Boecklin chez les Français
Böcklin Among the French
Léon Deshairs
To justify the charge of exclusivism that he levels against us, of indifference toward artistic developments occurring beyond our borders, Bjornson cites the example of Böcklin. The example is, I believe, far from convincing. The observation on which Bjornson relies is incomplete. The very fact he states is only approximately correct. His conclusion consequently seems to me debatable.
Let us grant that Böcklin is known in France only by name. To conclude from this that we are guilty of ill will, one would first have to prove that it was within our power to know him through his work.
Now, at the bottom of the first page of an article by William Ritter devoted to Böcklin and published by the journal Art et Décoration in October 1897, I find this editor’s note: “We would have wished to accompany this study by our contributor with more numerous reproductions to give a more complete idea of Böcklin’s works; we were forced to abandon this, since the publisher who holds, in the strict sense of the word, all reproduction rights over these works asked us for several thousand francs to grant us the right to reproduce the few prints we had requested. We are all the more grateful to M. Sarrasin Thurneysen for the exquisite grace with which he placed at our disposal the photograph of the three frescoes with which Böcklin, in 1869, decorated a pavilion of his house, and which the most discerning connoisseurs rank foremost in the master’s complex body of work. Let us no longer be surprised that the great Swiss painter’s work, thus padlocked, could not penetrate further into France and is even absolutely unknown there.”
So much for reproductions. As for the originals, there is a fairly considerable group at the Basel museum, another at the Schack gallery in Munich; the rest is scattered in the public or private collections of Berlin, Baden-Baden, Bremen, Breslau, Darmstadt, Dresden, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, Zurich… To know them, one would have had to make several stays in German-speaking Switzerland and in Germany. To say that we are ignorant of them is to repeat in another form that the French travel little — a truth less true with each passing day.
Reproducing Böcklin’s paintings would be very costly for art journals, which, addressing a limited public, already barely cover their expenses. The travel necessary to see the paintings themselves is not within every purse’s reach. It is among young people, curious about novelty, sympathetic to every original effort, still disinterested enough not to ration their enthusiasm, that Böcklin would have won the most admirers among us. Culture in letters and the arts generally does not enrich young people. At the very least, like Burne-Jones and so many others, Böcklin could have come to them. He could have sent canvases to our annual salons, broadly open to foreigners. He did not do so. In 1897, M. André Michel concluded an article with this wish: “We beg M. Böcklin to send to the Champ-de-Mars, where I am sure they would be happy to offer him the most generous hospitality, a selection of his paintings. We will then study them with all the care and all the respect of which we are capable, and the French public will not stint its admiration for everything in this rich and mixed body of work that is worthy of taking its place in the art of this century, where history will no doubt reserve a place for it…” This supplication went unheard. At the 1900 exhibition, finally, I personally experienced great surprise, which I expressed in Le Mouvement Socialiste (October 1), at seeing no canvases by Böcklin — who belonged by his life and the character of his work as much to Germany as to Switzerland — either in the Swiss section or in the German section. Whose fault was it? The organizers of those sections, or Böcklin himself? Not ours, assuredly. I very much fear that the painter shared Bjornson’s feelings toward us and, mistrustful of our openness of mind, deigned to do nothing to put it to the test.
Such would be the extenuating circumstances if we knew Böcklin only by name. But do we know him only by name? The citations I have already given might cast doubt on that. Here are more.
As early as May 1, 1867, in a Correspondence from Germany (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, first series, volume XXII, pages 511-512), Alfred Woltmann, reporting on a visit to Count Schack’s gallery, cited Arnold Böcklin alongside Feuerbach, Lenbach, and the sculptor Begas among the renovators of German art and summarized his impression in these terms: “Sometimes bizarre, always interesting, often great and admirable.” Let us note that at that date, the Basel citizens themselves were far from doing justice to the genius of their compatriot. In 1893 (April and July), the Gazette des Beaux-Arts published a fairly extensive study of his life and work. It is signed Fr.-H. Meissner and accompanied by five reproductions (The Isle of the Dead — Marine Idyll — Sirens and Tritons — Siren Fishermen — Spring Day). Now, it is not in the habits of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts to publish monographs on living artists. It ordinarily leaves that task to the Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne — which, less cautious, makes as many enemies as friends each month — and assumes it only by exception, to consecrate a reputation and make a true demonstration around a name.
Toward the end of 1895, the people of Basel celebrated Böcklin’s jubilee in their city. More than one French person made the trip to Basel at that time. The others could read, about the master whose seventieth birthday was being celebrated, in the Débats (October 14, 1897 — Variétés) a correspondence from Philippe Godet; in the same newspaper (October 26) a correspondence and (November 2) a highly perceptive artistic column by André Michel — I have quoted a few lines from it; in Le Temps (November 3) an article by Thiébault-Sisson; in the journal L’Art Décoratif (October) the study by William Ritter to which I have already alluded — the three reproductions accompanying it were: The Flight into Egypt, David, The Pilgrims of Emmaus; in the Nouvelle Revue, pages as enthusiastic as they were pretentious by Robert de Montesquiou. The Marquis de la Mazelière, studying in rapid fashion contemporary German painting (Revue de Paris, March 15, 1900), devotes five pages out of twenty-seven to Böcklin. Finally, for a little more than three years, Böcklin’s body of work, published by the Photographische Union of Munich and magnificently bound, has been available in the Print Department of the Bibliothèque nationale — not in some obscure corner or at inaccessible heights, but in a good position, adorning the shelves and soliciting the gaze.
