THE POLlTlCAL ECONOMY OF ART 53

2. Affordable Masterpieces

Unlike their betters, most burghers made do with reproductions of master-pieces,or modern drawings and etchings available at under 1,000 marks, some-timesat much less. Compelled to husband their resources, they were bound toshyaway from giving costly hostages to fortune. We have the 1889 budget of ahardworking public servant living in Berlin with a cheerful wife who knewhow to make do with what she had, and three teenage children; the eldest, anineteen-year-old daughter, held a part-time job painting flowers, whichenabled her to buy her own clothes. The father's salary was 5.450 marks a year,and this reduced the family to low-cost entertainments: reading out loud aftersupper-one sees the wife and daughter busy sewing or knitting-walks andexcursions, a rare visit to the theater. In 1889, they went to the Schauspielhausjust once. All together these investments in high culture cost no more than 62marks, little more than one percent of the father's salary. The party they gaveonce a year was an extravagance: it added up to around 80 marks; and they setaside about half that sum for the father's weekly congenial get-togethers withfellow bureaucrats. So tight a budget left very little, if anything, for art.'

The domestic economy of this family is exemplary for the middling Germanmiddle classes, as for the bonne bOHrgeoisie in France and elsewhere. No wonderthat a daughter at the piano with the others grouped around to provide vocalsupport was the diversion of choice for Europe's (and America's) average bour-geois in the nineteenth century. Music certainly had its charms, for amateurs asmuch as for professionals. Yet the comforting sense that one need not go intodebt for such civilized entertainments remained a valued ingredient in thissociable domesticity. So much money had to be spent on so much else.

It is worth reiterating that the economic dimensions of high culture were notdecisive for the making of taste. Families having to content themselves withimpromptu musicales were not necessarily indifferent to the quality of theirpreferences. To judge from readily available sheet music, the lieder their resi-dent virtuoso-usually the lady or a daughter of the house--shared with herfamily were often by Schubert; the pieces she performed as a soloist often bySchumann or the early Beethoven.Yet not even these evenings were withouttheir expenditures. Sheet music was fairly costly and had to be acquired pru-dently; around 1890, a Romanze by Anton Rubinstein for four hands cost twomarks; Franz Liszt's piano version of Berlioz's Symphouie [antastique, four timesthat sum.

54 PLEASURE WARS

Yet culture trickled in, with the mysteries of art and literature, like that ofmusic, unlocked by reasonably priced publications. The bookcases in bourgeoishouseholds were likely to display, in addition to popular editions of the classicswith garish spines-Shakespeare in Britain. Moliere in France, Goethe andSchiller in Germany-biographies of composers, painters, or poets. Late in thecentury, they were enriched by didactic texts 011 individual artists or schools ofart. Once launched, this genre practically exploded, as enterprising publishersissued series of affordable volumes aimed at exposing proper bourgeois to thehigher knowledge. Their prose was exclamatory and their paper gray-brown-ish, their appraisals were unctuous and their illustrations vile, but they assuageda ravenous thirst for self-education. One successful series, collectively tided"The Artist's Book"-Das KiinstlerbHch-offered slender, generously if crudelyillustrated studies of favorite German painters; published by the house ofSchuster and Loeffler of Berlin and Leipzig at a moderate three marks, theywere printed in editions of 1,000, with each additional thousand proudly notedon the title page. More ambitious monographs, on paper less drab and repro-ductions less foggy, were naturally more expensive. So, of course, were theleatherbound editions of the masters.

In a word, it would be naive to equate money with taste. A manufacturercould obviously spend a great deal more on cultural goods than his book-keeper, an attorney more than his clerk. But this says little about what the man-ufacturer or the attorney would do with the cash he set aside for culture. Thebookkeeper and the clerk might have discriminating (and, in fantasy, expen-sive) tastes, laboriously polished after years of uncomfortably standing in theback of the top balcony at the opera house or the theater, visiting museums onfree Sundays, and collecting cheap reproductions. Since there were thoseamong middling, even among petty bourgeois who had a genuine feeling forwhat they saw, heard, or read, taste became a source of frustration for thoseknowledgeable enough to want what they could not have. This is where astutemerchandisers met them halfway by introducing modern techniques of popu-larizing culture. Lowering the fences separating aesthetic craving and aestheticfulfillment, they tried to meet the needs of those yearning after the real thingby cajoling them into being content with a simulacrum.

