderheit in Deutschland
239 Seiten. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-97-8

Volume 5 Alfred D. White: The One-Eyed Man

Social Reality in the German Novel 1848-1968
189 pp. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-32-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5068-5
Volume 6 Joanne Maria McNally: Creative Misbehaviour
The Use of German Kabarett within Advanced Foreign Language
Learning Classrooms
297 pp. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-82-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5088-X

Volume 7 Theo Harden & Arnd Witte (eds.): The Notion of Intercultural
Understanding in the Context of German as a Foreign Language
290 pp. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-63-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5079-0

Volume 8 Gabrielle Hogan-Brun (ed.): National Varieties of German

outside Germany
A European Perspective
275 pp. 2000. ISBN 3-906765-58-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5098-7

Volume 9 Holger Briel & Andreas Kramer (eds.): In Practice -

Adorno, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
205 pp. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-85-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5601-2

Volume 10 Alan Cornell, Klaus Fischer & Ian F. Roe (eds.):

Valency in Practice / Valenz in der Praxis
279 pp. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-010-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6279-9

Volume 11 Forthcoming.

Volume 12 Charles E. McClelland: Prophets, Paupers, or Professionals?

A Social History of Everyday Visual Artists in Modern Germany,
1850-Present
238 pp. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-062-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6878-9
 0 64 0497275 8

DATE DUE
DATE DE RETOUR

CARR MCLEAN 38-296

 o
12 Volume German

n
Linguistic and

Cultural
S
How did German visual artists relate to the broader society around
them between the invention of the artist as “genius” and visionary, in
Studies
the Romantic era of the nineteenth century, and the struggle to
overcome pauperization and social marginalization through collective
professionalization during much of the twentieth? The collective - if
not always agreed - aspirations and expectations of artists in this long
period are best reflected in the schools and academies that came to
dominate their education, in their professional associations, and their
strategies of marketing and economic well-being. Like members of
other German learned professions, visual artists struggled to achieve
autonomy from state, church, and other powerful social and economic
forces while also raising and maintaining ever-evolving professional
standards. Like other professions, they were forced also to make com¬
promises with power and money, losing many battles in the process.
The subjectivity of values surrounding art, the de facto economic status
of artists as small entrepreneurs unable or unwilling to submit fully to
corporate, bureaucratic, or union organization, and the practical
inability to limit their numbers all conspired to undermine fully
successful professionalization. By bringing the tools of social history
to bear, this book sheds rare illumination on the little-known history
of the many “everyday” German artists, rather than on the better-
known works of the few.

Charles E. McClelland obtained his BA (Hons) at Princeton in

German and European Studies in 1962, his MA from Yale in 1963
and his PhD also from Yale 1967, both in history. He has taught
modern European and German history at Princeton, the University of
Pennsylvania, and the University of New Mexico, where he was also
Director of European Studies. His most recent publications include
Professions in Modern Eastern Europe/Professionen im Modernen
Osteuropa, with editor’s introduction (Berlin, 1995) and The German
Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions and their
Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era
(Cambridge, 1991).