Artists are scattered, leftover crumbs of a past time.
Isolated from the people. The best of them lost in an intellectual fog. Only formal problems, frenzied abstracts. Objects the property of photography. Formal problems that the average mortal lacking special empathy or snobbism can scarcely comprehend. Ascendancy of an equally boring take-anything photomania. The ivory-tower dwellers shunned and frightened behind locked doors, eavesdropping on their mathematical ego. T-square and compass ready for abstraction. Speculating oddballs and superstitious sorts at every turn. Driveling art historians. Stereoscopic novelties, new material as well as magical, mechanical catchwords. Sometimes under the banner of the proletariat and so on. Today, however, less than yesterday. Boom in peculiarities. Psychoanalysis and other patent medicines have to bear the brunt. A great divide between art of this sort (avant-garde) and the people. Only a few moody, rich people with bad habits retain an interest today in artists’ experiments. And this great love is usually exposed afterward as the stale speculation of undercover art dealers. What a juste milieu; what a deterioration of art in contrast to the truly dark Middle Ages. Eyes to the rear, not ahead.
Now no medieval artist preached praise of ready-mades, of keep smiling; standard concepts and comfort were unknown to him. Making money was not valorized, celebrated, nor painted. Compass and ruler, in a correct hierarchy of values, led a subordinate existence.
Today, the best painters are estranged from the people. Occasionally there comes a simple man from the people, a dilettante who suddenly has everything the elite, intellectual avant-garde lacks: simplicity, soul, and feeling. Characteristics, incidentally, that the elegant art snobs and enemies of the people since Henri Rousseau have been discovering and claiming for themselves.
The art of our time is pale. A child with an overgrown head and horned-rim glasses. Anemic and very contemplative ... a proper big-city stay-at-home. It is obvious from his looks that he broods a lot. Estranged from nature and reality, he creates from within himself exact circles and mathematical-looking figures. And takes all of this terribly seriously. Observers from a later time will smirk in genuine astonishment at what today’s clever propaganda has passed off to the gullible people as the “latest” art.
There was even a certain Malevich back then, who (he was dead serious about it) once exhibited a painting, an empty white square. Praised, likewise dead-seriously, by a critic as the “deed of the epoch.”
One can certainly no longer live today as an old “Dutch master.” But in this faithless and materialistic time one should use paper and slates to show people the devilish mug concealed in their own faces. Let us tear down the storehouse of ready-mades and all the manufactured junk and show the ghostly nothing behind them. Political convulsions will influence us powerfully. Do not fear looking back to your ancestors. Look at them, [Hans] Multscher, Bosch, Bruegel, and Mäleßkircher, [Wolfgang] Huber, and [Albrecht] Altdorfer. Why then the usual pilgrimage to the philistine French Mecca? Why not return to our ancestors and set forth a German tradition?
Just among ourselves, better to be ranked second class but at least to have expressed a little of our national community. And besides, the French are not at all interested in followers of their three schools.
Naturally, no Matisse is going to prosper in Outer Pomerania or Berlin. But what’s the difference! The air and everything is hard, a little unpleasant and graphic. It is easy to get sniffles and cold feet ... this is not the tempered, calm soil of the south.
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