Berlin

And part of it he duly became. Soon the dwarfish and exceptionally ugly painter—he ruefully admitted that on Judgment Day no woman would be able to point to him and say, “You have me on your conscience, old Menzel”—became a fixture in the high society scene, a voyeuristic presence at every party and ball. Ever the attentive observer, he chronicled these occasions in close detail, providing a rich visual history of upper-class Berlin life at the turn of the century. Like his portraits of the Prussian masters, these works tended to be reverential, containing little hint of the grossness under the glitter. As a reward for his piety, Menzel was heaped with titles and medals: he became Professor of Art at the Royal Academy and, on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s orders, won the Order of the Black Eagle, Prussia’s highest honor. When he died in 1905, Wilhelm personally marched in the funeral procession; he also ordered the Prussian government to purchase the paintings in Menzel’s estate and to display them in the National Gallery.

Another paladin of official art in the new German capital was Anton von Werner, a history painter who glorified the Prussian crown in huge, almost photographically precise, canvases. His Battle and Victory, for example, depicted Kaiser Wilhelm I riding in the victory parade of June 16, 1871, with the Brandenburg Gate and a host of fawning subjects in the background. His most famous work, reproduced in thousands of German schoolbooks, was his Kaiser Proclamation in Versailles

, which recorded the emperor and his generals toasting the foundation of the German Empire in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors. Commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm I as a gift to Bismarck, the painting was put on public display in 1877 and quickly became a national icon. Through his closeness to the imperial court, Werner won accolades similar to Menzel’s. He was appointed president of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1875, and chairman of the Association of Berlin Artists and head of the Berlin chapter of the National Union of Artists in the mid-1880s. Upon Wilhelm IIs accession, Werner emerged as even more influential, for he had tutored the future emperor in drawing and won his trust as a reliable mentor in all things artistic. After 1888 he served as the new kaiser’s unofficial adviser on Royal Academy appointments, museum acquisitions, and official exhibitions. In this capacity he validated Wilhelm’s instinctive hatred for modern art. With Werner at his side, Wilhelm vowed to maintain the German capital as a bastion of wholesome and uplifting art.

For all their influence, however, neither the kaiser nor Werner could keep Berlin free of the modernist influences in painting that were sweeping Europe at the turn of the century. In 1892 a progressive faction within the Association of Berlin Artists invited Edvard Munch to mount a one-man show in the German capital. The Norwegian put up fifty-five paintings in the Association’s exhibition hall. None of the old guard around Werner knew anything about Munch, and when they saw his works they were horrified. According to the mocking account of a Munch partisan, they gasped in unison: “This is supposed to be art! Oh misery, misery! Why, it’s entirely different from the way we paint. It is new, foreign, disgusting, common! Get rid of the paintings, throw them out!” And out they went, via a vote orchestrated by Werner to suspend the show.

Yet while Werner and company were able to expel the foreigner Munch, they could not get rid of Max Liebermann, a native Berliner who became the city’s chief crusader for modernist art. Liebermann had made a prominent name for himself in Paris and Munich before returning to his native city in 1884. As the assimilated son of a wealthy Jewish cotton manufacturer, he identified deeply with German culture, without for a moment overlooking the persistent racial and social prejudices around him. When a patronizing acquaintance told him that there would be no anti-Semitism if all Jews were like him, he replied: “No, if all gentiles were like me there would be no anti-Semitism. For the rest, I am glad that my face makes it obvious that I am a Jew. I don’t need to spell it out to anyone.” Nor did Liebermann need to spell out his artistic principles, which were evident in paintings like The Flax Spinners, Views of Workers Eating

, and Asylum for Old Men, which exposed contemporary ills in a bold impressionist style.

Käthe Kollwitz, circa 1905