Chapter 5: Europe

When writing to a friend in 1967, Holty said of his memoirs that he started them “(much too soon) over 25 years ago when I thought that I had to be the star of the show instead of the witness.”1 In 1926, when the young man left Wisconsin with his small band of travelers, he apparently became the witness to events rather than star of them, because he never again spoke in such detail of his personal life as he had of the preceding years. There are exceptions, as when he went back to Wisconsin in order to fetch his father, who had fallen into a state of depression after his wife died. Holty recalled the event on the 35th anniversary of Lindbergh’s record transatlantic flight, in 1927, with which it had coincided:

I had just come from Europe to visit with my father who had become sick in his soul and I was to return to Europe within a fortnight bringing my father with me — in search of medical aid for his rather imaginary ills. As a doctor, he knew a lot about symptoms of one kind or another that no one could actually disprove—like dizzy spells and double vision (people walking on their own heads and things like that). The real cause of his malaise was not even admitted by him, namely, that he had given up on life after my mother’s death the year before.

I did not want to come back to America to stay but I had not by a long shot adjusted to life—my life in Europe. I had just about stuck my nose into modern art and though enthusiastic about some of it, was by no means convinced by much of it and felt myself a beginner again, a beginner with a wife and a grandmother who followed us around and who had always hoped to go to Europe alone with her beloved grandchild. And then there was my father who was both close and strange to me at the same time, jealous of his son and bitter about what life had done to him. As time goes by I have learned better to understand him, not because I am wiser or have grown more perceptive but because I have become more like him than I was at that time and I have also become his heir in personal qualities and characteristics—not all of them admirable and few of them happy. Like him I am deeply honorable and like him I am righteously scornful of those less so and like him I have the need to let them know it. Like him I am generous and like him rather improvident and like him I procrastinate. Like him I feel that I should play a more prominent role in public life than has been awarded me or him and like him I am not easy to live with and cannot understand why because I am entertaining and outgoing but probably repeat the funny stories I tell well too often and am outgoing when I should be reticently sympathetic or keep my mouth shut and, very much like him, I am outspoken and often offend people who are more introverted than I am and definitely do not need to be told what I tell them. As a painter more narrow in his real interest than I admit, even to myself, I am more egocentric than he was when I knew him, for by then he had relinquished his art (the stage) for medicine and while he was a very good doctor and swore by all that was holy that he was content in his profession, I doubt it. . . .

He must have looked at my artistic ambitions with alarm and did what he could to dissuade me from becoming a painter although he was impressed by my abilities especially my talent for getting likenesses. He tried to make me a medical man but gave up sadly when my grandfather agreed to finance my art studies. I do remember one thing he said, however, because it struck me so strangely at the time. When I went to New York to study art for the first time and he knew that the medical jig was up he said or asked me, as out of a clear sky, “Why, if you must become an artist don’t you at least take up a decent profession—the stage?” . . .

I loved my father deeply, even in that most selfish period of my life, but I was reluctant to leave my wife in Europe and I had little equilibrium at that moment. There had been a series of terrible railroad accidents in Europe that year due to the over-aged rolling stock and I saw Tudi dead a thousand times while I was crossing the Atlantic on my way to the United States.2 I hated to interrupt my work and leave the congenial Munich life we Americans, my wife, her sister and I, had become accustomed to. I had painted one picture that had some substance. I know because I still have it and only recently had it mounted on a panel as the canvas had never been stretched. I had painted it thumbtacked to a plywood wall in my studio in the Gluckstrasse (luck street), well named as far as we were concerned because we, my first wife and I, spent the only happy years of our short life together right there, five flights walk up. Being so insecure about everything that concerned me at the time I had only one desire, to get back to Europe as quickly as possible and my heart leaped with joy and relief when my father suggested that we waste no time about getting him some relief for his ailments there. But, while I made arrangements for passage as fast as possible, there were things like passports to attend to and other matters as well so that a week, at least, went by before we could leave and during that time Lindbergh flew over the ocean.