At times, bourgeois spent good money to get that real thing. In 1828.Paganini gave a series of sensational recitals in Vienna, making the violin singin ways thought impossible before. Mathias Perth, a court official, attended oneof the sold-out performances, so overcrowded that scores fainted and had to becarried from the hall. Duly impressed, he noted in his diary, "It cost me a lotof money. I was dripping with sweat, but I heard him, and in order to get anidea of his playing, one must hear him. The effect on each listener of the tones

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ARf 55

he coaxes from the violin is indescribable." Paganini was, to Perth's infatuatedmind, the Napoleon of violinists. No wonder he was reported to have earnedmore than 30,000 gulden during his visit-$6,000 in 1828 dollars-but Perth,who probably made about a tenth of that sum a year, did not envy him.' Hehad strained his resources to hear this diabolical miracle worker, and he wasglad he had spent the money.'

Obviously, the key to widespread pleasure was differential prices that reflect-ed differential quality. Those who found the painting they coveted out of reachcould buy an engraving or (in the second half of the century) a photograph ofit, or perhaps clip an illustration from their family weekly. In the Victorian cen-tury, art, literature, and music were inching their way toward a consumer cul-ture that provided for everyone with money to spare, no matter how little, aculture of book clubs, massive supplies of reproductions, reduced admissionfees catering to students or impecunious families. The instruction of popularguides to culture supplied cherished benefits as they directed grateful readersto aesthetic delights on their honeymoon or their infrequent holiday trips todistant museums. Faithfully consulting their Baedeker, that handy cicerone tothe tourist-itself something of an investment, averaging six marks-theycould revel in paintings, drawings, sculptures, and buildings they had onlyglimpsed in reproductions remotely hinting at the original,"

The docility of most bourgeois tourists before the masterful tone of theirguidebooks, leaving only a few mutinous spirits to strike out for independentjudgments, demonstrates the helplessness felt by the majority, coupled with alonging to share, however humbly, in Beauty. In 1853, on their honeymoon, theprosperous LUbeck wine merchant Heinrich Leo Behncke and his wife, Caro-line, took in the renowned picture gallery in Dresden. "Raphael's greatMadonna long captivated us and filled LIS with enthusiasm," he noted. "Not farfrom the Raphael Madonna hung Correggio's Holy N(ltht; the shepherds stand

* Virtuosi in the pcrformmg arts offered an exception to the almost unbreakable rule among

the Victorians that when women were in the world at all, they would earn less than men.

Respectability helped-and so did P. T. Barnum's adroit publiciry, Jenny Lind, "the Swedish

Nightingale," W3S renowned for her charities and the purity of her life as much as for the punry

of her voice. Her celebrated 1850 concert series in the United States under Barnum's manage-

ment netted her $150,000 (and her manager more than three times that). And the pianist ClaraSchumann, a widow with an impeccable reputation and sewn children (several of whom strained

her resources with health problems and gambling debts), gave recitals across Europe for substan-tial fees, even without the guidance of a Barnum.

t The J 898 Baedeker to southern Germany cost five marks; that to Berlin and environs, only

three marks; but the volumes for more "exonc" places like Egypt, Spain and Portugal, Palestineand Syria, twelve marks each.

PLEASURE WARS

near the Christ child and the mother, with her great love, filled with the blissof which only a happy mother is capable, bends down and regards the child. Astream of light that comes from the child illuminates the mother, and herangelic features dazzle the shepherds and shows in the distance Joseph, Maria'shusband." Strolling through the museum, the couple allowed one painting afteranother to "captivate" them. Behncke thought Holbein's Virgin with child"lofty and magnificent, most beautiful!" In contrast, he frowned at canvases byRubens and Jacob Jordaens as "indecent and not very appealing."Then, "filledwith lasting impressions," the couple took their midday meal.'

