The Entrepreneur
March 2008
The unlikely subject of Germany’s most recent blockbuster exhibition was Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553), the resident artist at the electoral court of Saxony in Wittenberg. The show, a sprawling display of some 100 paintings shown together with a small number of drawings and prints, opened at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in November and can be seen at the Royal Academy in London from March 8 through June 8. In Frankfurt it drew record crowds of visitors and was hailed in Der Spiegel (Germany’s equivalent of Time magazine) as the art event of the year. There was even a review in The New Yorker—a considerable feat for any occurrence at a distance from the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers. The Royal Academy will give Cranach his first-ever major exhibition in England. All very impressive. But why Cranach? And why now?Cranach’s work has not traditionally been ranked at the same level as that of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the quintessential altdeutsche artist, nor at the level of Dürer’s stylistic opposite, the enigmatic Mathis Gothart-Nithart, more commonly known as Grünewald (c. 1480–1528), the master of the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. However, it can be argued that Cranach’s work fits perfectly between these two artistic poles. His earliest paintings and prints, executed in Vienna between 1501 and 1504, are full of Sturm und Drang, encapsulating the barely tamed expressionist side of the German Renaissance. Two monumental woodcuts from this period showing crowded Calvary scenes rival Dürer’s "Apocalypse" series of 1498 both in scale and in complexity of technique. The bodies of the two thieves in both prints are absurdly contorted around the beams of their crosses, their extreme poses prepared in two ravishing chalk drawings on colored paper in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett. A painted equivalent is a Crucifixion that came from the Schottenstift in Vienna and is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum there. Cranach’s early style is so different from that of his later oeuvre that scholars used to attribute these works to the anonymous hand of the so-called "Pseudo-Grünewald"; it was only on the occasion of the first major survey of his art held in Dresden in 1899 that they were widely accepted as being by Cranach.
The artist’s stylistic progressiveness was linked to a probing intellectualism of a kind that seems to have been in demand in Vienna around the turn of the century; indeed, in 1501, Emperor Maximilian founded a humanistic faculty at the university there. Cranach received commissions from the resident humanists, and portraits, such as that of the poet laureate Johannes Cuspian, are full of complex iconological references to a humanistic world view as well as to Christian symbolism.
In 1504 Cranach was called to the court in Wittenberg, marking the beginning of one of the longest periods of employment of any court artist in history—a successful career that came to an end only with the artist’s death 49 years later in 1553. The Städel Museum owns an important work from the first phase of Cranach’s Wittenberg period: the so-called "Sippenaltar" from 1509, a triptych depicting the Holy Kinship of the Virgin with the Christ child, Joseph and Mary’s mother, Anne. The altar, which is one of the centerpieces of the exhibition, was completed immediately upon the artist’s return from a trip to the Netherlands, where he had been sent on a diplomatic mission the previous year.
There he encountered the work of such "modern" artists as Quentin Massys (1466–1530), whose paintings were influenced by Italian models. Cranach’s images of the Virgin and Child also reflect the art of Perugino (1446–1524) and Raphael (1483–1520). The Frankfurt "Sippenaltar" depicts figures in fashionable costumes set in the context of an intricate interior that reaches beyond the central panel to incorporate both of the side wings. Cranach also must have studied the exterior, workaday sides of Netherlandish altarpieces that were often painted in grisaille, a technique deploying tones of a single color, most often gray, that he went on to use himself in this and other commissions.
During his first decade in Wittenberg, Cranach’s style became calmer, more simplified, and the Netherlandish journey was undoubtedly a catalyst for certain aspects of this overall development. More important, however, was Cranach’s role as a court artist and his prolific output in this capacity—there are about 1,000 panel paintings extant, and it is likely that the Cranach workshop produced as many paintings on canvas or linen, though only a few survive. This astonishing productivity was dependent, of course, on a highly efficient workshop. A recently published study by the German paintings restorer Gunnar Heydenreich provides far more detail than has been available about this studio practice (Lucas Cranach the Elder: Painting Materials, Techniques and Workshop Practice, Amsterdam University Press, 2007). Heydenreich’s research is groundbreaking, especially if one considers that art history often still adheres to the ideal vision of the artist-genius creating in inspired isolation. From such a perspective Cranach’s later work always has been seen as merely a "fizzling out" of the early fervor.Heydenreich provides thorough scientific analyses of all material aspects, and while the results are intriguing, their most far-reaching effect is to show why the standard questions of connoisseurship hardly assist our understanding of the Cranach phenomenon. The paint, for example, seems to have been applied in a variety of ways: it might be a highly labor-intensive buildup of layers, or a more spontaneous wet-on-wet application known as alla prima, depending not so much on the hand of the artist or assistant but on the specifications of a given commission. The sophisticated organization of the studio was intended ultimately to achieve a style that was clearly recognizable and uniform, excluding the very distinction of different hands that is traditional connoisseurship’s chief area of investigation. Cranach obviously realized that such works as the paintings he produced during his early years in Vienna and during the very first years at the Wittenberg court could never be repeated by anybody else. The court’s demand for art could only be satisfied once he developed a style that was easier to imitate and a technique that was easier to replicate.
Impressive as these scholarly achievements are, they are not the real reason for the renewal of interest in the German Old Masters, one sign of which is the fact that this exhibition will be shown outside Germany. First, more time has passed since the dark and murderous years of National Socialism, when the notion of altdeutsch (referring to the golden age of German art in the late 15th and early 16th centuries) was readily subsumed under that of grossdeutsch (pertaining to Nazi notions of a "greater Germany") and the masters of the German Renaissance were appropriated by the fascist propaganda machine. More than three decades after the last major survey of Cranach’s art—held, tellingly, on the quasi-neutral ground of the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1974—a younger generation of art historians seems to have less hesitation in addressing altdeutsche Kunst again.
And why Cranach? One answer might be found not in this exhibition’s sumptuous catalogue but in a little German/English booklet that was available in the Städel’s bookshop during the show. Titled Cranach the Entrepreneur, it contains brief descriptions of all the master’s business achievements: as a painter he was an innovator, as a court artist a Dienstleister (literally a "service provider") and as a publisher of Luther’s translation of the Bible a venture capitalist. He was also a real-estate investor, pharmacist, merchant, member of the city government for 10 years, three times mayor of Wittenberg, and, as a result of all this, one of the wealthiest people in town.
The catalogue of the Basel exhibition concludes with an interview with Joseph Beuys that was intended to show Cranach’s relevance in the 1970s. In 2008 the Renaissance master’s relevance is no longer provided by an artist/shaman who in his arte povera–like work tried to come to terms with his experiences during World War II. It can instead be found in the prefaces submitted by the two main sponsors of the exhibition, Commerzbank-Stiftung and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., which both stress Cranach’s qualities as a well-educated and successful businessman. After all, in our times savvy artist-entrepreneurs and their huge and busy workshops produce everything from shiny red hearts meant to dangle from lofty ceilings to diamond-encrusted skulls.
It seems, therefore, that every era is discovering its own Cranach. When art history was practiced by men of independent means in the early part of the 20th century, Cranach’s business savvy was sneered at. Then came the Nazis. Then the generation of 1968, looking for, in Beuys’s words, "chaotic elementary" tendencies in his art, "real alchemistic knowledge," and "a relationship to elementary spirits." Now that the age of Aquarius is long since over, Cranach the entrepreneur has been rediscovered—only this time the artist is being wholeheartedly embraced.
Armin Kunz is a managing partner of the Old Master prints and drawings dealership C.G. Boerner in New York.