"Kultur's" Claims Analysed

Progress, Volume XI, Issue 5, 1 January 1916, Page 520

"Kultur's" Claims Analysed

Sir Thomas G. Jackson, 11. A., in a letter to the "Times," exposes the shallowness of German pretensions to artistic culture. He remarks that "Germany has produced but two really great painters, both of them, be it remarked, South Germans; no great sculptor, the admirable metalwork of Peter Vischer being all on a small scale; their Gothic architecture was borrowed from the French and spoiled; and their Renaissance work, when not verging on the grotesque, is- commonplace. The best architecture in Germany is their Romanesque work, which was borrowed from Lombardy. It is wanting in the finer graces, often clumsy and illproportioned; sometimes, as in the western towers at Laach, quite ugly; but it has a sturdy, virile character which is commendable. Cologne Cathedral is based upon Amiens, of which it reproduces and exaggerates the weak points. Of the modern work at the west end the less said the better. The truth is that the Germans are not a creative people, and, therefore, only in an inferior degree artistic. The present achievements of Germany in architecture consist in wantonly destroying, for no military purpose, the glorious'monuments of the past. They have the assurance to tell us they will replace them by something better. What they are capable of at the present day may be judged by the monstrous pair of steeples at Cologne Cathedral, and the hideous monumental structure that vulgarises the meetings of two beautiful rivers at Cpblentz. May Heaven preserve the world from such 'cultured' atrocities."