While a number of recent exhibitions have examined Symbolist art in a European context, Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany 1870–1920 was the first international show to focus exclusively on German art from the turn-of-the-century period.¹ Despite the inclusive parameters in its title, most of works included date from the Wilhelmine period (1890–1914). Coorganized by the English art historian, Simon Reynolds, and Ingrid Ehrhardt, curator at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, Kingdom of the Soul presented almost two hundred works of painting, sculpture, and graphic arts to audiences in Germany, England, and Sweden. Since many of these nearly seventy artists are little known outside Germany, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue do much to increase the audience for this art. But they also reveal the limitations of the category “Symbolism” as an organizing principle, and the problems of applying traditional art-historical methods to what has long been represented as mysteriously inscrutable material.

The bulk of the catalogue is comprised of twelve brief essays that present a series of thematic overviews, as well as succinct case studies of key artists, including Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, and Max Klinger. This format tends to prevent authors from developing complex arguments, and most of them offer surveys and syntheses of their own, earlier, scholarship. In his two contributions, the Symbolist specialist Hans H. Hofstätter provides some cultural context for these works, explaining the intellectual connections between French and German artists at the turn of the century. He also examines religious imagery, focusing on the diverse reworkings of an unusually popular motif: Hans Holbein’s 1522 depiction of the dead Christ. Reynolds and fellow English art historian William Vaughan consider Arcadian imagery and landscape painting, and other contributors discuss sculpture, portraiture, and scenes drawn from myths and fairy tales.

Although several of these essays are simply a linked series of artists’ biographies, they do provide a welcomed introduction to the work of intriguing and unfamiliar figures such as the landscape painter Eugen Bracht and the haunting Dresden printmaker Richard Müller. However, with the exception of Vaughan’s fascinating essay on “spiritual landscapes” and Annette Dorgerloh’s consideration of portraiture, the authors shy away from situating these works within any sort of social and historical context. Instead, they concentrate on two concerns: defining the slippery term “Symbolism” and constructing a plausible genealogy for the German variant of the movement.

Defining the concept of Symbolism is notoriously difficult, and this ambiguity affects both the exhibition’s conceptual framework and the selection of artists. While one author describes the central concept as a “spiritual current” (7), for another it represents a “mental attitude” (17). If some view Symbolism as a response to industrialization and the heightened materialism of the age, others stress artists’ desire to transcend outmoded academic standards and access new realms of experience. What binds the diverse group of artists in this exhibition together is likewise not entirely clear. They share neither goals nor styles. Some, like Paul Klee and Käthe Kollwitz, are modernists, while others, including the sculptor Hugo Lederer, are academicians. Symbolism, then, seems to be a kind of residue that is manifest in specific works. To study the “movement” is to investigate a sensibility or a Zeitgeist. It is not surprising that in their respective studies of Symbolism from the 1970s, both Hofstätter and Robert Goldwater employed a series of overarching categories to help classify specific characteristics of this comprehensive concept. What we can observe in these diverse pictures and sculptures are artists consistently rejecting the real world for the ideal realm of myth and attempting to convey a mood rather than tell a story.

Most contributors to Kingdom of the Soul favor the same sweeping thematic approach of Goldwater and Hofstätter. Unfortunately, in this attempt, the works themselves often become little more than exemplars of highly inclusive conceptual categories. We learn that a favorite Symbolist theme is “Religion and Sexuality,” and Hans Thoma’s paintings appear under the suggestive rubric “Myths, Moods, Premonitions.” Such generalizations are not uncommon in thematic exhibitions, where a broad conceptual framework can help the viewer make sense of a wide range of material. But these titles and headings, like many of the catalogue essays, reinforce the misleading notion that the works really do occupy some kind of ideal realm, utterly removed from contemporary life.

Describing The Onrush of Spring—Ludwig von Hofmann’s Arcadian landscape in which a naked youth, flanked by two young women, strolls along a windswept shore—Simon Reynolds writes that we “embrace the full joy of spring…beauty liberated from sexual stereotypes in a landscape redolent with cosmic symbolism” (59). In this image, he sees “the promise of a renewed Golden Age in Germany” (59). While this characterization certainly captures von Hofmann’s aspirations, it tells us nothing about the work’s reception, or of the social tensions that this kind of art strives to conceal.

While these attempts at identifying the divergent aspects of Symbolism remain problematic, the authors succeed in establishing a kind of lineage for this work. Several describe the painter Caspar David Friedrich as a precursor of the German Symbolists, but the exhibition’s real starting point is the work of the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin and his colleagues, the “Deutsch-Römer,” or German Romans. These artists, most of whom had already left Germany to settle in Italy by the 1860s, did exert an enormous influence on generations of German painters. Creating suggestive images that renounced the banalities of everyday life, they viewed art as the quest for a mythic ideal. Works like Böcklin’s famous Island of the Dead (1880) exemplify this approach and were enormously popular.

In his catalogue essay, Hans Henrik Brummer reviews the critical response to Böcklin’s work in the 1890s, and the visceral reactions it elicited help to explain the problematic status of German Symbolism even today. While young artists such as Edvard Munch venerated the Swiss painter, others—most notably Munch’s great advocate, the critic Julius Meier-Graefe—cast Böcklin as a dangerous impediment to progress. By the early twentieth century, after Meier-Graefe’s influential writings on modern art appeared, Böcklin and the Symbolist approach gradually came to be viewed as academic and antiquarian. It was easy enough to oppose an art that employed suggestion and allegory in the pursuit of ideal truths with that of the French modernists, whose shifting impressions celebrated the heroism of modern life. Years later, the Nazi enthusiasm for Böcklin’s work only seemed to bear out Meier-Graefe’s denunciation of the nationalist aspect of German Symbolism.

This critical background helps to explain the relative paucity of scholarship on this subject since the Second World War. But the work itself, with its evocative themes and elevated aspirations, also seems to resist interpretation. As if to placate the many artists who openly proclaimed their desire to reject everyday life and strive for universal meaning, scholars frequently disengage these images from the world in which they were created and rely largely on formal tools such as source finding and iconography in their analyses. Ordering these depictions into congruous categories also tends to eliminate all contradictions and discontinuities. And it is often here, exploring the glaring gap between the actual world and the ideal realm of representation, that we can learn the most.

In contrast to the domain of quiescent tranquility evident in so many contemporary paintings, the Wilhelmine age was one of rapid change, not only in the realm of culture but also in the social, economic, and political spheres. This tension, between a real world in turmoil and a stable, imagined ideal, permeated every aspect of visual culture. It is evident in the work of Böcklin, who frequently combined an almost too earthy naturalism with his evocative mythic settings. It makes sense of Meier-Graefe’s singular description of the enormously popular work of Franz von Stuck. This Munich artist, he wrote, “paints barmaids like sphinxes and sphinxes like barmaids” (159). It can even help to explain how the ascetic artist Melchior Lechter could fashion luxurious volumes of Stefan George’s poetry while designing a stained-glass window for Berlin’s largest department store. The turn of the century was an era rife with tensions and contradictions, and only through a close critical engagement with these complex works can we learn more about the elusive subject of German Symbolism.