KAULBACH.THE DELUGE.

It was only natural, therefore, that his pupils should feel above using a model. It is said that at the time when they were turning Munich into an Athens, and the painters were covering the city walls with frescoes, Munich possessed but one model, and the poor fellow died of starvation. And then, how they hated colours! They were so difficult to manage! Who, pray, wanted to learn fresco painting by hard labour, and swallow the chalk-dust? It was much easier to copy their lord and master, whose name was on their lips, but not a spark of whose genius was in their heads, with every sort of mannerism. “When nature once produces a new birth she does so with a lavish hand. Talents, talents enough for centuries!” In these words Cornelius himself did honour to his pupils—to Carl Herrmann, Strähuber, Hermann Anschütz, Hiltensperger, and Lindenschmit the elder, the mention of whose names evokes a painful memory of the arcades in the palace garden at Munich.

What survives of Cornelius is only the man, the individual. Posterity will doubtless always honour him for the unflinching energy with which he upheld his ideal from youth to failing age; for his courage in propounding and defending what seemed right to him; for refraining from putting on velvet gloves with the multitude, but frankly showing them his nails. This high-mindedness of Cornelius, and his lofty conception of the aims of art, must always command our respect. All his works are the product of a serene, great, and noble soul. His is a physiognomy with a proud, vigorous profile, which expresses an intellectual tendency, and can never be forgotten. He was a man—as a painter, a curse to German art, but a self-conscious, aristocratic mind. As he himself said: “Art has its high-priests and also its hedge-priests”; and when at the end of his life he made his profession: “Never, under any circumstance of my life, have I lost my pious reverence for the divinity of art; never have I sinned against it,” we none of us refuse to accept his word.

KAULBACH.   PRINCE ARTHUR AND HUBERT.

This unfailing earnestness which suffuses Cornelius’s work raises him high above Wilhelm Kaulbach, and secures for him lasting fame, when that of Kaulbach shall have been buried with the last of the “cultured” patrons for whom he worked, and by whom he was placed on a pedestal. Look at both of them from a purely artistic point of view, comparing them with the old masters, and both of them sink equally into insignificance. But if we come to accept the problem of art criticism as a matter of psychology rather than of æsthetics, if we search for the relations between the work of art and the soul of its author, we cannot but look upon Kaulbach as by far the inferior. Cornelius endeavoured to raise the masses to his level, paid for his idealism with unpopularity, and was never understood. Kaulbach, the humble servant of the public, changed the Spartan iron of the art of Cornelius for the base coin of the art unions; to tickle the multitude, he clothed voluptuous sensuality in the stately garment of the earnest Muse, and was hailed with jubilation throughout his life. But the valise with which alone, according to the fairy-tale, one can enter upon the journey to immortality, was still lighter in his case. Idealistic painting, as professed by Cornelius, had skimmed all the cream from religious and mythological subjects; so Kaulbach tried to give something more actual in its stead. He found this in the philosophy of history, in the images of epochs in the history of the world which were then so much in vogue, and handed his public, eager for knowledge, a printed programme upon which he had catalogued the gigantic thoughts and even weightier references which the picture was said to contain. As the masses were awed by the severity of the Cornelian conception of forms, he softened it down with superficial calligraphic elegance: what was sturdy and angular in the former was by him changed into a coquettish effeminacy. This he effected by daubing his pictures, which were in no way colour conceptions, with insipid combinations of colour, and replaced with oleographs Cornelius’s illuminated monumental woodcuts. By these concessions to the picturesque he drove the axe into the tree which the designers of cartoons had planted. The part he plays is that of a man of compromise between Cornelius and Piloty; his frescoes are too sugary; his oil-paintings too faulty. It was he who buried the era of cartoons, although the obsequies were conducted with all pomp.