Behncke's verdicts sound only too familiar; his expressive adjectives, sec-ondhand. But his sensibility was representative for his time and station, and hisresponses, though untrained and unsophisticated, were apparently altogetherauthentic. The common accusation that they must have been just anotherinstance of middle-class cant is unhistorical. While many bourgeois did nothave the right words for art or music, they had, often enough, the right feel-ings.' Like most bourgeois, indeed like academic critics in his time, Behnckepaid particular attention to the subject matter of a painting and insisted on itsrespectful handling by the artist; spiritual elevation was a principal reason foraesthetic approval. That is why Behncke could not warm up to Rubens or jor-daens, not even to their sacred scenes: their coarseness insulted his religioussentiments. However one may judge the Behnckes' taste with the benefit ofhindsight, there is little doubt that they, and thousands of their fellow bour-geois, aspired to possess in some way goods which, they had been taught andfirmly believed, made life gracious and lifted it above mundane routine.

Surpassing expectations, the age of inventions devised an extraordinary arrayof techniques to bring paintings to middle-class multitudes. Some manufactur-ers did not scruple to make the questionable promise that they would matchthe emotional impact of the original. From lithography early to photogravure

* In lus semi-autobiographical novel. TI,t! Hny cifAIl FI('~", Samuel Butler savagely lampoonedthe inauthentic appreciation of nature and an of a principal character, George Ponrifex, for whomhe invented a diary that included a record of his travels to the Continent [or the sake oflus cul-ovation. "I remember seemg at Battersby in after years the diary which he kept on the first ofthese occasions. It 15 a characteristic document. I felt as I read I( that the author before startinghad made up his mind to admire only what he thought It would be creditable 111 him to adnure.to look at nature and art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to lurn by gen-eration after generation of prigs and impostors. The first glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr. Pon-cifex into a convennonal ecstasy:' while the pictures at the Uffizi "threw h1l11IJ1to genteelparoxysms of adnurarion," TIleWay cifAll Flesh (1899; introd. Wilham Lyon Phelps, 1916). '5. '7[ch, 4J.But [here seems to me nothing meretricious about the Behnckes' "conventional ecstasy:'They expressed their feelings as best they could.

TilE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART 57

late in the century, a rapidly expanding industry produced a wealth of illustra-tions, publicized them in the press, and distributed elaborate catalogs. Byaround 1880, there were no fewer than thirty publishers in Germany offeringphotographs to householders clamoring to embellish their rooms:

Not without controversy. From its earliest days in the 1830s, photographyhad generated a flood of excited comment and portentous prophecies that didnot recede for decades. In the words of Nadar, the most famous photographerof mid-century France, the invention had caused "universal stupefaction." Dulystupefied, the prognosticators took the most extravagant positions. Photogra-phy would be the death of art or its salvation, a mortal competitor for the por-traitist or his obedient servant, the triumph of vulgarity or an instrument ofcultivation. There was general agreement that the kind of pictures once seen inthe houses of the rich alone would soon appear in those of ordinary bourgeois.And as usual, the democratization of culture brought anxious and angryprotests. In 1867, Barbey d'Aurevilly (the writer, we recall, who had arousedZolas wrath by patronizing Goethe and Diderot) defined photography as "thatdemocracy of the portrait, that equality before the object, brutal and menda-cious, that art of quatre 50115, put within reach of an egotistical beggars' worldin a century of bargains and shoddy goods."? That was snobbery, but Barbeyd'Aurevilly was right to point out that photography "cheapened" culture-which meaning of that verb remained open.

Wbile traditional genres of reproduction-engravings. etchings, wood-cuts-had to contend with heavy competition from their inexpensive and effi-cient modern challengers, they survived. Art-loving Victorians could enjoystandard favorites fr0111Albrecht Durer to Angelica Kauffmann, Botticelli toGainsborough and Goya, aLiwithout leaving their easy chair. Yet the alarm ofself-appointed guardians of good taste grew with the expansion of the fashionfor graphic surrogates: Barbey d' Aurevilly was not alone.

Not to be intimidated, middlebrows struck back. In J 884, with the jovial,heavy-handed metaphors so well adapted to its petty bourgeois subscribers, theCartenlaubc celebrated the "modern art industry" for turning "the lovely luxu-ry of the richest into the conunon property of all burghers, so that a sense ofbeauty and thoroughly cheerful domesticity rises from the first floor to theattic and descends to the cellar, shutting the mouth and paralyzing the fist ofcrudity and ugliness."? The art industry did no such thing; it neither silencednor disarmed anyone, and the clan of pedagogues devoted to raising the pub-lic's taste found it necessary to intensify their mission to the middling andlower bourgeoisie. The quantity of art in people's houses was surging, but whatof tbe quality?

