Archive Newsletter No. 3.1
September 2018
Since its formation in 1823, Kunstverein München has had an ongoing and fluctuating relationship with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which was founded earlier, in 1808.
Kunstverein München became one of the first fully-formed art associations in the German- speaking area. [1] Munich was a city of about 50,000 people in 1823, and had a disproportionately high number of artists who had come as court artists. In addition, the Munich Academy had become one of the most important educational institutions in Germany and attracted more artists to the city. With the secularization of the church, commissions were more scarce, plus the Bavarian King Max I Joseph devoted himself to urban expansion rather than art. Satisfying the increasing dependence of artists on private commissions and sales became a dominant role of Kunstverein München.
Significantly, the four founders, the Veduta painter Domenico Quaglio (1786–1837), the genre painter Peter Hess (1792–1871), the portraitist Josef Karl Stieler (1781–1858), and the architect Friedrich Gärtner (1792–1847), represented different disciplines of painting. [2] These artists, also called Fächler [3] , found little support at the Academy at that time. Although the Academy had "already given the artists and art lovers a general point of union" [4] , as Max I Joseph emphasized in authorizing the founding of the Kunstverein, the Academy was unable to offer the artists regular exhibition opportunities. Nevertheless, the founding of the Kunstverein München should not be understood as a rebellion against the Academy. Gärtner, one of the founding members, had also been an active professor of architecture at the Academy since 1819, making the Academy seem an unlikely target.
Conversely, the Academy – especially the then director Johann Peter von Langer (1756–1824) – initially appeared to be skeptical about the founding of the Kunstverein. [5]
The approval letter from the King also expresses a certain reserve in which the activities of the association were expressly restricted to areas not already covered by the Academy. [6] Apparently this was out of concern that the Kunstverein would be too involved with education and training and would thereby collide with the Academy’s focus.
Kunstverein München quickly became socially accepted. From 1824, relations with the Academy were also increasingly established and other members of the faculty joined the Kunstverein as
members. [7] Exhibitions took place at weekly intervals and the Sunday art club visit became an integral part of life in the
bourgeoisie. Although there were numerous other associations in Munich, Kunstverein München played a central role in the social life of the city and as a point of contact for artists in the first half of the 19th century. The Kunstverein owed its leading position to the art trade, which at that time did not yet exist in its present form.
According to Walter Grasskamp, King Max I Joseph expressly defined the organization of exhibitions as one of the Academy’s founding tasks. The so- called annual exhibition of the Academy was held on average only once every three years and showed mainly works of their own professors and advanced students. Since its establishment, the history painting tradition has dominated the Academy. The chair of landscape painting was even abandoned in 1824 and not reoccupied until the turn of the century. Between 1838 and 1845, the Academy also held no exhibitions. The portraits, still lifes, genre scenes, and landscapes painted by artists who found no support at the Academy were met with the growing interest of bourgeois collectors, which benefited the Kunstverein as an artist's representative and exhibition organ. For almost a century, Kunstverein München was the largest and most respected private association in Munich, with up to 6,000 members.
However, the supremacy of Kunstverein München became increasingly unstable in the following years. As early as 1845, the Munich Academy moved into the exhibition building on Königsplatz in Munich, erected by Georg Friedrich Ziebland (1800–1873). The new royal building loosened the artist's dependence on Kunstverein München in the longer term. Increasingly, genres were shown on Königsplatz in addition to history. In 1858, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the Academy joined forces with the cooperative Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstgenossenschaft and exhibited a highly acclaimed exhibition on Königsplatz. The opening of the famous glass palace in 1854 provided an additional, state-sponsored exhibition space in Munich. The cooperative was supposed to organize exhibitions in the years between 1889 and 1931 in the annual rhythm. Also, the cooperative took over the annual exhibition of the Academy in 1863. The Kunstverein’s monopoly position was finally broken after its core area of exhibition activity and its position as an association of interests had been relativized. [8]
At the turn of the century, the city of Munich finally lost a total of cultural influence. Both the Kunstverein and the Academy were opposed to new developments in art and from the political side, they were keen to continue to support conservative and late-Romantic tendencies of Munich art. In the 1898 annual report of the Kunstverein München, the negative criticism its exhibitions received in some Munich newspapers was a topic of complaint, and a ban on certain critics was sought.
In retrospect, both Kunstverein München and the Academy were central institutions in the then artistically-flourishing city of Munich, especially in the mid-19th century. Although both institutions competed with one another, especially for exhibition space, close links between the two institutions were already evident in the 19th century, which manifested themselves particularly in the members of the Kunstverein.
In the twentieth century, the competition between the two institutions eventually changed into a more positive mutual exchange, which we will report on in the next newsletter.
Text: Theresa Bauernfeind
Research: Theresa Bauernfeind, Christina Maria Ruederer
Translation and Editing: Theresa Bauernfeind, Post Brothers and Christina Maria Ruederer
If you have any questions or suggestions please contact us via archiv@kunstverein-muenchen.de.
[1] Important suggestions for the founding of the German art associations came from England, France and Switzerland. Above all, the English Art Institutions were in part exemplary for the German art associations, but these, however, acted exemplary again for the later (from 1834 on) English Art Unions. Another role model for the German clubs was founded in 1787, the Zurich Society of Artists and Art Friends, which organized annual public-oriented art exhibitions since 1801 and introduced the principle of the art lottery. In the German newspaper Kunst-Blatt of the year 1824, there are also references to the originally founded in 1789 and then re-founded in 1815 Paris Société des Amis et des Arts, which already had the main features of the later German art club type in the form of stocks and sales exhibitions.
[2] Cf. Langenstein 1983, 45–50.
[3] These Specialists, in the 19th century also
known as Fächler, were mainly representatives of landscape painting and of the genre in contrast to historical painting.
[4] Letter of Max I Joseph, 31 December 1823, file Kunstverein München 1823, No. 21. Translated from the German by Kunstverein München.
[5] Cf. the memoirs of Albrecht Adams, according to which a first founding application of the Kunstverein München had been rejected by King Max I Joseph at the instigation of Langer.
[6] Cf. Letter of Max I Joseph, 31 December 1823, file Kunstverein München 1823, No. 21.
[7] In 1824 the Academy professors Joseph Hauber (1766–1843), Carl Ernst Hess (1755–1828) and Wilhelm von Kobell (1766–1855) became members of the Kunstverein Munich, in 1825 also the new Academy Director Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867) joined. August Graf von Seinsheim (1789–1869), board member of the Kunstverein Munich, became an honorary member of the Academy in 1824. Cf. Langenstein 1983, 78.
[8] Cf. Grasskamp 2002, 18 f.
Fig.:
1. Letter of Max I Joseph, 31 December 1823, file Kunstverein München 1823, No. 21.
2. View of the Kunstverein building by Eduard von Riedel in the Hofgarten of Munich, built in 1865, Copyright Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.
3. August von Voit, glass palace Munich, photograph, 1854, Copyright Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.