Is this bibliography of the Böcklin literature in France complete or not? I do not know. I hope it is not. I compose it from memories — duly verified, it is true. Such as it is, it suffices to prove that Böcklin is not as unknown to the French as Bjornson believes. For my part, I know many admirers of his Sirens, his Centaurs, his Ideal Landscapes, and Romain Rolland wrote to me:
“As for Böcklin, I have been hearing about him for fifteen years, and I have never even had the impression of discovering him, as may have happened to me with other very well-known painters — Lenbach, for example. Böcklin always seemed to me a name from 1840. I admire his imagination. The question remains whether the greatest German painter is necessarily the greatest painter in Europe…”
I well know that most of the articles I have cited appear to prove Bjornson right in that they begin more or less with these words: “You do not know Böcklin; I shall tell you who he is.” But perhaps one should not exaggerate the importance of this declaration by an author happy to bring a revelation and to enter virgin territory. Moreover, the observation it expresses, far from strengthening through repetition, loses a chance at truth each new time it is uttered.
I also know that these articles represent a few drops in the floods of ink expended each day; that the men who wrote, read, or discussed them are a small minority; that Colonel Picquart, reinforcing Bjornson’s assertion with his testimony, writes that in the circle in which he lived, Böcklin is absolutely unknown, even by name, and wittily recounts how this ignorance could have gotten him sent to Devil’s Island. I would not wish to incur the charge of rash generalization that I myself level against Bjornson. But it seems to me that when one wishes to judge the tastes, knowledge, and ignorance of a people in matters of art, it is the opinion of those who take an interest in art that matters, and that it is fair to draw one’s examples from among the latter rather than from among soldiers.
Böcklin is not unknown in France. Shall we say he is underappreciated? Would it be not to truly know him to mix reservations with praise and not to proclaim him, with Bjornson, “the greatest painter-thinker” of contemporary Europe? That is a matter of judgment, of one’s way of seeing. I excuse a German or a Norwegian for preferring his eyes to mine. But if he insists, I shall be tempted to turn Bjornson’s judgment against France back upon him. I mistrust this yoking together of the words painter and thinker. Not that I deny painters the faculty of thinking. But colors are not words; figures are not hieroglyphs; and I maintain that there is more thought in two pages of the textbooks our little schoolboys carry in their satchels on their way to school than in all the paintings of the greatest painter in the world. The German school would no doubt have gained by counting fewer thinkers and more painters. Besides, this way of awarding first prize to Böcklin seems to me ill-suited to the appraisal of works of art. Is Böcklin greater than Burne-Jones, than Lenbach, than Segantini, than Puvis de Chavannes? I do not know. Daumier too, whose work was recently exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, is very great. Is he greater, is he lesser than some other? He is so differently.
Yes, all our critics have made reservations about the originality and perfection of Böcklin’s work. They have not named this painter, with Dr. Max Lehrs, “the Botticelli of the nineteenth century as Botticelli is the Böcklin of the fifteenth.” They have not written, like one of his devotees quoted by André Michel, that “he posthumously sums up in the full nineteenth century all the tendencies, beliefs, dreams, sciences, letters, arts — in a word, the spirit of the Holy Roman Germanic Empire.” But without realizing through the sole magic of painting so prodigious a program, one can still be a fine genius. There are in Böcklin repetitions, lapses of taste: his ideal landscapes recall at first those of our neo-classical school, of Valenciennes and Michallon. His allegories are not always perfectly clear and interesting. His color sometimes howls strangely. But his imagination and his verve remain uncontested. This German charmed by Italy achieved a marvelous alliance of German poetry and ancient paganism. Sometimes he abandons himself to robust buffoonery: satyrs catch sirens in their nets; a centaur presents his hoof to a dumbfounded village blacksmith. At other times he rediscovers so profoundly the meaning of abolished myths that he seems to summarize their exegesis in a powerful evocation: the dripping reefs transform into Tritons and the waves into Nereids; that face appearing in the bush stirred by the wind is Pan… and we share the shepherd’s terror. Böcklin most often plays in this mythological world with a joy that seems to illuminate the canvas. His merit was far less to have shown himself a painter-thinker than to have found, in the robes of Centaurs with gleaming haunches, in iridescent scales, in the brilliance of pink flesh and the glaucous depths of water, in the tumultuous agitation of waves around the reefs, motifs in which to satisfy his love of color, movement, and life.