If not the iconic work of German Art Nouveau movement, it is at the very least an image of affirmation, of enjoyment of inner freedom while surrounded by nature. Hoffmann’s painting stands for shedding the mantle of the German Romanticism that had defined the 19th century. It is an expression of the dynamic spirit of the youth movement and Lebensreform, which took Wilhelminian Germany by storm shortly after this work was painted. Ludwig von Hoffmann was an early inspiration for Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Thomas Mann, who referred to von Hoffmann’s “fantasias of Arcadian beauty.” This painting is probably his purest and most fully realized expression thereof.
“Der Frühlingssturm” (The Spring Storm) – the fresh breeze of freedom and longing blows through Ludwig von Hoffmann’s seminal painting
The light comes from the south. This fact was known to the young painter, 33 years old, when he went to Rome in 1894 like so many German painters before him. He may have carried with him in his luggage an image that symbolized — for the young artist and for his age — new beginnings and a break with the old. In any case, we know that he had finished the painting by 1894/95 when he was in Rome. It shows three figures, striding arm-in-arm along the coast, above the sea, strong yet graceful, braving the wind in the sunlight. A fully nude youth is flanked by two girls. One is bare-breasted with a blue skirt; green fabric flutters behind her, suggesting a goddess of victory. The other wears a red skirt and an orange blouse. The figures’ bare skin is just as luminous as their colorful robes; their nudity and their garb engage in a friendly competition for our attention. We can feel the air that tousles their hair and hear the roar of the sea just a few steps away. The clouds in the sky seem to be taking in the whole scene with pleasure. Hoffmann named his painting “Spring Storm,” and it became a key work of German Jugendstil. Indeed, the painting itself is an invigorating breeze, full of longing, freedom, self-confidence, and playful optimism. The dynamic spirit of the youth movement and Lebensreform, a concept that espoused a return to more authentic ways of living and the rejection of restrictive social and sexual norms that would soon sweep through the German Empire, already begins to take form in this image. In it, the German bourgeoisie suddenly encountered an awakening of playful corporeality and nudity, depicted outdoors rather than in the accustomed boudoir setting. And, what is more, they found southern air and southern warmth, along with a new mixture of the loud, bright colors of clothing depicted by the Nazarenes with the Mediterranean light, earth, and sea tones used by German artists from Hackert to Blechen. Ludwig von Hofmann struck a nerve in his era. Wilhelminian society, so wealthy and overindulged, was beginning to long for the other, something beyond the prosperity brought by industrialization in a state under the control of a powerful ruling class, something beyond the iron rolling mill and the salon. In his “Spring Storm”, Hofmann succeeded like no other in capturing the hearts of his fellow travelers, the great poets and authors of his time. He helped those who traded in words to feel in images and stoked their visual imaginations like no other contemporary painter. In April of 1898, Stefan George visited him multiple times in his studio in Rome. Hofmann had been reading George’s literary magazine, Blätter für die Kunst (Art Pages) for two years, and the writer dedicated two poems to the painter from his cycle Teppich des Lebens (Tapestry of Life): “Feld vor Rom” (Field Outside Rome) and “Südliche Bucht” (Southern Bay). It was an extraordinary tribute from George, who was obsessed with the idea that great artists were chosen, bestowed with special gifts. Apparently, George and Hofmann made excursions to the Campagna together, and possibly further south. “As we flew across the aching green of the undulating expanse / Frascati nestled, ever paler, into the mountain,” reads the first poem. The second is an ode to an ancient morning on the Mediterranean: “Blissful gardens cling to green cliffs / Where flowers mingle with the blue waves.” Such motifs echo Hofmann’s visual world, in which nude young people romp through brightly colored, light-flooded southern landscapes often inflected with references to antiquity. George considered Ludwig von Hofmann a member of his circle, at least for a time. Hofmann’s circles were broader, however. He illustrated a cycle of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems that included the “Schwanenweiher” (Swan Pond) and “Küssendes Paar” (Kissing Couple) and was published in 1898 in the art journal PAN. In 1905, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote his Prologue to Ludwig von Hofmann’s Dances, which also featured scenes of antiquity and graceful figures, behind which often rise the “contours of the islands against the lyre-shaped southern bays appearing in the redolent morning air,” as the poet described the imaginary, utopian antiquity he found in von Hofmann’s paintings. The grip of antiquity on von Hofmann’s imagination never loosened. In 1907, he travelled with Gerhart Hauptman through Greece. It was actually Hauptmann who discovered what was perhaps von Hofmann’s most consequential impact on a great writer. “Here we find L.v.H.’s entire oeuvre,” the dramatist Hauptmann remarked of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. In the famous “Snow” chapter, the novel’s main protagonist Hans Castorp imagines, in a dream sequence lasting several pages, scenes taken directly from Hofmann’s paintings and drawings. Although Mann obviously never explicitly states the inspiration for these images, he knew Hofmann’s work extremely well and had gone back to read up on the artist in monographs. “How handsome, healthy, wise, and happy they are,” Castorp gushed over the young people that appeared to him in his snow-bound vision of a southern utopia. Thomas Mann and Ludwig von Hofmann had an extraordinary artistic relationship, although they probably never met in person. Hofmann’s painting “Die Quelle” (The Spring), with its naked youths, hung in the writer’s office throughout all the stations of his life, including his Californian exile. In early July of 1914, Mann had spotted the painting in the Munich Galerie Caspari and wrote to von Hofmann, “I have loved the lofty, new, festive humanity of your art since I was young. I saw it and loved it in every canvas and every drawing of yours I have ever come across.” This flattery succeeded: von Hofmann sold the painting to Mann at a significant mark-down. From then on, Mann could see the free, uninhibited bodies on this canvas every single day. From 1916 onwards, von Hofmann taught in Dresden at the Academy of the Arts. After he was granted Emeritus status in 1928, he lived in Pillnitz until his death in August of 1945. He gradually receded from the forefront of the art world, because his “fantasias of Arcadian beauty” (Thomas Mann) did not fit in with the new era of trenches and world war and revolutions that began in August of 1914. Von Hofmann painted his own generation’s utopia. Like Gerhart Hauptmann, Stefan George, Richard Strauss, Harry Graf Kessler, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart, he was born in the 1860s. Those born around 1890 — Gottfried Benn, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger for instance — were hardened by tougher circumstances. “I feel humble toward nature; I do not wish to violate it,” was Ludwig von Hofmann’s motto. And the “Spring Storm?” It was shown in Berlin in 1898. The National gallery considered purchasing it, but in the end Rudolf Mosse bought it for his own important art collection in the Mosse-Palais on Leipziger Platz, where it hung in the Music Room. In 1933, the painting was caught up in the storm of a new epoch that showed no trace of the “Spring Storm’s” utopian luster. In May of 1934, by which time the owners had long since fled to Switzerland, it sold for 2,242.50 Reichsmark in a forced auction at the Berlin auction house of Rudolph Lepke. The auction catalog rhapsodized over its “Fanfare for the joys of youth and love.” In 1941, von Hofmann’s hometown of Darmstadt acquired the painting, where it was displayed in the Mathildenhöhe museum as the major work of German Art Nouveau. It remained there until recently, when it was restituted to the heirs of its rightful owners. They have had a long journey, the youth and the two girls from the family of von Hofmann’s “children of the sun and the sea” (Thomas Mann), and they are giving us the opportunity now to look at the spirit of awakening around 1900 sobered by the knowledge of what came later.
Alexander Cammann