Academic literature on the topic 'Meier-Graefe'

The Folkwang Museum (1902) in Hagen, Germany, represented a radically new approach to museum design and display. Based on principles of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, the museum overturned historicist museum principles. Following Nietzsche, the Folkwang’s founder and director, Karl Ernst Osthaus, advocated a spontaneous and individual relationship to artworks and praised art that yielded rich, synesthetic experiences. With the help of art critic Julius Meier-Graefe and designer Henry van de Velde, Osthaus defined an advanced formal language based in Parisian painterly aesthetics that he believed could provide the terms for coordinating the arts. In The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk. Katherine Kuenzli shows that at the Folkwang, principles of simultaneity displaced linear narrative and historical and geographical classification. Through visually striking displays and ambitious educational programs, Osthaus and his colleagues also sought to expand the public for art. Unity remained elusive, however; Osthaus, Meier-Graefe, and van de Velde adopted competing ideological agendas that reveal the political heterogeneity of the Gesamtkunstwerk around 1900.

Für den Kunstkritiker Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935) haben Bilder eine ganz eigene Logik, die sich nicht in Sprache übersetzen lässt. Ausgehend von dieser Prämisse denkt Meier-Graefe die Kunstgeschichte als interpiktoriales, sich selbst regulierendes Geflecht und bedient sich zur Vermittlung von Bildern selbst auf gleich zweifache Weise einer bemerkenswerten Bildlichkeit – sei es qua Plädoyer für oder Einsatz von Reproduktionen, sei es qua einer der ikonischen entsprechen- den somatischen Deixis: Indem er sich selbst in seiner physischen Reaktion auf ein Werk(erlebnis) Tableauartig in Szene setzt, kehrt er die Wirksamkeit von Bildgefügen hervor, macht sie visuell nachvollziehbar und aktualisiert deren Potential. Diesen Vorstellungen und Vorgehensweisen liegt, so die These des Beitrags, die Erfahrung musealer Präsentation und Rezeption zugrunde. Entwickelt wird eine »praktische Ästhetik«, die auch für aktuelle Interpiktorialitätsdebatten diskussionswürdige Ansätze bereithält. <br><br>In the opinion of the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935), pictures have a specific logic which is impossible to translate into spoken language. Given this premise, Meier-Graefe develops a specific theory of how art history constructs itself as an interpictorial, self-regulated reference system. Furthermore, in order to convey works of art, he operates with pictures and images in a remarkable way: on the one hand, he makes specific use of reproductions, on the other hand, he communicates via body language that parallels the iconic deixis: By describing and presenting himself in his texts in the physical act of perception and/or reception, he turns himself into a tableau and makes the effect as well as the potential of the artwork visible. The basis of these ideas and methods seems to be the modern experience of museum presentation and reception. Meier-Graefe develops a kind of “practical aesthetic” which can enrich the current debates on interpictoriality.

Critique et historien de l’art autodidacte, mais aussi éditeur, galeriste, commissaire d’exposition, expert, courtier et infatigable homme de terrain, Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935) joua un rôle prééminent dans le monde de l’art européen des trente premières années du XXe siècle. Basé sur l’examination d’archives et de correspondances inédites ainsi que sur une relecture attentive de son vaste corpus d’écrits publiés, ce travail entend retracer la trajectoire d’un passeur téméraire souvent réduit à un rôle de défenseur de l’impressionnisme français dans l’Allemagne de Guillaume II. Si son progressisme francophile tout comme le formalisme de son approche des arts visuels ont parfois été soulignés, l’analyse détaillée de son implication dans le marché de l’art, le monde des musées et plus généralement, dans les débats politico-culturels de son temps, révèle une personnalité plus nuancée. Bien que méfiant envers les fantasmes identitaires des élites allemandes conservatrices, Meier-Graefe lutta sans répit pour un nationalisme d’ouverture, espérant infléchir le cours d’une culture germanique disloquée et hostile aux valeurs de la modernité. En suivant la carrière de cet Allemand cosmopolite, brutalement cisaillée par la Grande Guerre et achevée en France en exil du nazisme, cette thèse entend décrypter les mécanismes d’un projet de régénération culturelle ambitieux, impliquant actes et discours. Alternant entre phases d’enthousiasme intense et de profond désenchantement, Meier-Graefe s’y dévoile comme le chantre d’une modernité idéalisée dont il condamna obstinément les embardées avant-gardistes
Self-taught art critic and historian, but also publisher, gallery owner, curator, expert, broker and tireless field man, Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935) played a prominent role in the European art world of the early 20th century. Based on a close study of numerous archives and letters, as well as a careful rereading of his vast body of published work, this dissertation endeavours to retrace the life of a reckless facilitator, whose career is too often reduced to the role of “importer” of modern French art in Germany. If Meier-Graefe has been frequently identified through his progressive francophile positions and formalistic viewpoints on visual arts, a detailed analysis of his involvement in the art market and institutions—and more broadly, in the political/cultural debates of his time—reveals a richer personality. Wary of the identity concerns shared by conservative elites of the Empire, he vigorously encouraged a “positive” nationalism, hoping to adjust the course of a fragmented Germanic culture hostile to the values of modernity. Tracing the steps of a cosmopolitan German whose path was brutally affected by the outbreak of World War I, this essay examines the mechanisms of his ambitious project of cultural regeneration, involving both action and discourse. Jostled between phases of enthusiasm and deep disillusionment, Meier-Graefe emerges as the champion of an idealized modernism, whose avant-garde experiments he nevertheless severely condemned