Volume 28, Number 9 · May 28, 1981
Breaking Away
By John Willett
The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany
by Peter Paret
Harvard University Press, 269 pp., $17.50
The secessionist art movements that took place throughout Europe during the 1890s were less a breakthrough in painting than a regrouping of existing art organizations to meet practical needs. In many European cities of that time the old academies with their enormous annual mixed exhibitions were ceasing to work satisfactorily. It was not so much that these had become resistant to new developments—to realism in the 1850s, most notoriously, and to impressionism in 1867 and after—especially when controlled by an absolute ruler like Napoleon III. Nor was the move against the academies always led by the avant-garde. Rather, it seems to have been the sheer size and variety of the late nineteenth-century artistic community that finally burst the academic seams, leading first to the division and subdivision of the French Salon, then to the Wanderers' breakaway from the St. Petersburg Academy, the formation of the New English Art Club, the establishment of Les XX in Belgium, and the wave of secessions in central Europe.
Review, 2633 words
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