The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany

by Peter Paret

Portrays the group of artists in pre-World War I Germany who supported the tenets of modern art against the disapproval of the government academy and Emperor William II

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 1980

About the author

American historian who has specialised in German military history in the Napoleonic era and German artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paret tracks the struggle of the Berlin art avant-garde with the politically-powerful defenders of traditional art. Modern art's number greatest enemy was William II, a keen artist himself who was heavily involved in the operation of state art museums and the German Institute of Fine Arts. The Emperor and his favoured official artists produced art aimed at inspiring the everyman, rejecting social realism as depressing and impressionism as decadent and foreign (French).

In response to the stifling atmosphere of the state art institutions, dealers helped up and coming artists to form alternative art scenes free from state interference. Eventually the new artists formed a Kunstlerbund in Weimar to protect themselves from the Emperor's increasingly outdated tastes. Secession, however, was too individual, too liberal, to survive the growth of collectivism following war and the growth of expressionism.

The book is about the Berlin secession, but that said I would have liked more comparison to the art scene in alternative art centers, Munich in particular. There is also little analysis of the art pieces themselves.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the politicization of art.