Art: An Artist for All Ages

Hans von Marees was one of the greatest German artists of his day, but neither in his lifetime nor in the 75 years since his death has the German public got to know him well. Other artists have long admired him; but the very fame of these admirers—men like Emil Nolde, Franz Marc and Max Beckmann—tended to dim his own. Last week the Bremen Kunsthalle was showing an exquisite exhibition of 116 drawings by the artist that Die Zeit calls “the dusty giant of the 19th century,” and the story was still the same. The critics raved, but the general public still withheld its cheers.

It is strange that this should be so, for there is a timeless quality about Marées’ art that should win popularity in any age. Though he often drew and painted figures from ancient mythology, he did so out of respect for classical form and balance rather than in an effort to record again the long familiar heroics. He succumbed to none of the emotional excesses of his romantic contemporaries, and while he was always true to nature, he never became a slave to realism. To heighten mood, he sometimes painted his figures in green and orange—a practice that was to become one of the hallmarks of the later expressionists.

Hans von Marées began studying art in his teens, first in Berlin and later in Munich. In 1864, at the age of 27, he got a commission from a Munich count to make copies of a number of Italian Renaissance masterpieces. When this chore was done, he stayed in Italy, surrounded by a tiny coterie of friends. He apparently had no interest in fame: the few major exhibitions of his work took place after his death. The new German artists acknowledged him as a master, but his work dropped out of sight again during the Third Reich. It was not that the Nazis considered him particularly “decadent”; it was just that he was the son of a Jewish mother.

Some of the drawings in the Bremen show are portraits, but most are nameless nudes, many of them studies for future paintings. In the portraits, he proved that he could catch a subject’s inner being, but his nudes go far beyond the limitations of the individual. U.S. Critic Peter Selz probably summed up Marées’ contribution best when he noted that the artist always treated his nudes as “timeless creations of nature. Their significance is never that of the incidental but of some universal law.” It was this quality that enabled Marées to span the ages and to search out eternal truths that lie beyond outward appearances. As he put it when writing about the drawings of Michelangelo: “Not the completeness of the image but the completeness of the understanding makes a thing a work of art.”