It was early in the afternoon and I was talking to a neighbor. We still had the house on Jefferson Street there though I was never to see it again after this parting. It was summery for May in Wisconsin, almost like a mid-summer day and most of the people, not at work, were in their houses. The big chestnut and elm trees threw their heavy shadows onto an empty street when the factory sirens began to blow. There had been other attempts to fly the Atlantic and other aviators planning to leave any day but no one of us earthlings believed that any one of the attempts would succeed—at least success was not in the forefront of our minds. We knew that Lindbergh had taken off the day before but that was about all. But as the number of blowing sirens increased in volume our little world understood or began to comprehend what had happened. People rushed from the houses, embraced each other and shook hands again and again. They hopped up and down like children on a playground shouting “He did it! He did it!” and everyone laughed and many cried and the screeching of sirens and other factory whistles were music to our ears. (I, 156-160)

While he was in Europe, Holty traveled widely between Germany, North Africa, Hungary, Switzerland, and France.3 He eventually settled in France, but his first destination was Germany. Why he wanted to leave America and why he went immediately to Germany, when the first goal of artists was usually France, most likely Paris, he explained in this passage:

Perhaps the twentieth century did not begin in the year 1900 but rather in 1914 or what is more likely in 1920. All that happened before that time in culture, in what was evident of science, certainly in art really belongs to the nineteenth century. . . . As far as we were concerned in the Wisconsin of my youth, we lived in a sort of colonial culture. No matter how many generations of forebears, three or four had lived there, their thoughts and ours, so far as these transcended the preoccupation with daily living, were directed far from our own locale. Those who hoped to understand the culture of the United States better, i.e., those who had given up on Europe, went to Eastern schools for information and adjustment, but many of us thought of that part of Europe our ancestors had come from, often enough with mixed feeling depending on the beneficence or malevolence of the European past. Up to a certain age, it is true, most of us just grew like Topsy but when we began to think in abstract terms about the future, our personal one in particular, we became painfully aware of a certain insularity that had to be transcended, one way or another.

My own family was largely of German descent though on the Jewish side there was some Polish background. As far as culture was concerned, however, at least as far as my people were concerned, Germany was supreme. (III, 65)

In the spring of 1926, Holty presented himself at the home of Professor Karl Kaspar as a candidate for his instruction in the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He was armed with a letter of introduction from Oskar Hagen, who had gone in the early 1920s from the University of Gottingen to the University of Wisconsin, serving as an exchange professor in art history before being regularly appointed in that capacity. He eventually became Chairman of the Department of Art History at Wisconsin. Hagen thought that the young Holty’s work showed promise and offered to commend him to his friend Kaspar, whom he considered one of the better of the modern German artists and a bonafide Academy professor. The encounter of the student with the professor, as well as his unexpected guest, is worth repeating:

Professor Kaspar lived in an elegant upper middle class apartment in the Teng Strasse, in the section of Munich known as Schwabing. Schwabing was considered the Montmartre or Montparnasse of Munich but usually the Bohemia it was supposed to be was confined to the very top floors of rather bourgeois apartment buildings—for the top floors were studio apartments, usually two studios to a house. . . .

Professor Kaspar’s apartment was not a studio apartment but was located on the first floor of the building and when I rang his bell it was he who received me at the door. He smiled when I mentioned my name, I had of course telephoned beforehand, and told me that he had already been advised of my coming in a letter personally sent him by Prof. Hagen. The professor ushered me into the salon of his apartment and introduced me to an older man who was sitting in a somewhat darkened recess of the room but Prof. Kaspar mumbled and spoke in a most atrocious dialect, that of Augsburg, where the Bavarian dialect is mixed with the Swabian one, for Swabia, or Wuerttemberg, lies to the immediate west. I wondered who the big man with the lantern jaw and ham sized hands was and who seemed not to feel comfortable and I decided that he was a country relative of Kaspar. . . .

The Professor and his guest were partaking of a mid­afternoon libation and I was invited to join them in a glasslet of Kirschwasser, that wonderful Black Forest and Alsatien brew that for some years afterward was to be my very favorite drink. It is a cherry brandy without a trace of sugar or sweetness and it doesn’t have a cherry taste. Frankly I have never seen such tiny liquor glasses in my life and the old gentleman sitting on the sofa in the rear of the room looked as though he was holding a collar button between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Drinking in such Olympian culture was a polite affair. One tasted, one sipped but one didn’t guzzle. Nevertheless there was. so little liquor left in the fat black bottle that the Professor proposed to go to the kitchen cupboard for a replacement. As he asked his guests whether he should do so he held his head cocked slightly sideways in a sort of listening posture and as though he hoped to hear his proposal politely refused. But no one said yes or no. The old man just sat there and I was too embarrassed to cast a vote one way or another. I spoke the German language like a native but it was still a strange world to me and my poise and appearance of confidence in such situations was largely mask and pose. . . .