A spiritual battle, an aerial battle, the “Battle of the Huns,” is the first of his works. Beneath, a real historical event; above, the same reproduced in the spiritual world. The battle is over; the field is hidden beneath the corpses of the slain; but the spirits continue the combat in mid-air, and strive to turn the occasion to account for a display of nudity. Next came the “Destruction of Jerusalem,” crammed with ingenious references, and elucidated with long, printed commentaries. This programme-painting played its trump card on the staircase of the Berlin Museum, where a space of 240 feet by 28 feet is occupied by “the intellectual manifestations of the historical Weltgeist”; “the total evolution of culture with every people of every period in its principal historical phases”; those incidents “which, in the evolution of universal history, mark the important knots with which the closely entwined threads of the national dramas of the universe are bound together.” The “Battle of the Huns,” the “Destruction of Jerusalem,” were included in the series; and to them were added the “Tower of Babel,” the “Rise of Greece,” the “Crusades,” and the “Reformation.” The whole of Hegel’s philosophy was reproduced on the walls. But as the pictures are not new through any novelty or greatness of their conception, we need certainly not enter into the “astounding profundity” of their philosophy. The eye is struck with mere compositions, built up according to certain formulas, and tableaux vivants, put together with more or less cleverness, theatrical in effect and crude in colour.

Of his other large pictures, the “Naval Battle at Salamis” caused a special stir through its sinking harem. In his “Nero” he contrasted the orgies of the Romans of the decadence with the enthusiasm for death of the early Christians. Again, in his great cartoon in charcoal of “Peter Arbue,” he inflated to monumental dimensions a drawing suitable for a comic paper.

Kaulbach is not an artist to be taken seriously. Woltmann, who made the same observation twenty years ago, tried at least to vindicate the illustrator, and expressed his regret that a man who had the stuff in him of a German Hogarth should unfortunately have been caught in the toils of the Cornelian school. But this comparison does little justice to Hogarth. There is nothing in the illustrations of Kaulbach which many other artists could not have improved upon. In his “Reynard the Fox” he adapted, for the benefit of the German public, Grandville’s Scènes de la Vie privée et publique des Animaux, published in 1842. His illustrations for éditions de luxe (“The Women of Goethe,” etc.) marked the first steps of the road which ended in Thuman. And Thuman stands higher than Kaulbach. The faint, unaccented drawing, the oval “beauty” of heads, declamatory and expressionless, the academic touch are common to both of them. But only with Kaulbach do we find the penetrating perfume of the demi-monde, the voluptuous, satirical laughter which is not even stilled before Goethe, the pandering sensuality which cannot touch the purest and tenderest figures in German poetry without using them as a pretext to fling nudities to the public like bones to a dog. In his “Dance of Death” suite, Kaulbach turned into frivolity what Rethel had before expressed solemnly and earnestly. Like the two augurs, who could not meet without laughing, so at last the satirical designer began to laugh at his own monumental pictures. After completing in his series of mural paintings at the Berlin Museum his “Apotheosis of the Evolution of Human Culture,” he explained in his friezes that the whole was, after all, nothing but a dustbin and a lumber-room. When he was commissioned to depict a suite of paintings for the upper walls of the new Pinakothek at Munich, the artistic life of that town, as glorified by King Ludwig—a suite which the weather has since been kind enough to render almost invisible—he fulfilled his task by mocking at what he should have glorified.

“All die Meister Kunstbahnbrecher, wie die Herren selbst sich nennen, Wahrlich Widderköpfe sind sie, Mauern damit einzurennen. Mit dem Loche in der Mauer ist’s noch lange nicht geschehen, Da muss erst der Held erscheinen, siegreich dadurch einzugehen. Gegen jenes Ungeheuer ziehen sie zu Feld mit Phrasen, Wie die sieben Schwaben einstmals ritterlich bekämpft den Hasen. Voran zieht der edle Ritter Schnorr, der Künste Don Quixote, Seine Rosinante setzt er, statt des Pegasus in Trotte; Heiliger Hess, sein Sancho Pansa, Du nicht liebst das offene Streiten, Und du lässt dich sachte, sachte, ’rab von Deinem Esel gleiten. Was ist denn so grosses Neues in der Neuen Kunst geschehen? Nichts, als was sie nicht der aften, längst vergangnen abgesehen. Wände ich auch Lorbeerkränze all um diese Alltagsfratzen, Würden sie sie doch nur zieren zu bedecken hohle Glatzen.”