Wrestling with the craving of bourgeois for instruction, books of advice on

PLEASURE WARS

manners and on home furnishings issued warnmg against unworthy imitations.Some even rejected the more respectable ones-they belonged, this stern wis-dom held, not on the wall but in a portfolio to be produced on special occa-sions. The question of choice remained acute. Should one buy modernetchings of genre scenes designed for the purpose of mass distribution, or awell-made reproduction of a Rubens or a Raphael? In 1868, in his authorita-tive Hints OIl Household Taste, Sir Charles Eastlake, painter, connoisseur, directorof the National Gallery, firmly laid down a rule [hat most discerning bourgeoiscould endorse: choose "the humblest type of Turkey carpet or the cheapesthearthrug from Seinde, and be sure it will afford you more lasting eye-pleasurethan any English imitation.TThe truth lay In original objects-and might eventurn out to be affordable.

Surviving illustrations of nineteenth-century bourgeois interiors suggestthat this counsel had only limited impact. Reproductions of old masters rang-ing in price and quality became cherished decor. Among these reminders ofmastery, Durer's hands folded in prayer. Leonardo cia Vinci's LAst Slipper,Raphael's Sistine Madonna, or a Rembrandt self-portrait held pride of place:Their grip on the middle-class imagination emerges from the moody, reveal-ing recollections of the poet and novelist Rudolf Binding, the son of a law pro-fessor at the University of Leipzig. One day around r880, he sat ill his parents'reception room and mused on it with fresh eyes as though he had never beenthere before. He saw uncomfortable and showy chairs and couches, heavy cur-tains, all the furniture loaded down with fnnges, tassels. knots. Red velvet andplush were everywhere; the upholsterer. Binding thought, had triumphed. Allavailable surfaces were laden with family photos, many III plush frames.And thepictures to which the family had resigned themselves (or which they reallytreasured) were well-produced "colored reproductions of the great wall paint-mgs by Raphael and Michelangelo." imported from England." Even if theBinding family would have admired Liebermann's Giillserupjerillllell, which IS

unlikely, they would have been unwilling, probably unable, to invest so muchcash in art.

Nor could they have managed copies of masterpieces, oils that matchedtheir models in size, color, materials-and appearance-as closely as talent andpractice could make them. To buy one required an Income in the upper reach-es of the middle classes. In 1862, the powerful and affluent French politician

* A watercolor done around 1859. showing the study of the eminent Cermanist WilhelmGrunm III the year of his death. displays several small pictures. life-size busts of Athena, Goethe,and Schiller, and, most prominent of all, a large reproduction of the Sistine .\ladllllll<l. Only thechalk-whire bum mark Gnrnrns study as that of a scholar; the rest, especially the Raphael. looklike the kind of adornment one might see III any sohd bourgeois household.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART 59

Adolphe Thiers, temporarily between high government posts, showed an inter-viewer around his apartment in Paris. It was laden with works of art, and Thierstold his visitor that while his "small fortune" did not permit him to collect onthe scale "of our greatest financiers," he could indulge his love of art with moremodest, but apparently none too modest, expenditures. He had amassed animpressive collection of Rembrandt etchings and Durer woodcuts, and a fewcopies-some of them full-size-s-of the old masters."

Copies from the Italian, Dutch, or Flemish masters had long been the mostdesirable substitutes for the originals, and the Victorian century begot a verita-ble industry devoted to paintings of paintings. A highly paid surgeon likeTheodor Billroth, a German teaching and practicing in Vienna, could adorn hismusic room with respectable copies of Correggio, Caravaggio, and Rubens."Copyists became a familiar sight to the museumgoer with their folding chair,portable easel, and intense stare. Their drudgery was by no means reserved fordilettantes; it formed a common element in the training of aspiring artists inacademies and private ateliers. When in 1850 Edouard Manet applied for per-mission to copy in the Louvre, he did so as the pupil of Thomas Couture, andin his apprentice years he did Tintorettos, Rembrandts, Bouchers. Around thesame time, that artistic and political enthusiast Gustave Courbet copied theDutch and Spanish painters he valued most: Rembrandt, Hals.Velazquez, Rib-era.When Madame Morisot took her three talented daughters to the Lyonnaisartist Joseph Guichard for instruction in painting, his first piece of advice wasto have her apply for a permit to let Berthe, the most clearly gifted of the sis-ters, work in the Louvre. II

