1913 (41 page)

For just five days, from 23 October onwards, this brotherhood is given a test-run: on pheasants. Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, who was in Leipzig for the inauguration of the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, has just achieved the Serbians’ withdrawal from Albania in the Second Balkan War through an adept diplomatic initiative. This relieves and impresses the German Kaiser Wilhelm so much that he visits the heir in his castle in Konopiště. The two men get along magnificently. Franz Ferdinand organises a two-day hunt, on which Kaiser Wilhelm II, believe it or not, shoots 1,100 pheasants. Unfortunately, he only eats one for dinner.

In Ludwig Meidner’s studio at 21 Wilhelmshöher Strasse in Berlin-Friedenau an illustrious circle gathers every Wednesday evening: Jakob van Hoddis, famed for his doomsday poem ‘Weltende’, Paul
Zech, René Schickele, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Pinthus and Max Hermann-Neisse. First, the master of the house shows the guests his latest works. He calls them ‘Apocalyptic Landscapes’. They are in keeping with his motto: ‘Paint your grief, your entire insanity and sanctity out of the whole of your being.’ In Meidner’s landscapes everything is exploding. In 1913 he paints
The City and I
, a picture in which his head seems to be exploding just like the city behind it. The sun hangs there shakily in the background, as if about to fall down.

Meidner is repeatedly overcome by these visions of horror. He works obsessively, day and night, in his little atelier in Friedenau. He writes: ‘A painful impulse inspired me to break away from all straight-lined verticals. To spread ruin, destruction and ashes across all landscapes. My brain bled amid these awful visions. All I could see was a thousand-strong roundelay of skeletons prancing around in front of me. Numerous graves and burned-out cities with plains winding through them.’

The cities burn, as do the faces of the people – even his own, albeit contorted with pain – and the landscape is torn apart by bombs and war. An eerie light plays ghost-like above it all. Armed with his paintbrush, Meidner seems to be fighting against the sinister powers threatening him, and he tries to exorcise his nightmares by putting them down on paper. He takes Cubism and Expressionism very seriously. He names his traumatic paintings
Vision of the Trenches
or, repeatedly,
Apocalyptic Landscape
. He lives, as we already mentioned, in idyllic Friedenau. These are warm, peaceful October days. And the year is 1913. The friends who visit him on Wednesday evenings see the pictures and grow concerned about their creator. Is he losing his mind?

On 17 October, a month after the airship L1 crashed into the sea by Heligoland, the military airship L2 explodes over Johannisthal, near Berlin, on its maiden voyage. Its thirty-man crew dies as the burning wreck crashes to the ground, sending a nearby pine forest up in
flames, and the bodies of the soldiers on board are burned to a cinder. Their namesake, Count Zeppelin, writes to Great Admiral von Tirpitz that very same day: ‘Who could be more stricken or grieve more deeply with the Navy than I?’

Reviews of the re-opening of the Neue Galerie opened in autumn 1913 by Otto Feldmann at 6a Lennéstrasse in Berlin spoke of the state of Picasso’s reputation, and that of Modernism in general. This inaugural exhibition is the reason, thus far overlooked, why such greats from the French art world as Picasso and Braque were not on display at the ‘First German Autumn Salon’, which was being held at the same time. Kahnweiler, their Parisian dealer, was more keen on selling the works than exhibiting them, and sent them to the more commercial rival exhibition in Berlin. If you consider them together, the two exhibitions collected the entire artistic repertoire of the year 1913 and, moreover, its heroes. For next to the Paris artists Neumann also showed ‘negro sculptures’, Hellenistic sculptures and ‘Oriental’ pieces. Early works from cultural expeditions to distant lands, which were having such a great influence on artists at the time, were therefore mixed with European works – and Carl Einstein, who would become famous for his book about
Negro Sculpture
, wrote the foreword. It was a fascinating display of the situation of French art around 1913. In the magazine
Die Kunst
, however, Kurt Glaser drew the following surprising conclusion about new art salons in Berlin: ‘A still-life by Matisse is exhibited, the colours lacking impact. Picasso has a whole wall to himself, and you get the impression that it’s been designated as the exhibition’s shrine. Perhaps a little late, too, for one would hope that the fuss that has been made about these decent but nonetheless feeble artists will soon die down.’ But Feldmann refused to be deterred by this. In December, straight after his inaugural show, he exhibited sixty-six of Picasso’s works, again commissioned by Kahnweiler. The German critics kept up their attack: a review in
Cicerone
stated that Picasso, whose Cubist works were included in
the exhibition, ‘still doesn’t seem very strong, or very independent for that matter’. The great Karl Scheffler gave his judgement in
Kunst und Künstler
: ‘And there’s really not much that can be said about Picasso.’ In the magazine
Die Kunst
the devastating verdict is that ‘there can hardly be any doubt that Picasso has reached a dead end.’

There’s only one person missing from this line-up: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There was no trace of his work in either exhibition, because he was in the process of creating something entirely new and wonderful. He returns to Berlin from Fehmarn at the end of September, happy and laden down with paintings. His months by the sea have produced sixty. Now he wants to leave the old times behind him, as well as the dissolution of Die Brücke and the apartment on Durlacher Strasse. He and Erna Schilling hunt for a new den together, and find one at 45 Körnerstrasse. They are back in Berlin, that ‘tastelessly muddled and rather senselessly unfurling city’, as Rilke so eloquently described it at the time. Kirchner discovered a new type of woman on Fehmarn, modelled on Erna and Maschka as they emerged naked from the gentle tides of the Baltic Sea. These bodies are almost Gothic, tapering off towards the top, with faces whose features appear carved as if into a piece of wood. While Erna dedicates herself to transforming the Körnerstrasse studio into an art work of sculptures, paintings, hangings and embroidery, with great expanses of cushions for the models and their friends to lie around on in comfort, Kirchner is drawn back out to Potsdamer Platz.

His senses are still so keen from the months by the sea, his perception and pores so open, that the city, its noise, its power and its faces penetrate his soul with elemental force. Only now that his visual nerves have been cleansed by the brisk Baltic Sea air is he able to see entirely fresh images: He begins with
Berlin Street Scene
, the first picture from his ‘Potsdamer Platz’ series. It depicts urban modernity, the city and its main characters all condensed together, the garishly clad coquettes with their dead faces, promising the men a happiness
that not even the whoremonger could believe. Kirchner senses how the physicality which he was able to experience and paint on a pure, natural level in the women and children in Fehmarn is now no longer possible in the urban space of the new era, amid all the garments and the noise, the different glances and different expectations. The city’s driving force is its speed, its incessant forward propulsion, its obliviousness to the present. But in those pictures of Potsdamer Platz, Kirchner is pressing the pause button. Suddenly, everything stands still. And by making the viewer of the picture into a whoremonger, the coquettes and the city offering themselves to him in their meaningless disposability and senseless belief that, tomorrow, everything will be different and better, Kirchner succeeds in creating unique pictures of a modern age in which the bodies of the city consist no longer of flesh and blood, but only of longing and nerves.

Emil Nolde simply can’t bear to be in Berlin any more. So on 1 October he and his wife, Ada, pack up his painting tools and clothes into numerous large trunks. Then, early on the evening of 2 October, they head to the house of the art collector Eduard Arnhold at 19 Prinzregentenstrasse, in the Tiergarten district.