When Professor Kaspar left the room toddling or stumping along as persons of his constitutional build seem to do, the old gentleman spoke out for the first time. He asked me whether I was interested in more serious drinking than we were or had been doing and he added without waiting for me to answer that if I was so interested to finish my business with the Herr Professor and to meet him on the corner of Teng and Byaer Strasse. He was going out for a walk now and he would meet me there. But he said I didn’t have to mention his invitation to the Herr Professor; he always sounded a bit scornful when he referred to the title Professor.

When the Herr Professor returned, the old man who really was a big fellow then got up, walked to the entresal or hallway and I could see him pick up a hat and then the apartment door opened and shut again and he was gone.

Karl Kasper came from the kitchen, or butler’s pantry, one split second after I heard the outer door close. . . . Kaspar was a bit astonished to find his guest had left so unceremoniously but he said to me with a wry smile, artists were bound to be eccentric and the master probably wanted to get a breath of fresh air. That was the first hint I had that the old gentleman was an artist and I asked Professor Kaspar to please repeat the name to me as I had not quite caught it, being a bit flustered as I first came in because of the usual candidate student nervousness. That remark seemed to please him and he told me, this time without too much of an accent, that the old man was the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.4

After I had absorbed, through this astonishing disclosure, the thought that I would soon be enjoying a real tete a tete with so distinguished a master, Professor Kaspar and I settled down to the business of this formal call. . . . He asked me whether I had any work or photographs of work that I might show him and I said that I had photographs of some lifesize figure drawings I had done and he asked me to bring these to his studio at the Academy. We settled on a date when this should take place and I thanked Professor Kaspar for his friendliness and hospitality and bowed myself out of his house as I thought a European of good manners should do, never turning my back on my host until I had passed through the house door he was kind enough to open for me.

When I reached the street, which as usual in mid­afternoon was almost deserted, I saw my man pacing up and down rather impatiently at the far corner, not to my right where we were supposed to meet, but to my left on a cross street the name of which I have forgotten, but which led directly to a sort of basement bar and grill about a block to the north of Teng Strasse. Munch disappeared again, hands clenched or crossed behind his back, his head with the flat hat on it slightly tilted forward as though he were looking not too hard for something he might have dropped.

By walking more rapidly than the gentleman at the corner I shortened the distance between us but he at no time slowed down so that no meeting or walking together where we were going to was effected. He just kept on moving and we reached our destination in the indian file order of one followed by two. . . .

The three steps down entrance to this little tavern was in the middle of the street wall and on the inside the entrance was flanked by two alcoves, naturally formed or bounded by the windows or walls and half windows that faced the street, the endwalls and the glassed enclosure of the entrance itself. There was a longer table in each of these alcoves with benches on three sides and a chair or two on the fourth side. Without a word Edvard Munch sat down in one of the end benches and motioned me to sit in the opposite one, leaving the long bench between us empty. Ordinarily two persons in our situation would have seated themselves so that a conversation might be conducted at right angles, i.e., one would sit on the long bench, the other on one of the side benches but apparently the master preferred a maximum of space remain between him and his guest, for that is what I was.

It seemed to me that Munch hung his hat on a nearby rack and ordered or called the waiter over to the table with one movement of his arm and hand and when the man approached he ordered two double kirschwasser for us, looking not too intently at me to gather whether that was all right with me and I nodded without really being asked one way or the other that that would be fine.

In later years I was to learn a lot about Edvard Munch that I did not know of at all in that spring afternoon and that had I known it then would have made his conduct and some of what he said less puzzling and mysterious. As it was, I was fortunate to even know of him and his work (through reproductions) when I think back to my midwestern background and the arid years of study in New York in the early nineteen-twenties. . . .5

So I did know Munch’s work and of course I had visited his honorary exhibit at Munich before I met him at Professor Kaspar’s house. What I did not know was that he was an extremely neurotic even psychotic personality, that he was supposed to have had an incestuous love affair or at least been incestuously in love with one of his sisters, so often portrayed in his early work that was so heavy with thought and that he had at one time been heavily addicted to alcohol. He had overcome that and had given up drinking but on that particular afternoon, probably bored to distraction by his visit in the graveyard art atmosphere of post-World War I Munich and his obligations to be a sociable guest when he had long been a practicing misanthropist, he had decided that a little fling with the cup that cheers, though I never noticed any cheerfulness in the two hours we sat together, was the least of all possible evils. He drank steadily but did not gulp swiftly as though to drown a sorrow and from an alcoholic’s point of view he drank with moderation. . . .