A few detractors denounced the practice as deadening ancestor worship.Edmond Duranty, novelist and anti-academic critic, made a fierce mock con-fession in 1856: "I have just come from the Louvre. 10 had had matches I wouldhave set fire to that catacomb, without remorse, firmly convinced that I wouldhave served the cause of the art to come." Several decades later, Camille Pissar-ro echoed these incendiary intentions: "the necropolises of art," he said, shouldbe burned to the ground.fYet the Impressionists, all but Monet and Sisley,duti-fully did their copying and found it useful, at times even inspiring. Mainly con-centrating like their more conventional brethren on Rubens and the greatVenetians, they schooled their eye, improved their technical facility, and paidtheir tributes to greatness. Cezanne, in awe of Delacroix's genius, copied andadapted his work some twenty-two times, and busied himself with an EIGreco.P Whatever Pissarro might say, copying could be a road to innovation.

It could also be a road to pecuniary success. A copyist who managed to ren-der a classic with striking fidelity was destined to make a reputation. His wasso honorable a practice that his name would be highly visible, a source of pride

60 PLEASURE WARS

rather than embarrassment: At times painters copied themselves, on demand.Arnold Bocklin's Isle of the Dead of [880, a nocturnal, portentous seascape thathe had painted for a young widow who asked for a picture to dream by, provedso fashionable that Bocklin himself did four further versions. Predictably, thisenigmatic and moody Toteninsel soon featured in countless bourgeois house-holds in engravings or photogravures-copies on a lower level.

Making copies COSt money, then, usually less than the copyist hoped for andmore than most BildHllgsbiirger could manage. Yet, even when artists were dis-satisfied with their stipends, they rarely minded the assignment; after all, it sentthem to Paris, to Madrid, or, best of all, to Rome. The young Franz Lenbachspent three instructive years in Italy from 1864 on, copyingTitians,Tintorettos,Giorgiones for the German collector Count Schack. In the summer of 1865,one of his cultivated friends from Munich, Rosalie Braun-Artaria, came uponLenbach in the Uffizi at Florence, doing a Rubens self-portrait for Schack, andexclaimed over the "magnificently successful copy, which stood like a secondoriginal beside the first." A prodigiously rich northerner settled in Munich,Schack could play the Maecenas, commissioning promising painters to stockhis treasure trove with plausible versions of old masters; he was said to haveabout 100,000 marks a year, of which he frugally spent only one-sixth, leavingthe rest for art. He guaranteed Lenbach a stipend of 1,000 gulden for the firstyear, 1,400 for the second, and 2,000 for the third, sums that would relieve anyyoung artist of financial worries. But with time the chore lost its charm forLenbach; in 1868, he informed his patron from Madrid that he had hadenough. He wanted to focus 011 his own "productive airns.?"

Other copyists were no less skillful and no less busy. Henri Fantin-Latour,known for his precise flower pieces and his painted homages to fellow artists,made himself available to supply collectors with faithful replicas. His "trueteachers," noted Adolphe jullien. his friend and biographer, in 1909, "were inthe Louvre." Everyone called him.jullien noted, "the painter par excellence ofthe middle class and bourgeois society, some to praise him, others to make funof hirn.?" Among the best clients of these copyists were Americans intent ongiving the small private museums they had founded some glimpses of immor-tal works of art. The Athenaeum at St. johnsbury, Vermont, for one, has amidother excellent, clearly identified copies, Thomas Waterman Wood's version ofRosa Bonheur's Plowing on the Nivernais," Thus local art lovers intent on see-ing masterpieces could save themselves a trip to Europe.

