Mellem myte og virkelighed

Abstract

Summary This article deals with the cultural writer Georg Brandes's role as a go‐between between Danish and German art of the late 19th century. It is pointed out that Brandes, in spite of his aesthetic background in French naturalism around Taine and Zola, also had close connections with the cultural avantgarde in Germany, for example with the poet Paul Heyse, the sculptor and graphic artist Max Klinger and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One of the reasons for this is that Brandes took part in the fight of the German avantgarde against Friedrich Hegel's platonic philosophy. Paul Heyse was the first German cultural personality who Georg Brandes befriended. Through him he got into one of the most important centres of German realism and another benefit was the connection with modern German painting. Of course Brandes was interested in Franz von Lenbach's realistic portraiture but first of all he was intrigued by Arnold Böcklins painting Villa am Meer (1865) as at token of his dream away from bourgeois hegelianism. This was in the middle of the 1870's and later in the same decade Brandes became a close friend of the young painter, graphic artist and sculptor Max Klinger. In spite of his naturalistic point of view Brandes willingly admired Klinger's symbolic paintings, which he found quite modern. In an elegantly illustrated article (1881) Brandes described Klinger as a left‐wing artist, who analysed society's social and sexual problems in a very original manner. Not only because of his early advocation of Friedrich Nietzsches philosophy (1889) but also because of his great interest in modern German art, Brandes was much ahead of his Danish contemporaries. It was only later—in the 1890's that Danish painters were inspired by the art of Böcklin and Max Klinger. For example Oluf Hartmann's more or less vitalistic works from the turn of the century seem quite impossible without the knowledge of works by Böcklin, Klinger and Edouard von Hoffmann. Furthermore it is impossible to understand Edvard Weie's paintings of nymphs and pans without taking into consideration that dream about the liberating force of the mythical subject, that Brandes in his epoch‐making lectures and articles had pointed out may years before.