The first glasses of Kirschwasser were placed on the table and we each took one in hand and half raised our arms as drinkers do in salute. We took a sip and placed our glasses on the table again. My host, realizing that he couldn’t avoid some sort of conversation asked the first, and in this case almost rhetorical question and answered it himself. “Was I from America?” “Of course I was” and then, “Why of all places did I choose Munich to come to and not Berlin which was much more lively?” I answered that I had chosen Munich for several reasons. First it was a tradition for those of us that grew up in Milwaukee, Wis., to think of Munich as our Athens or Egypt whichever one might choose to call that city in the land of dreams. One of our local men Carl von Marr had been until recently the Director of the Academy in Munich and besides I had personal relatives living in Bavaria and since I descended exclusively from Southern Germans and had pretty thoroughly absorbed their prejudices I looked upon all things Prussia, Berlin included, with a somewhat jaundiced eye. . . .

Munch curiously enough did not ask me much about America itself and when I asked him whether he had ever wanted to visit that land he answered simply that he hadn’t ever thought of it. He added that he was not a traveller in the ordinary sense of the word and that such voyages as he had undertaken had been for purposes of studying art, He had been in France and for a short time Italy but that now he was content to live within the world of his own making and his own work. He had, he said, when he was younger, lived for a time in Berlin because he liked the life of that city and he felt less like being in a backwater such as his native Norway. Now, he said, he preferred complete isolation and added that he looked forward to the end of this visit also which, and this was said with a shrug of his shoulders, was a matter of “noblesse oblige.”

I was not really prepared for such a meeting as this at the time. I couldn’t talk about modern painting with such a master because I knew so little about it. Perhaps that was fortunate. The more advanced ideas I was shortly to find attractive were probably repulsive to this great man who, after all represented an epoch that was already of the past and who did not make the impression of being a tolerant and objective observer of painting that lay outside his own completely formed world.

He had had enough trouble I am sure to carve his way out of the contradictions of his own time without concerning himself with the ideas and problems of cubism and abstract painting. Perhaps surrealism, a movement then just born, might have had some interest for him but I only had heard of it mentioned by name then and hadn’t the foggiest notion of what it was about myself. To put it briefly, I was green and my problems were still of the most elementary sort. I wanted to learn to draw and paint well, what I saw before me and I was intelligent enough to listen to others older and more accomplished who might tell me what, outside of the desire to paint pictures, the real world of art was all about.

But if I was green, I was, as a good American, determined to profit by such a fortuitous meeting with a capacity of such renown and I asked Mr. Munch what he would advise or how he would advise a young artist if he was willing to do so, what would he recommend as far as study goes and what ideas he would think were the right and proper ones a young man should cultivate.6

As I read what I have so far written, our conversation appears to have had much more of an easy flow than it actually had. When Munch spoke or asked a question I responded promptly enough but when I asked a question of him or made a statement that called for an answer, that answer was agonizingly slow in coming. But when at long last I asked him for advice, the long silence before he answered me seemed endless. When he finally spoke I could see that he had given what he was to say much thought and consideration and when I think back to all this I feel grateful and rather humble about it.

Munch began by saying that he did not consider himself an educator and that what he might advise about study would not be original in any way. He advised me to draw a great deal from life and to study the drawings of all the great masters of the past and that included the Oriental masters as well as those of the West. I would, he said, find in such study everything an artist needed to know, but it would be up to me to find the important things and to draw my own conclusions. Drawing and painting from nature was a great challenge and while it did sharpen the eye and broaden the vision the real wisdom was to be found in the works of the masters. He said that if I found a good teacher he would be that, if he awakened my mind and directed it properly and insisted that I see things in a big way. But, he added, I was not to expect him to make me see and to give me abilities that I did not have within me. He said that one was not taught much in art, one learned about it by oneself. He paused for a moment as he developed his thought and then said that if one was chosen to be an artist a moment would come when some particular direction would fire the enthusiasm and at such a moment one would have taken the first great step forward. But, and here came the first of the three things he said that remain uppermost in my mind, he said that one must accept the idea that nothing of real value could be expected before reaching the age of seventy (Munch was not much over seventy himself at that time) because only then would the violence of the emotions have subsided enough to leave the artist some freedom and a great artist required complete freedom of the spirit to do really good work. Anyone can well imagine such curious reasoning to be a bit beyond the comprehension of a young man of twenty six, especially one who was not violent by nature and to whom life was quite pleasant as it was mysterious yes, but not agonizing.

Then Munch went more directly into the matter of freeing oneself as much as possible despite the tyranny of the emotions about which one could do nothing except waiting for them to let up in their own good time. He told me that I should combat all ideas of possession, should acquire no goods or chattels and hold the ownership of things in contempt.

