Wilhelm Von Kaulbach - Evaluation

Evaluation

Kaulbach's was a beauty-loving art. He is not supreme as a colorist; he belongs in fact to a school that holds color in subordination; but he laid, in common with the great masters, the sure foundation of his art in form and composition. Indeed, the science of composition has seldom if ever been so clearly understood or worked out with equal complexity and exactitude; the constituent lines, the relation of the parts to the whole, are brought into absolute agreement; in modern Germany painting and music have trodden parallel paths, and Kaulbach is musical in the melody and harmony of his compositions. His narrative too is lucid, and moves as a stately march or royal triumph; the sequence of the figures is unbroken; the arrangement of the groups accords with even literary form; the picture falls into incident, episode, dialogue, action, plot, as a drama.

The style is eclectic; in the Age of Homer the types and the treatment are derived from Greek marbles and vases; then in the Tower of Babel the severity of the antique gives place to the suavity of the Italian renaissance; while in the Crusades the composition is let loose into modern romanticism, and so the manner descends into the midst of the 20th century. And yet this scholastically compounded art is so nicely adjusted and smoothly blended that it casts off all incongruity and becomes homogeneous as the issue of one mind. But a fickle public craved for change; and so the great master in later years waned in favor, and had to witness, not without inquietude, the rise of an opposing party of naturalism and realism. He is perhaps best known for his unusual representation of death, destruction and madness.