1913 (35 page)

These are lines from
Die Gartenlaube
. They read like one of Kafka’s short stories.

Marcel Duchamp travels to England with his eighteen-year-old sister Yvonne, who wants to study English at a language school in Herne Bay, on the north Kent coast. Duchamp, on the other hand, is just on holiday, and writes: ‘Delightful weather. Playing as much tennis as I can. A few French people here, so I don’t even need to learn English.’ He still doesn’t feel like making art.

As he does every year, Max Liebermann sets off at the beginning of August for the Dutch coast, this time staying at the chic beach hotel Huis ter Duin in Noordwijk. But he doesn’t see any reason to relax. All he wants to do is paint. Among the dunes of the coastal resort he once again paints the huntsmen, the horse-riders in the water, the women playing tennis. The sky is always grey in these pictures from the summer of 1913, but Liebermann, unlike the other holiday-makers, isn’t bothered by that in the slightest, for it offers a beautiful contrast against the sandy beige and white of the clothing. On 18 August he writes to his friend and patron Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg: ‘I’ve been here again for a week now, the place where I know every person, every house, almost every tree, where I’ve painted practically everything. My weeks here alone are like therapy for my inner self.’ Day after day he sets off with his paints and his easel, and on this particular day he and Paul Cassirer, his friend, art dealer and the former chairman of the Berlin Secession, plan to visit a tobacco
magnate in his summer house in Noordwijk. Or, more specifically: his kennel. A huntsman opens the door, upon which eight rather small grey or white shaggy-haired spaniels appear, yapping wildly over one another as their droopy ears jiggle excitedly back and forth. The owner informs Liebermann that spaniels are excellent for hunting rabbits. They set off into the dunes together. Liebermann takes his easel with him in order to paint a picture of the hunter with his dogs in tow. Soon, the first shot rings out through the air. Every single report startles Liebermann, and it bothers him that his models have to make such a racket. He tries to paint the dogs as quickly as possible, their silhouettes standing out on the crest of the dunes against the rosy, setting sun. Then Liebermann starts to sketch the hunter placing the rifle over his shoulder and organising the dogs into pairs, but the sun is already sinking into the sea and Liebermann has to break off mid-sketch. He makes plans to return the following morning – and the hunter promises to just pose rather than shoot. And so
A Hunter in the Dunes – Trainer with Dogs
is born.

On 28 August, Kaiser Franz Joseph joins in the last Hochleiten hunt on Steinkogl, near Bad Ischl, and shoots a goat.

On 14 August 1913, Hugo von Hofmannsthal loses his cool in a letter to Leopold von Andrian:

A new man takes to the stage of 1913: Heinrich Kühn. A middle-class intellectual from Dresden, born in the house ‘Nine Muses’. Thanks to his father’s financial support, he lives as a gentleman of independent means in Innsbruck, dedicating himself entirely to photography. Kühn is a deliberate eccentric, who wears either a Tyrolean costume or English suits, with a long, rumpled coat over them while he takes his photographs – this can be seen on his bookplate, in which it’s hard to tell which is more crumpled, his overcoat or his folding camera. He had an old-fashioned and naïve aura to him. And yet he managed to take photographs of the utmost modernity. His pictures from 1913 are fresh and full of innocence, grace and strength. This is partly down to their composition, the extreme low-angle shots. And then there’s his technique, for it was he who perfected the use of Autochrome in collaboration with the great American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Even in those days he was able to use it to create excellent colour pictures, one after the other, of the Tyrol’s alpine pastures and meadows. After the death of his wife, who had always regarded his strange passion with great scepticism, he had only five models: his four children and their nanny, Mary Warner, who became his partner. The villa in Innsbruck became the ‘House of the Five Muses’.

In 1913 the family was slowly running out of money: the allowance from Dresden had dwindled to nothing, his brother-in-law had gambled away the family fortune and Heinrich Kühn was desperately searching for a way to earn a living. He had been trying to establish a state teaching position for art photography in Innsbruck – and the prospects were looking very good. But in August he discovered, after two years of negotiations, that the ministry responsible was withholding its signature for lack of funds; all the money had been spent on military matters, for the Balkan War: ‘You know how it is, Herr Kühn.’

But Kühn refuses to be discouraged and continues to take photograph after photograph of his private theatrical troupe – in other
words, the children: Walter, Edeltrude, Lotte and Hans. And Mary. One photograph (used on the cover of the German edition of this book), shows Mary and his eldest daughter darting across the crest of a hill, the heavy August clouds pressing down from above. White is one of the few choices available to them for their clothing, along with blue, red and green – the father buys the children special ‘photography clothes’, which are suitable for the pure colour tones of the three layers of the Autochrome plate.

There’s the melancholic Walter, with his metal-rimmed glasses resting on his teenage nose, who began painting at a young age; then introvert Edeltrude, who looks like she’s suffering greatly from the world in general and her forename in particular; then Lotte, the liveliest and most radiant; and then Hans, the youngest, a patient lad. Heinrich Kühn is a loving father, but a radical artist. If one of the children accidentally hogs the painting, destroying the balance of the image, he rigorously airbrushes them out, even if it took him hours to get all the children in position in the first place. What Kühn wants to depict in his photographs is nothing less than paradise. Children at play, children resting, women in swirling clothes, the innocence of nature. ‘The Fall of Man’, he writes in a letter ‘takes two forms: Social democracy. And Cubism.’

Kaiser Franz Joseph appoints the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand, as ‘Inspector General of All the Armed Forces’, thus extending his authority. The heir subsequently refuses to approve the demand for a preventative war made by the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Count Conrad von Hötzendorf, his arch-nemesis.

In The Hague, the Palace of Freedom is inaugurated in September, built with the help of donations from all over the world, including around $1.25 million from the American multi-millionaire Andrew
Carnegie. Preparations begin for a new Hague peace conference in 1915, which is intended to resolve all unresolved issues between nations.