Munch said that an extra chair or piece of furniture could be as cumbersome as a millstone around one’s neck and the worst of all things about possessions was if one became attached to them for sentimental reasons. It robbed the artistic soul of its capacity to love nothing but the work itself, and the muse was as jealous as any other woman could be and forgave the artist no infidelity whatsoever.

When I interrupted him long enough to ask about the things one had to own like canvas, paints and the studio equipment he waved his hand at me impatiently. Of course one had to own those things he remarked impatiently. Indeed one couldn’t have enough materials provided, he added, had one room enough to keep them. There was no use whatsoever being crowded and stumbling over everything in the room but one needed ample supplies because one had to work and work and work. All the theories and all the discoveries one made, all the happy accidents that might happen were good for nothing unless one worked ceaselessly.7

Sunbeams and shadows were slanted and lenghtening when the master and I left the Osteria, he to return to the apartment of his host for at least a few more days and I to the Park Hotel where my wife was waiting for me to go out to dinner with her sister and her parents, also visitors in Munich at that time. I am sure Mr. Munch gave our rendezvous no thought for while he had given me much of himself he had gotten little in return for I had nothing to give but rather bewildered youthful eagerness. When I was alone in the taxi heading downtown I hugged to myself a sensation of having had a brush with fame but nothing more really. Luckily a rather unusual memory and a tendency to recapitulate from time to time my various experiences has made that afternoon’s interview far more meaningful than it could possibly be at the time and the other day when for the first time I really did a picture twice, the meeting with the old gentleman and a host of attendant memories gushed forth. (II, 25-33)8

After studying for a while at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Holty finally found the type of teacher Munch had spoken of. Several young Americans, including Vaclav Vytlacil whom Holty had known in Milwaukee, had discovered the private art school of Hans Hofmann. Vytlacil persuaded his friend to join them in studying with Hofmann. Thereafter, Holty considered all of his previous teachers to be intellectually “stilted.” Even though they might have studied in Europe and been not unskilled, they were only half educated—thus totally unprepared to investigate what had been going on for so long in European art. Much later, Holty wrote of Hofmann as a teacher:

In the early years of his teaching, Hofmann was pedantic. Before his eyes were the masters of his own and previous generations; he was not then capable of drawing inspiration from the work of the young. Later in life he changed and his eyes were directed forwards. The advantages a good teacher can gain from his affinity with the young stand to reason. Numerous persons come upon more discoveries than any one person does and the young student through intuition, and often enough through sheer animal drive, turns up many an artistic golden nugget and rarely, unless he is uncommonly contemplative, knows what to do with it. It is not, as might be implied, a case of the blind chicken finding a corn. The student is not blind, but he wishes to see too much and often fails to recognize the value of any one thing. he does see. Besides, he is probably so intent in looking for something (his vision, value[less] as it may be in the beginning is already there to lead him and to blind him) particular that he fails to take note of what he does find.

The teacher if he is a good one and a good artist besides, will know what to do with at least some of the discoveries the student makes, and here lies his gain. It is as simple as that. Of course if the teacher is a pedant, that is what he will remain and the rising sun will not interest him unless it comes out of the east at the right time and at the proper angle at that. There was a time when Hofmann was so pedantic and emphasized one sort of structure (Cubism) to the neglect of anything else. He even went so far as to advise us to forget about painting, at least for the time being, and to deny all such things as automatism and wilfulness, and he did so in no uncertain terms. Perhaps his basic faith in beautiful painting never wavered, but he was rigid in all matters of method and dismissed the work of such artists as Mondrian and Miro out of hand. At the time, in the mid 1920s, Hofmann’s life was that of a provincial which may have had something to do. with his artistic conceptions. Munich, where Hofmann’s school was located, was a city that had seen better artistic days. At that time the lively artists of the pre-World War I days had left the place and the city was out of touch with the big world of art. Hofmann’s life was one of material struggle that did not change much from year to year. The long winters were followed by summer schoois which Hofmann conducted in such places as Ragusa, Capri, and St. Tropez, beautiful places indeed but hardly art centers, and Hofmann’s short early autumn visits to Paris were barely a relief to the monotony of his modest everyday life. The attendance at the school had to be built up again each autumn to provide a livelihood and Hofmann had little contact with the local artists who rather resented his known preference for the French modernists and who only recognized his teaching activity as another way of making a living. It was well known that he was not painting himself, at that time, another mark against him in the judgment of the local artists. That old wives’ tale about “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” was devoutly believed in everywhere, and whenever theory or theories were discussed at length, someone, at least in German-Speaking countries, was bound to come up with the platitudinous advice, “Maler! Male” (“painter, paint”). (II, 87-88)

