In the painting of our century, the models that we lack from antiquity are being replaced by the work of Italian artists, who, as our ecclesiastical painting proves, are still being imitated in manifold and various ways. Incidentally, the ideals have changed in essential ways. It was the influence of what was understood as “antiquity,” together with the decline of a sense for color, which had petered out with the pale hues of the Rococo, that caused people (in this medium, too) to see the remedy only in terms of form and to neglect color. Today the tables have turned. Cornelius and the whole row of cardboard draftsmen are far removed from the present: however one-sided the overestimation of them was in the past, perhaps people today are underestimating them by focusing on their flawed brushwork and chalk application and by forgetting the intellect that infused their subjects – this infusion was achieved at least by the most original among them and indeed belongs to the “how” in art. With their colorists, Paris and Belgium provided the impetus for color’s return to the world of pictures, and it then flared up in the Piloty School in Munich. But this approach to color is also fading away: The “golden hue” is no longer the most highly praised virtue of our painting. Essentially, this trend was also conventional, just like the previous one. These days, Piloty’s palette is decried as “sauce,” and Makart’s much admired colorism is also viewed with skepticism. A delight in clear color – color as revealed by nature to the unbiased observer – stands at the heart of a movement that is spreading further and further: the so-called plein-air* painting coming out of Paris. One cannot deny that these young artists still frequently mistake the flaws of plein-air painting’s virtues for its actual virtues; one cannot deny that by exaggerating a healthy reaction to the mannerism of beauty, plein-air painting often falls victim to a mannerism of ugliness. And one cannot deny that, on the other hand, this young school of painters, in its enthusiasm for reproducing objects as they are, sometimes falls victim to the errors that follow. Nevertheless, for anyone who wishes to see, views from all sides will open up into the future land of art, a kind of art that will also generate, with increasing frequency, something emotionally significant once certain technical difficulties have been completely overcome. It will not do so as a painting based on thought but as one based on perception; not as an art of the mind but as an art of the imagination.
Over the last two centuries, music was destined to experience a marvelously rapid growth, flourishing, and blossoming. Looking back to the period before Bach and Händel – a time whose musical creations have become completely alien to our emotional state – and then forward to the present, we cannot help but realize that no other art form progressed from a budding to a flowering state as quickly as music, and it takes its place as a third instance of unfolding (of which there is no fourth) alongside the astonishing flowering of Greek sculpture in antiquity and of painting in the Renaissance. Therefore, we need not claim that music advanced steadily from one artist to the next, that there were no sidesteps or even backward steps, since they also occurred in the history of the great blossomings of the other arts as well. To allow the moods, passions, and sentiments to work before us in general, in a purified way, i.e. dissociated from the admixtures of coincidence; to free ourselves in this way from the fetters of reality and move towards the intensified enjoyment of ourselves in a world of truthfulness: the art of music has done this better in our century than in any preceding epoch.
* Open-air painting, or painting directly from nature – ed.
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