* The Century Club in New York has a full-scale copy of Correggio's Au/iope, Identified on

the label as dating from 1809, after the palming in the Louvre, by John Vanderlyn, then a promi-nenr American history painter living in Pans. On the label Ius name appears far larger, far more

prominent, than that of Correggio.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART 61

Reproductions in varied techniques, then, satisfied a sizable spectrum ofmore or less substantial burghers. The most astute entrepreneurs addressed sev-eral of these markets on the same occasion. Even three-mark tracts on artadvertised collections of engravings by prominent German painters at fairlyhigh prices, most of them inaccessible to the bulk of their readership." In r880,Otto von Leixner, journalist, essayist, poet, and editor, used as the frontispiecefor a collection of studies on aesthetics a collotype of Angelica Kauffmann'spainting of a vestal virgin, and advertised engravings of it at ISO, 30, or 25

marks, promising the "artistic rendition" to be "a masterpiece which does jus-tice to the beauty of the original in every respect.":" He did not specify whatdifferentiated the engravings he was offering from each other, but it must havebeen a matter of quality and size alike."

The Photographische Union ill Munich resorted to the same technique. In[899, it advertised a three-volume set offering a selection of "the most out-standing works of the master" Arnold Bocklin, the Swiss painter whom Ger-man art lovers had begun to embrace a decade or more earlier for his virilemermen and hefty mermaids, and for cryptic nocturnes like the Isle of the Dead.The sets cost a generally prohibitive 100 or 200 marks each. But those inter-ested in a single Bocklin could ask the publisher for a price list of pho-togravures or photographs. And in the same year, people with modest meansintent only on being introduced to Bocklins muscular, rhetorical art could buya sixty-page essay by Professor Dr. Max Lehrs for I mark 50. A small shop-keeper needed to put in only about three hours to acquire this informative lit-tle monograph. We have seen it before: the culture industry had learned to havesomething for everyone.

The cost of music made the same accommodations. Except for socialites whotook a box to satisfy their gregariousness or pursue sexual adventures, concert-goers came for a musical experience they had usually had before. Conductorsand soloists had, of course, distinct predilections and might smuggle into pro-grams unfamiliar, hence difficult, numbers, But they also tacitly allowed sub-scribers some say in the making of programs. Audience-tested symphonies orconcertos, arias or sonatas, became staples of the repertory because there was ademonstrable clamor for them. They were popular because they were popular.And nineteenth-century merchants of culture tailored concerts and recitals,just as they did pictures, not just to some all-purpose taste but more preciselyto the size of their customers' purses. Whether conventional or venturesome,concert managers developed a scale of ticket prices to gratify the social eliteand me middle-income bourgeois without forgetting the student or the pettyclerk.

PLEASURE WARS

Munich, proud of its high culture, provides some suggestive examples: OnJune 10, 1865, for the world premiere of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at theNationaltheater, the ticket for the most desirable boxes went for IS gulden(about 25 marks), a sum at which even a professor might balk, especially if hewanted to take his family. But for poverty-stricken Wagnerites there was tbelowly "Parterre" at 48 kronen (about 1 mark 20) or, still more modest, the"Galerie," which cost a mere 24 kronen, or some 60 pfennig. Tickets for "ordi-nary operas" were pitched at prices more affordable than those of most Wag-ner performances; and by the r870s, on royal command, selected nonsub-scription evenings had lowered prices still further.

Even Wagner became relatively accessible: on February 13,1886, the Munichopera put on a Fi)lirrg Dutchman "at reduced prices," ranging from 4 marks to

60 pfennig. The management thoughtfully discriminated among the beneficia-ries entitled to such reductions: on January 10, [886, it mounted a matinee ofCharles Gounod's Romeo and Jllliet for the fund benefiting the company's wid-ows and orphans with tickets from I mark 50 down to 50 pfennig. The latterprice was reserved for students at Munich's two universities and students at theAcademy of Fine Arts; and, responsive to the pupils at the Royal School ofMusic and secondary school students, the management put their admission at40 pfennig. It was in this spirit that the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra,founded in r893, staged affordable evenings with the highest-priced ticket setat I mark-which would cost a lowly bureaucrat less than two hours' exertion.

