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Kirkus Book Review

The Berlin Secession (1899-1913)--commonly identified with German impressionism--figures little in histories of art: its luminaries--Max Liebermann, Walter Leistikow, Max Slevogt--are hardly known outside Germany (where interest in atypical adherents like Louis Corinth, Kaethe Kollwitz, or Ernst Barlach does not extend to the movement itself); it lacked the stylistic unity of the Vienna Secession, proponent of Jugenstijl; it was soon eclipsed by more radical expressionist groups--the Brucke, the Blaue Reiter. But Stanford historian Paret's primary concern is not secessionist artists and their work, though he tries valiantly to conjure up some ""notable achievements"" (which, except in the case of Slevogt, the few illustrations here fail to substantiate); rather, he is interested in the genesis of the secessionist apostasy and the hostility it aroused--a hostility to modernism which was to culminate in the Nazi condemnation of ""degenerate art."" And he has not only researched every private and public rumble, he is writing family history: Paul Cassirer, the dynamic Berlin art dealer and publisher who managed secession affairs, is his grandfather. The movement arose, Paret shows, out of dissatisfaction with the workings of the official exhibition system--the unselective, hodgepodge hanging of hundreds of works--and represented an elitist revolt against mass mediocrity, not a generational or aesthetic rebellion. Still less was it a political protest. But once underway, the movement ""fought for the right of free expression,"" promoted French impressionism as the most vital new artistic force, and incurred the wrath of the emperor and his functionaries--who found these new pictures strange, confusing, dangerously un-German (""propagated by foreigners and Jews for economic gain""--or simply inimical to ""a truly national art""). In the central episode of secession history, the emperor overrode arrangements to send a broadly representative exhibit to the 1904 St. Louis Exposition--to the disgust of all political parties. But the damage had been done: ""if the emperor could regard painters whose work he disliked as Reichsfeinde, so could any decent German."" Paret follows the secession through its brief, embattled ascendancy to its internal split--when the expressionist avant garde, unwelcome in turn, defected. Meticulously documented, intelligent, to-the-point, this is the rare close-focus study that both alters the factual record and bears on issues of wide interest. Exemplary if special. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.