Embody Language: Christopher S. Wood on Michael Fried's Menzel - Books - Book Review

CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD ON MICHAEL FRIED'S MENZEL

Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. 313 pages. $55.

ADOLPH MENZEL (1815-1905), an improbable, cross-grained character who might have walked out of one of E.T.A. Hoffmann's eerie tales, lacked by his own admission the "glue" that binds us to the rest of humanity. Instead he stood just to one side of the world, holding a pad in one hand and pencil and stump in the other--whether left or right did not matter, for he was graphically ambidextrous. He drew constantly. At age seventeen Menzel began a course of study at the academy in Berlin, but soon abandoned it and taught himself to paint. Eventually, with his brilliant historical mirages of eighteenth-century Prussian court life, he won celebrity. By the end of his long run, according to an obituarist, Menzel "belonged to the image of the city. This dwarflike man with his enormous head and sarcastic countenance ... was pointed out to tourists as a curiosity." The memorial exhibition mounted by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin at his death, in 1905, made room for 6,405 drawings, 291 watercolors, 129 paintings, and 252 prints.

Even that stupendous mass of material (how were the drawings displayed?) might not have satisfied Michael Fried's appetite for Menzel. Fried has written a mettlesome book that ranges all over the oeuvre. After Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987) and Courbet's Realism (1990), Fried completes a trilogy on his three great "realists," by which he means that "all three were intensely bodily painters." Menzel in particular created highly convincing fictions of "embodiment" that invite us to "project ourselves as if corporeally" into the works. Fried pleads the strongest case he can for the quality and significance of Menzel's work. To experience these moments of what Fried calls "exchange or transfer ... between persons and things" you will need to rendezvous with the works, meet them face to face in "the precious now." So unless you remember well the great Menzel exhibition of 1997 at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, your pleasure in this book will be deferred until your next trip to Berlin, where most of the paintings and drawings are kept. As Fried points out, Menzel's reputation, like Eakins's, has been stranded in his native country along with his works.

In Menzel's Realism Fried jumps from topic to topic, contrasting or connecting the painter's work with John Ruskin's ideas about vision and drawing; with Kierkegaard's conception of everyday experience as a ground of meaning; with the "empathy theory" practiced by Robert Vischer and Heinrich Wolfflin; with Georg Simmel's thoughts on urban experience; with photography; and with much else. There is no cumulative argument, just a constellation of contexts. Fried's voice as always is unpretentious and stubbornly questing, and the book is a delight to read.

In reproduction, it is Menzel's drawings that make the greatest impact. You can hardly tear your eyes away, as Fried puts it, from the lathery Unmade Bed, ca. 1845; Worker Eating, Several Views, 1872-74; or the precarious mountain of furniture in Moving Out of a Cellar, 1844, all in pencil; or the glowering gouaches of empty suits of armor. No less enchanting are Body of an Officer, 1873, a drawing of a Prussian soldier exhumed in a Berlin vault after a century of gaping sleep (Menzel was of course on hand, with pad), and Marks on a Urinal Wall, 1900. The immediately winning paintings are the so-called private pictures: "loose-jointed" views from back windows, impressions of empty bedrooms or the flotsam of a rural backyard, pictures admired even by Julius Meier-Graefe, the Francophile critic who otherwise deplored Menzel's uncouth naturalism.

The ferocious intimacy and taste for disarray in Menzel's work strike us as forward pointing. But this sensibility and the meaty draftsmanship derive, I would say, from rococo masters Watteau, Fragonard, Chodowiecki, and perhaps ultimately from Rubens. Menzel spent decades illustrating the life and times of Frederick the Great (1712-86), the polymath Prussian king, military strategist of genius, and intimate of Voltaire. In these most public works--canvases for the royal and imperial courts of his own day or for industrialists, wood engravings for multivolume popular histories--Menzel dreamed an airless world of automatonlike courtiers, treacherous physiognomies, periwigs and tricorn hats, and gargantuan crystal chandeliers. He was equally given to farcical anecdotes and spidery ornamental vignettes. His historical confections were the foundation of his official patronage and all his popular affection. In the eye of the public his masterpiece was Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci, 1850-52.

Fried is unfazed by the depth of Menzel's ancien regime fantasy. He looks straight through the subject matter and instead gathers the entire oeuvre under a single proposition: What Menzel was aiming at in all these works was "effects of embodiment." Fried finds a hundred different phrases for the enigma of empathy: We feel Menzel's "imaginative projection of bodily experience"; the works with their "somatic tenor" exert a "quasi-physical pull"; Menzel was "'activating' a primal or originary relation to embodiment" that he found in artifacts; the works make "bodily valences ... all but palpable"; they depict "bodily sensations ... practically as vivid to us as our own." We know what he means, I suppose, but the accumulation of paraphrases points to a risky lack of precision, the same conceptual incompleteness that led to the demise of nineteenth-century empathy theory in the first place.