What impressed the Hofmann student most was that Hofmann was never vague in his teaching. He was the thorough German in this respect, the kind who refuses to rely upon the subjective, or on hit and miss chance. His method was always demonstrably clear even if his concepts and theories were not always so. Of the latter it must be said that they were subject to change and to a fairly consistent development. I am referring now to Hofmann as he taught in Munich when glass clear drawing was his aim before all else, color, brio or painterly qualities. Nourished by the artists of the German renaissance, Durer, Cranach and Grunewald, Giotto and in modern times Cezanne, Van Gogh and Matisse, he was partial to the small picture and was irrevocably against all that appeared unstable and adventurous, born only of the mind without reliance upon visual experience (Erlebnis) which was the control of controls for him. He recognized the power of intuitive inspiration but mistrusted it and warned his students against it, advising us to work from nature as it lay before us (“in all its glory”). (II,61)9

While Holty gives few glimpses of his personal life in this period, the image of a home open to visitors and an informal and convivial social life oriented toward cultural pursuits emerges in the following passage:

The ladies of the household, my young wife and her sister (Figs.1-8), were irresistible to the young men and girls of the art and near art world and we were never without callers. One of my sister-in-law’s many admirers was a musician, also a mathematician and a true blue bohemian who seemed to be able to go on living full steam without ever having to sleep at all. He was an early morning caller and once in the door he made a B line to our music room and started to play the piano and in concert hall volume at that. My wife was a pianist and was busiest at the time in her studies of Bach and Walter Harburger, that was our friend’s name, played from whatever sheet was before him on the note rack. There were many times when drugged with sleep or still sleeping I was less than pleased by these early morning concerts but I could never, try as I might, find fault with the music itself. At the same time we attended the opera performances of the local Wagner festival, rather religiously at that for this was our first summer in Europe and in Bavaria such a festival was one of the series of musts for the neophyte helping himself or herself to a tablespoonful of central European culture. Whether we were in the mood or not we dutifully repaired to the Festspiel Haus out in Bogenhausen and heard all the operas of this particular summer cycle and sometimes, according to our mood or moods we enjoyed the performances and sometimes we didn’t. When we didn’t enjoy what we were listening to, we felt all the weaknesses of the works, the excessive length of Tristan, the stock-watering of Parsifal, the deafening crescendi of the Ring. When we felt like bathing in Wagner’s musical works, nothing was too long, nothing too loud and there appeared to be no extra filling, only what we wanted or needed and there couldn’t be too much of it. (II, 43)

Holty had written that their studio apartment, a five-flights walk-up in Gluckstrasse, was where he and his wife spent the “only happy years of our short happy life together.” After arriving in Munich, Holty’s father realized that his son’s wife was ill with Tuberculosis and needed to be in treatment. The artist wrote little about this period save in some offhand remarks to an art historian seeking information on the artist Hans Reichel, who was involved with the Holtys at this time:

First of all, I met Reichel in the year 1927 and not before. There was no relationship through the Hofmann School at all. Reichel was at that school and left it long before I came to Munich, and I attended the school in 1926 and the autumn of 1927. When my wife was sent to Switzerland in December of that year, I left the school (forever) to join her in her exile from the world of good health.(Figs.9,10) At Easter time in 1928 we invited Reichel for a three-weeks visit with us in Locarno where the sanatarium was located, and because he was so entertaining and cheered my wife by his presence, his wit, and his storytelling, we arranged (at quite a financial sacrifice) to have him spend the following year, that is, from the autumn of 1928 through the year 1929, with us at Locarno (Orselina suburb) and at Montared Vermala in French Switzerland in the summertime.10

Reichel painted with Holty during this time, in a relationship the younger man described, as follows:

Later, when circumstances caused me to leave Munich and to live in Switzerland, Reichel, who visited with us and later spent a year there, became my teacher or mentor and I owed much to his counsel, both in the matter of encouragement and in the forming of artistic convictions. Through my intercourse with him I made rapid progress in the next two years. He was a good teacher because he was a reluctant teacher as was Klee [Reichel’s mentor and model]. There was no pedagogic zeal in either man but a willingness to be of assistance to those who came for guidance. The difference between the mentor and the teacher, as I see it, is that the latter believes in discipline, the former in necessity. The latter teaches and instructs in general methods good or bad while the former addresses himself only to the immediate pictoria1 problems at hand. Reichel’s criticism concerned itself only with the discovery of contradictions in the work, contradictions that beclouded or obfuscated the “sense” of the intention. . . .

