Art: Retreat

In June 1935 svelte, socialite Mrs. Helen Appleton Read, lecturer and long-time art critic of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, sailed to Germany to organize a monumental loan exhibition of German art for the U. S. with the backing of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation and the Oberlaender Trust. Nazi officials at first were suspicious, but Mrs. Read had a fine argument for Minister forPropaganda Goebbels and Minister for Culture Rust: the French Government had won great and favorable publicity in the U. S. by loan exhibits of the 18th-Century French masters. Would Germany do less?

In June 1936 Mrs. Read went abroad to arrange final details. The exhibition was originally entitled “German Art from the 19th to the 20th Century.” However, since practically every important German painter of the past 35 years has been driven from the country, Mrs. Read sidestepped an embarrassing situation by ending her choice of pictures in the 1870’s, at the birth of the German Empire. An itinerary was chosen, and last week the most important show of German art ever to reach the U. S. opened in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art.

In fact, the German show opened with more of a bang than was intended. At the last moment lawyers discovered that, though property of German individuals and of the German Reich was safe from legal action, holders of defaulted German municipal bonds might possibly be able to seize pictures belonging to German municipal museums. Twenty-six pictures were hastily withdrawn, including two fine Holbeins, a Dűrer, three Altdorfers and two portraits by famed Bartholomaeus Bruyn. In the 81 paintings and 150 drawings left, there was still enough to make the show one of the most important of the 1936 season. Possibly the high spot of the whole exhibit is Lucas Cranach’s famed Venus und Amor, the property of the Nűrnberg National Museum. On this panel medieval Artist Cranach shows a slim Venus, draped in a diaphanous veil wagging a warning finger at a pug-nosed Cupid who has pulled a honeycomb from a tree, and suffered severe bee stings as a result. In the upper right hand corner Medievalist Cranach appended his moral: Dum Puer Alveola Furatur Mella Cupido, Furanti Digit um Cuspite Ficit Apis. Sic Etiam Nobis Brevis et Peritura Voluptas Quam Petimus Tristi Mixta Dolore Nocet.* Because of the retreat of many of the best early paintings, the show leans heavily on the mystical 19th Century Romantics that for a brief while made Munich an art centre almost equal to Paris and Rome, profoundly influenced U. S. painters of the “Hudson River School” and the stolid portraitists that followed them. Other noteworthy pictures included:

¶A magnificent Coronation of the Virgin by Cologne’s unknown Master of the Life of Mary, in which the Virgin, crowned by God and Jesus Christ, is surrounded by a full orchestra of Angels, playing psalteries, sackbuts, harps, lutes and viols.

¶A charcoal portrait of a man by Albrecht Diirer.

¶A portrait of two long-necked sisters, in the manner of David, by Sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, famed as the creator of the galloping chariot on top of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

*While the boy Cupid snatches honey from the comb, a predatory bee stings his finger. So does the short and transitory delight which we pursue bring us woe for it is interwoven with sorrow and pain.”