A growing literature has emerged describing and analyzing the production and reception of art objects as well as the institutions supporting artists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This recent book, the published version of Thomas Schmitz’s 1997 doctoral dissertation (University of Düsseldorf), is a thoroughly researched and cogently analyzed account of one of Germany’s unique institutions, the Kunstvereine (art unions). Additionally, he discusses the relationship of Kunstvereine to issues of class identity and cultural self-representation. He has no aesthetic or ideological ax to grind and therefore quite objectively discusses the art unions’ major features, including their strengths and weaknesses. Schmitz summarizes the unusual variety and broad scope of art unions, using a wide range of local, regional, and national archives in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bremen, Hannover, and Nürnberg, as well as contemporary journals and newspapers and a vast number of key secondary sources. His bibliography runs to almost one hundred pages.

Art unions existed in other European countries before the nineteenth century. For example, the English founded a “Society of Virtuosi” as early as 1689, and in 1732 established an art club, the “Society of Dilettanti,” whose members included six prime ministers as well as a murderer (30)! A more direct ancestor to the German art union was the Zurich Society of Artists and Friends of Art, founded in 1787. Schmitz examines the various reasons for the founding of art unions, the majority of which were established in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars and Congress of Vienna. Virtually every town and region had an art union. While the reasons for their founding differed, many Kunstvereine had similar goals: establishing venues for convivial social interaction for the middle class, creating places for the display of artworks outside artists’ studios or officially sanctioned art academies, and organizing spaces for the sale of paintings and prints. Members contributed funds, and, in many cases, lottery tickets were sold. Lottery winners received commissioned paintings or prints; these funds augmented each union’s coffers. Schmitz repeatedly notes the importance of “sociability” as an integral part of the Kunstvereine raison d’etre. He competently considers the common features of Kunstvereine throughout Germany and examines their local variations within the preunification German lands before 1871. Several art unions, for example, specialized in religious art, others in historical subject matter. The author suggests that art unions paralleled other voluntary associations that grew rapidly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and mirrored the variety of social groupings within Germany. There were Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Kunstvereine. Several art unions catered to the tastes of nationalistic and politically right-wing groups at the turn of the century. He also evaluates the problematic role and rapid capitulation of Kunstvereine during the Third Reich and concludes with a short summary of their prohibition in the German Democratic Republic and reestablishment in the Federal Republic after 1945.

The type of art displayed and for sale varied considerably, depending on the individual art union. During their heyday in the early and mid-nineteenth century, Kunstvereine both exhibited and sold works of prominent contemporary artists, including Caspar David Friedrich during the 1820s and later Karl Spitzweg, the genre painter. The majority of artists, however, were minor and local talents who today are virtually unknown and rarely written about or exhibited. By and large, the art unions’ regular exhibitions tended to privilege the aesthetic juste milieu, somewhat in opposition to the grandiose canvases favored by members of the official academies. Sponsored by the local aristocracy, the academies often catered to their supporters’ aesthetically conservative tastes, displaying portraits and religious and military scenes. In contrast, the art unions, especially during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, exhibited realism and contemporary genre pictures for the small but growing middle class. By the late 1800s, Kunstvereine belatedly began to show Impressionist work, but the associations generally did not promote the latest international trends. Genre and landscape perennially served as popular subjects, especially as an expanding Bürgertum sought to furnish their homes with culturally appropriate decorative objects. The art unions’ aesthetic timidity was especially obvious by about 1900, when alternative artists’ groups such as the Secessions took up the cause for modernism and promoted the works of the German and European avant-garde, particularly the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Expressionists.

Schmitz’s important study does more than simply a describe the various art unions as an alternative public sphere to art academies. He presents the reader with a social history of the art unions’ membership, dividing it by occupation and numbers. As previously mentioned, virtually every town and region had an art union, whose membership ranged from several hundred to several thousand. The numbers were substantial, indeed, as one of the most important art unions, the Munich Kunstverein, grew from 156 members in 1823 to more than 5,400 by the turn of the century. Just before the First World War, approximately 85,000 Germans belonged to an art union. Who joined? While numbers do not exist for each specific occupation nor are all years statistically complete, it appears that the majority of Kunstverein members were nobility, military officers, merchants, and educated professionals (Bildungsbürgertum), such as doctors, lawyers, professors, and government officials (68, 77). Schmitz attempts to characterize precisely what is meant by “bürgerlich” (middle-class), as art-union members ranged from aristocrats to, though less frequently, artisans. Citing the vast literature on definitions of the nineteenth-century German middle-class, Schmitz provides tables from a fair number of Kunstvereine to suggest that the majority of members came from the upper classes and tended to be a town or region’s “notables”—men of “substance.”¹ The author also provides a full discussion of the nuts and bolts of artists’ roles in promoting their art through the unions: for example, their negotiations with prospective patrons and the politics of local and traveling exhibitions. Thus his study seeks to understand art unions as part of the larger social history of the German middle classes during the long nineteenth century. The bourgeoisie is estimated to have made up between five and fifteen percent of the total population, depending how ecumenical one is in including artisans within the definition of middle class. Furthermore, the author describes the art production, reception, and purchase within art unions’ activities.² And third, he discusses the art-historical significance of these institutions in terms of the history of taste. How did contemporary critics, artists, and museum officials, not to mention German and foreign patrons, view Kunstvereine exhibition offerings and sales? As Schmitz notes: “With respect to methodology, my study moves among the social history of the bourgeoisie, research into the cultural history of middle-class civility, and an Alltagsgeschichte [history of daily life] of the upper bourgeoisie’s consumption of culture” (14; translation mine).

The volume does not detail precisely which painters and what paintings were on display at the various exhibitions. Nor does Schmitz spend a great deal of time delineating the changes in artistic taste within individual art unions over the decades, though his abbreviated discussion on this subject is a nuanced one. Rather, his study provides the reader with an overview of the major art unions and an examination of the similarities and differences among them. Schmitz’s account, therefore, is a multifaceted examination of an extremely important institution that has only recently begun to be studied. Art historians have tended to describe the works and activities of the major painters biographically. Social and cultural historians have examined the art profession as part of the larger trend in the nineteenth-century professionalization of occupations. Social and cultural historians have also studied art organizations and institutions such as museums, academies, schools, and artists’ groups to understand how and why the art world underwent dramatic transformations in style and in substance during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These transformations extend to this day, as does the continued existence of Kunstvereine in the Federal Republic. Schmitz’s volume is a welcome addition to the growing literature. His collection of statistical information in one handy, readable book will serve as useful reference. Kunstvereine were critical centers of cultural and social change within the art world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Schmitz’s study recognizes its importance in German cultural, social, and aesthetic history.