The theater, too, regularly featured nonsubscription performances at espe-cially modest rates: in January 1886, the Nationaltheater offered TI,C .Were/ralltriff enice with tickets no higher than 2 marks 50, the lowest-priced seat costinga mere 30 pfennig. In general, and not only in Germany, plays both classic andmodern were more affordable than operas, to which, for all their managers'efforts to attract the impecunious, a certain aristocratic aura continued to clinglong after the tided had been reduced to a small minority in the audience." Incontrast, the theater became a favorite middle-class entertainment, each coun-try of course identifying its pleasures in its own way. French plays about thedemimonde or adorable courtisans, which filled Parisian houses, did not seemappropriate for Germany unless they had treacle poured over them.

The fervor of missionaries agonizing over the level of German culture "vas,35we have seen, aimed at all social strata. But while graduates of the CYlIlIlasilllll,

even of the university, might need guidance in distinguishing the authenticfrom the meretricious, the segment the reformers worried over most was the

* I shall offer a detailed analysis of Munich's culture In "The Geography of Taste."

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART

Mi//elsralld. This sizable segment of the German middle orders has had an evenworse press than the bourgeoisie as a whole. It has been accused of indulgingin the politics of resseutiincut with devastating consequences, and of living con-tentedly in an aesthetic desert with no wish to emulate their betters.

But this is simplistic and heartless. Simplistic because the petty bourgeoisiewas not a monolithic entity; heartless because try as they might, denizens of theMirtelstalld found it exceedingly hard to overcome the handicaps built intotheir economic lot. Only the most determined could gather up the leisure andthe energy after a hard week's toil, or for that matter the money, to hauntmuseums, or follow compositions in the concert hall with a score, let alonetravel to improve their hazy acquaintance with what they had long prized froma distance. Their perpetual fear of social descent haunted them. Those whosaved their meager assets for culture, then, were making a distinct choice ofhow they wanted to live, favoring beauty over beer. self-improvement over self-indulgence. Yet despite these creditable exceptions. German cultural peda-gogues had a point in detecting among Germany's Kleillbiir~er an identifiabletaste in which few could take pride. Their most valued teachers, family week-lies like the Cartenlaube or its Catholic counterpart, Daheiin, did nothing tostretch their aesthetic imagination.

In abundantly illustrated numbers, these periodicals and their imitators pur-sued a safe cultural agenda. When they spoke of art. they polernicized againstthe "naked realism" of painters like Courbet, who to their mind extolled theugly at the expense of the comely. When they reported on an internationalexhibition, they would congratulate themselves on how weJl their compatriotshad performed in the face of a world that thought them barbarians. These greatfairs struck them as fights to the finish in which Germans went all out to winthe wars of art-decisively. Covering the German paintings represented at ther878 Parisian World's Fair for the Cattell laube, Fritz Wernick observed that,organized in an amazingly short time and crammed into a small suite of rooms,the offering had incontestably "become the most beautiful of all the art exhi-bitions."The superiority of German generalship had been demonstrated onceagain on the battleground of painting and sculpture. In Paris (which, no onecould forget, German armies had entered as a victorious enemy only sevenyears before), "our Germany has secured a brilliant victory with the smallestarmy."The gathering of German paintings had "struck like a bomb,'?'

This chauvinist tone was maladroit, to be sure, yet it usefully reminds thehistorian once again that nationalist fervor could be as potent in the politics ofculture as in allY other domain. But in a patriotic mood or not, family maga-zines were resolutely set against any touches of modernism, which, with somestriking exceptions, was a cosmopolitan venture. They defended academicism

PLEASURE WAR.S

by fearurmg a full-page engraving of a conventional painting or two in everyissue and, late 111 the century, handed out portfolios as premiums. Their art ranto the sentimental, the humorous, or the pious. Anecdote was king.

Examples abound. At an outdoor feast a shy Italian beauty, eyes lowered andhands clasped, waits for a swain, no less bashful, fingering his hat, to ask her todance. A schoolboy wearing a guilry expression-he has doubtless been caughtfighting or with his hand in the cookie jar--stands before the principal, who,birch rod in band, is about to administer painful justice. A pair of putti flutterabove the head of a mother smiling rapturously at her infant. In a well-stockedcellar. rwo or three corpulent, bibulous monks taste the wine they are supposedto be bottling. Christ takes in the bustle of a modern city, his expression at oncecompassionate and troubled. A kitten and a puppy fight peacefully over a ballof wool. A mighty stag bestriding a hilltop utters his mating call. Kaiser Wil-helm and his consort sit together stiffly on a sofa, incarnating in their dignifiedway the German family ideal. Or the kaiser stands alone, wearing one of hiselaborate uniforms and leaning on a sword, glowering at the viewer as if to