There is no doubt that at that time (around 1926-8) Reichel exerted an influence over my work although nothing I did ever remotely resembled his own work. That was not necessary and Reichel would have been the first to criticize me for that had it been so. But I was still much beholden to nature for my inspiration and under Reichel’s stimulating talk I was able to realize and work for certain moods in the pictures, all water colors, moods that I had hoped to realize but that I had failed to attain theretofore because of contradictions in the work and Reichel certainly helped me to eliminate these. Later, as I gravitated much more toward decorative cubism, there was less communion in art between us. (III, 10)

What communion there had been was closer to Reichel’s philosophy than his paintings. They followed a form of German Expressionism that Holty never appreciated (making him wonder sometimes whether his German heritage meant anything at all to him as a painter). He gave an example, though, of how Reichel’s talk affected him:

Reichel believed that one inhaled impressions and experience in a sort of automatic manner if one were truly flexible and that all this “Erlebnis” (1ivedexperience) would find its way into the “abstract” design of the work—also automatically. There was to be no pressure, no time limit, and no conscious purpose involved. To gain art from life was to adapt the method of “divine” play and work only for the pleasure of working. (This is directly out of Paul Klee.) If I remember correctly, Reichel said something like that when we were living together in Switzerland and I brought up the subject of rendering the splendor of the Tessim landscape without transactional methods that involved conventional landscape painting. I was asking the questions at the time because I was overwhelmed by the grandeur, and the complications of the panorama of mountains, hills, lakes and villages that dotted the landscape in profusion. What had me stumped and nonplussed was that the optical problems involved were further complicated by the sensation all this visual paradise evoked. It seemed to me that even if one finally managed to depict what one saw, one would still be at a loss to grapple with the feelings one had about it and that seemed to rise from the material vista like a cloud of vapor engulfing the soul quite separately. If Reichel’s counsel, or Klee’s, appeared too metaphysical for my comprehension at the time, I realize now so many years later what was meant. No artist can deal with any immediate experience, no matter how stimulating until he has attained that inner image of the world that can absorb stimuli because what is newly seen is already within him. (III, 9-10)

Holty continued in his letter to Gelre with this personal account:

At the end of spring, 1929, Tootie was declared cured or partially cured and we all left Switzerland to go to France where we parted company much to Tootie’s distress for by then she had fallen in love with Reichel who had transferred his affections from my sister-in-law (who for reasons of her own had decided to withdraw from their romance) to Tootie. All of this is fact—not conjecture. Reichel saw Tootie once more in the spring of the year she died (1930) when they met in Marseilles.11

Holty told nothing more of a factual nature about his wife’s death, except the date of August 1930, in the letter to Gelre. In a later discussion of his work of this period, however, he made a rare confession of his feelings:

There is an all pervading gloom and barrenness to be noted in my work of those years (the late 1920’s) though I was not consciously aware of it. Today, recalling the time and events, it is clear to me that I was working under the cloud of a tragedy, the illness and death of my first wife. No one then could have convinced me that I would live as long as I have, because, and I knew it was so, those years marked the death of my youth. (V, 2107)

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  1. Letter of 6, 22, 1967, to H.T.

  2. Holty’s first wife’s name was Julia Kroeck, but he called her variously Tudi or Tootie.

  3. Information from catalogue of Holty exhibition held at New York University Graduate Center in 1972 (the catalogue material was compiled and composed by Patricia Kaplan, under the supervision of Milton Brown), “Biographical Information,” New York: NYUGC, 1972, n.p.

  4. Prof. Kaspar was one of the leading officials of The Neue Secession Artists. This group had included an exhibition of Munch’s paintings within its annual spring show, the artist to be honored by his Munich colleagues. Holty explained, in his usually informative way, the various types of exhibitions that were held in Munich: “These were sponsored by artist organizations with municipal or state, formerly royal, financial aid and official sponsorship and while pictures were purchased from these exhibits, the onus of commercialism was avoided. Ordinarily there were three salons, a conservative one, that admitted only work of an academic tradition, a Secession Salon that was more modern and which grew out of Impressionism or Art Nouveau, and the New Secession Salons that went almost but not quite to the extremes of modern art. The Ultramoderns, Expressionists, later admitted to the New Secession exhibits, the futurists, and abstract painters were forced to create groups of their own and originally exhibited as groups in the galleries of some of the more adventurous art dealers, such as Herwarth Walden, Gurlitt and others in Berlin, Flechtheim in Dusseldorf and Hans Goltz in Munich. Each salon had its own jury although I believe the actual members in the group had one or more pictures admitted without judgment and any or all of these salons were free to invite some special guest artist or artists to exhibit within the framework of their annual shows. Recognized Professors at the art academies were usually invited to show in the Salons all over the country and once an artist had been recognized officially he was never slighted by being left out of one of the big exhibitions, whether he had a bad year or not. The arbitrariness of the American art juries was unknown and their often cruel decisions to leave this or that well known artist out of an official exhibition would have been considered the worst of manners and barbarian to boot because of the deference to fashion” (II, 26).

