| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 652 words from this article are provided below; about 647 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Carolyn Kay. Art and the German Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and Modern Painting in Hamburg, 1886–1914. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2002. Pp. x, 166. $45.00. Jennifer Jenkins. Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. xiv, 329.
These two books examine the art world in Hamburg at the turn of the twentieth century, each focusing on the vision that the museum director Alfred Lichtwark (1852–1914) developed for his institution as a force within public life. The discussion has wide implications about the evolution of politics and public life within the new empire, since quarrels over art afford a productive means by which to understand public consciousness within society as a whole. More specifically, such debates over matters of taste can tell us a great deal about how local, regional, national, and cosmopolitan worlds interacted. Carolyn Kay and Jennifer Jenkins approach the subject from complementary directions. While the former focuses inward on controversies over modern art, the latter looks outward to relate Lichtwark's work to topics as diverse as citizenship, city planning, and Social Democratic cultural programs.	1
Jenkins's book offers a handy overview of key aspects within society and politics during the period. In surveying the city's history, the author starts from Richard Evans's point that its political structure was, in her words, "as authoritarian as other parts of Germany, if differently so" (p. 8). Loose rules of citizenship enabled fairly broad participation in the Citizens' Assembly and a less aristocratic sense of the elite than was found in cities such as Leipzig, but a tight group of merchant families was nonetheless in charge. Weak authority within municipal institutions led to an avoidance of state subsidy, but for that very reason a strong market for art works emerged from private initiative. Jenkins interweaves a history of Hamburg's Art Museum and Art Association with an analysis of how political structures and participation were reshaped under the pressure of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). This is a sophisticated discussion, an important contribution to social-cultural history. She demonstrates how professional men, in some cases from leading families, took leadership independent of traditionally minded businessmen in forging productive new political alliances and rethinking what the city should become socially and culturally.	2
Lichtwark, Jenkins suggests, was a leading example of how aggressively some people rose to prominence in the early decades of the German Empire. She describes him emerging from humble origins as "a parvenu with a self-generated aristocratic veneer, an ambitious academic who propped himself up on his earnings as a librarian and journalist" (p. 58). His career as a politically talented museum director was by no means new, as James Sheehan has shown in Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (2000). Lichtwark wanted to change the museum from an imitation of a princely institution to a force by which to educate and lead the public. In order to impose his vision on the museum, he built up firm support among patrons and artists, even institutionalizing the former in a new organization for amateurs.	3
Jenkins shrewdly shows how Lichtwark manipulated contrasting allegiances to local, national, and cosmopolitan art in the museum's programs. She neither denigrates nor overvalues Hamburg as an art scene; despite the book's title, she does not often use the word "provincial." Instead she demonstrates how Lichtwark succeeded in defining the museum as a "regional" center but at the same time involved it deeply within the cosmopolitan movement of taste across Europe for impressionistic painting. In so doing, he also made the museum's holdings central to nationally defined exhibitions of German art held in Berlin. All of this makes less significant the nationalistic antagonism toward Parisian dominance of the art world that some scholars have emphasized.	. . .

There are about 647 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.