64. Anton von Werner

(regarding a statement he made against modern painting)

Anton von Werner, the director of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, made a merciless condemnation of the modern direction in painting in a speech he recently gave at the prize-giving ceremony in his institution. His sentences sound as if he had artificially closed his eyes to all the important things that this direction has already produced and to all the seeds that still promise many great things for the future. Von Werner defends tradition, the tried and tested, against the search for new ways of creating. It seems as if he wanted to defend the old, the established, even where it has been led in descending development to the template, to the soullessly formal. He looks back over the last quarter of a century and finds that either nothing new has been created during this time, or that the new is not good. Von Werner makes things easy for himself. He merely classifies the bad as new and the good as old. This is not the case, because anyone who claims this must lack the organs for the fresh, free trait of modern painting that is independent of tradition. But it does make it possible to speak strong, full-throated words of anger about the tawdriness, ugliness and dilettantism of the new direction.