enforce a rush of patriotic emotion.For Bllrger who chose to frame such decorative items, the Nazarenes, let

alone the Expressionists, might as well never have painted. The makers of mod-ernist culture retaliated with impatience and disdain; they read these flightsfrom strenuous pleasures as symptoms of middle-class ignorance and invinciblesloth. In 1829, Berlioz had a "naive" conversation with Francois Adrien Boiel-dieu, composer of smooth, highly successful comic operas, who advised him to

compromise with the bland taste of the day rather than insist on writing out-landish pieces that even trained musicians could not follow. Recalling thisencounter years later, Berlioz suggested that Boieldieu was only voicing Frenchtastes dominant at the time. The "gros public wanted relaxing music," he wrotein his Mhnoires; it wanted music "a bit dramatic" and "colorless," quite "free ofextraordinary harmonies, unusual rhythms, new forms, unexpected effects"-music that "demanded from its interpreters and its listeners neither major tal-ents nor close attention." Since then, Berlioz added, things had only gO[

worse."He was speaking for resentful serious Victorian composers, painters, play-

wrights, novelists. One other pronouncement among many belongs here, for Itstrikingly echoes the tone of Berlioz's biting scorn for the middlebrow cus-tomers in the marketplace of culture. In J855, the celebrated violinist JosephJoachim wrote his close friend Johannes Brahms, "The public ell gros" consistsof "people addicted to entertainment," people who badger true artists withtheir "crude e~"pectations."2J Technical finish, that witness to proficient crafts-manship and modest claims on aesthetic intelligence, ranked high among these

3. Limits and Possibilities

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART

strata of the public. No wonder that aristocrats of the brush and pen thoughtthe democratizing tendencies in the arts synonymous with the triumph of vul-garity; no wonder that representative spokesmen for the self-selected bourgeoiselite, sensitive and educated enough to grasp the intentions of controversialartists, found themselves reiterating the alarms they heard from the geniusesthey idolized.

Their laments were not mainly the condescension of upper-middle-classsnobs: the bourgeois masses (which, we know, included sizable portions of theeducated) did need to cultivate a receptivity to unfamiliar sights and sounds, toacquire the experience and train the mental suppleness necessary to welcomethe innovative rather than remain mired in the commonplace: To appreciatethe finest in art and music is a trial for human nature: it calls for the hard workof breaking the cake of custom for the sake of discriminating pleasures runningcounter to the pressure for simplicity and mere relaxation in rare leisure hours.Cultural conservatism came naturally, like all conservatism; the avant-gardeswere boldly defying a prominent ingredient in human nature, the fear of theunfamiliar.

It would be easy to duplicate from other sources this sketch of economic andaesthetic hierarchies; the limits set and the possibilities open to bourgeois pur-chasers of high culture showed remarkably similar profiles everywhere, fromScandinavia to the Mediterranean. Even Americans, nervous about the lowermiddle class, set aside the ideology of the open frontier and of classless equali-ty; straining to raise their countrymen's taste to an acceptable level, they large-ly followed the European model.

A canvass of the cultural temptations for the British middle classes tellsmuch about these family resemblances. The most effective adjustment to thefinancial capacities of all ranks in Britain was, of course, as it was elsewhere, arange of prices for roughly similar experiences. In 1848, a teapot designed by

* This was no secret to the nineteenth century. As early as 1810, Bellina VOll Arnim, a lively,

intelligent, politically progressive critic of her culture and a self-invited friend of tbe great. told

Goethe that she found it odd to see music being considered incomprchensiblc.v+lcnce chat rage

against what has not yet been heard. nor only because it was not understood, but also because it

was not even known. Humans stand before music like a sawhorse; the familiar they can stand, not

because they grasp it. but because they are used to it, like the donkey with irs daily burden." Bet-

tina von Arnirn to COt:lhe.IChristmas 18101, lVerke IlIId Brjifc, cd. Gustav Konrad and Joachim

Muller, 5 vols. (195y--63), V. 103.