  5. Holty mainly knew of Munch’s work through the Munich art periodical Jugend, which often emphasized the second-rate artists of the Jugend Stil, Holty thought, but also reproduced works by Ferdinand Hedler, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Max Lieberman, Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth, and of course, Edvard Munch (II, 30).

  6. Early in their conversation, Munch had asked Holty his age and how long he had been at drawing and painting. When the young man told him that he had had some art instruction since he was fifteen years old and a good deal of it since his nineteenth year, the elder man said that that was a long period of study if he had made the most of it. Holty demurred that he had not, that he had more than the usual difficulty with drawing and that one teacher who considered him deficient at such had advised him to give up art entirely, at which, Holty wrote: “Munch’s head rose and he looked at me straight in the eyes for the first time as he asked me very sharply why I hadn’t taken the advice. I said that I never considered quitting for an instant even at the time it was suggested that I do so and when I had really nothing I had done good enough to offer as evidence in my favor because and again for no good reason, I had unlimited confidence in myself. I added that I had one minor accomplishment. I could always draw a likeness. He, Munch, muttered that that was no minor accomplishment and added that if figure drawing was so difficult for me that might have been because I had not found the teacher who was able to open up the wonderful world of drawing. He certainly hit the nail on the head there but I didn’t know it until I finally met with such a teacher. When I found one shortly thereafter, I understood very well what he meant and wondered whether he too had had a similar difficulty in the beginning” (II, 31-32).

  7. Munch told the young man that for some years he had not needed to worry about material things, but he did describe his thirteen-room house outside of Oslo. He said that his housekeeper lived in the large old-fashioned country kitchen with stove and ovens, but the other twelve rooms were for working. When Holty asked him where he lived, he said that he had some cots in several of the rooms and some closet space for clothes but that all he needed to live was a place to sleep and any “spot or cot would do and besides he thought it was good for an artist to keep the ordinary habits of living mobile as one should do everything to keep from crystallizing.” Holty found out afterwards that the elder artist also had a large shed on his property, open in the center but with rooved platforms around the four sides, wherein he could work at some of his larger paintings by natural light. Later on, when Holty lived in Paris, he found the idea of having few possessions so appealing that he lived in a hotel and stored his paintings in a closet rather than his clothes. As he wrote: “Most of my clothes were on me, the other suit and the overcoat were in the bathroom and the linen was in the partly opened laundry package on one of the chairs. The dirty linen was in the desk drawer along with some neckties and handkerchiefs. That, I admit, was the farthest I ever went toward the oath of poverty, but in this respect, a disdain for owning things, I certainly followed Edvard Munch’s idea and example” (II, 33).

  8. The idea of doing a picture twice refers to a passage with which Holty began the section on Munch. Writing in 1965, Holty told of belatedly doing what he had often preached to his students but never done himself—that is, painting some pictures twice and even three times, doing not exactly the same thing so much as closely related versions of the same composition. This came, apparently, from one of the things Munch said to the young artist in the above mentioned session, as follows: “I am really following the advice once given me, and all other painters of our time, by the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch to paint everything twice because, as he said, in our 20th century nothing was certain or positive and no one could be completely certain of what he was doing and so, rather than be hung up by doubt, one had better do everything twice. He didn’t say that he thought that the second picture would necessarily be better than the first, it would just be different. Nor did he argue that the two works would resolve the inner conflict of the artist. It would only better empty his mind of whatever it was in it, assuage to an extent his discontent with the results and free him, or rather, enable him to go on to some other folly, as he put it” (II, 22).

  9. These paragraphs have been selected and somewhat rearranged for greater coherency.

  10. The line of reasoning in this paragraph is countered in the subsequent one: “This is a far cry from the beliefs and concepts of his old age when he believed one could draw more out of the materials used, the unique and indefinable plastic logic of color itself, in short, from the creative act without reference to the outside world, than one could bring to art through logical thought and premeditation” (II, 62). In a further tribute to Hofmann’s teaching, in general, Holty wrote: “His claim to being of those exalted people who ