In Modris Eksteins’s hands, the interlocking stories of Vincent van Gogh and art dealer Otto Wacker reveal the origins of the fundamental uncertainty that is the hallmark of the modern era. Through the lens of Wacker’s sensational 1932 trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs, Eksteins offers a unique narrative of Weimar Germany, the rise of Hitler, and the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt.
Berlin after the Great War was a magnet for art and transgression. Among those it attracted was Otto Wacker, a young gay dancer turned art impresario. His sale of thirty-three forged Van Goghs and the ensuing scandal gave Van Gogh’s work unprecedented commercial value. It also called into question a world of defined values and standards that had already begun to erode during the war. Van Gogh emerged posthumously as a hero who rejected organized religion and other suspect sources of authority in favor of art. Self-pitying Germans saw in his biography a series of triumphs—over defeat, poverty, and meaninglessness—that spoke to them directly. Eksteins shows how the collapsing Weimar Republic that made Van Gogh famous and gave Wacker an opportunity for reinvention propelled a third misfit into the spotlight. Taking advantage of the void left by a gutted belief system, Hitler gained power by fashioning myths of mastery.
Filled with characters who delight and frighten, Solar Dance merges cultural and political history to show how upheavals of the early twentieth century gave rise to a search for authenticity and purpose.
Modris Eksteins is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.
Read an Excerpt
From Part One: The Palette
Spirits
“In the early twentieth century a wind was blowing in Berlin,” recalled the Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde in his memoirs. That wind of change could not be confined to Berlin. It reached to Dresden and Munich, where like-minded artists joined together to promote what one of their number, Wassily Kandinsky, called “the spiritual in art.” In 1911 the art historian Wilhelm Worringer was the first to apply the term Expressionism to a new tendency “in which mind declares its autonomy over the experience of nature.” Expressionism represented a spiritual rebellion against science, materialism, and law. Emerging from the depths of the human soul, the movement would redeem mankind from the world of matter and connect it to the cosmic, eternal, and godly—or so its proponents promised. One of the principal innovators behind the new development, said Worringer, had been Vincent van Gogh.
By the time Worringer composed his treatise, Van Gogh’s influence on contemporary German art was openly acknowledged. The group of painters in Dresden who in 1905 formed Die Brücke (The Bridge), among them Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Ferdinand Hodler, enthused over the Van Gogh work they had seen at the local Arnold gallery that year. They took their name from a comment by Nietzsche: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not a goal.” In 1911 a group of artists in Munich formed a counterpart of The Bridge which they called Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). They had first encountered Van Gogh three years earlier, when two Munich galleries, Zimmermann and Brakl, exhibited some of his paintings.
The transplanted Russian painter Alexej Jawlensky, a former military officer who had moved to Munich, bought The House of Père Pilon from Brakl. He wrote Johanna van Gogh a letter of appreciation: “Van Gogh has been a teacher and a model to me. Both as man and artist he is dear and close to me. It has been one of my most ardent desires for years to possess something from his hand ... Never did a work by your late brother-in-law find itself in more reverent hands.” Jawlensky would attribute what he called “inner ecstasy” in his own work to Van Gogh’s inspiration. His compatriot and colleague in Munich, Kandinsky, also went through a phase in 1908 and 1909 when Van Gogh’s influence, especially in the free use of color, was obvious. Walter Leistikow, Franz Marc, August Macke, Heinrich Campendonk, Max Ernst, and Gabriele Münter were others who acknowledged the inspiration of Van Gogh, to the point where some made a conscious effort to distinguish themselves from his effect. “I had moments when I hated Van Gogh,” said Heinrich Nauen, “because I felt that he was oppressing my spirit; I hated him as lovers can hate when they stifle each other.”
The German Expressionist artists borrowed from Impressionism, especially its emphasis on color and life, but at the same time distanced themselves vociferously from the “French style” that they considered frivolous and superficial. The detail, precision, and loyalty to nature of Impressionism gave way to bolder strokes and more strident emotion. It was the psychic realm that interested the Expressionists. To them and their “raw art” Van Gogh became a hero. “The whole of French art,” remarked Jawlensky, is nature beautifully, extremely beautifully, observed; but all in all that is too little: one has to create one’s own nature, Van Gogh.” Here the Dutchman was being turned into a teacher, mentor, and veritable school of his own. The Expressionists were attracted not only to Van Gogh’s dramatic colors but also to his mysticism, madness, and death. In 1907 Emil Nolde suggested to the Dresden group that they call themselves “Van Goghiana” rather than “The Bridge.” Others were to say later of the Dresden circle that their paintings looked like an encounter of Van Gogh with Nietzsche.
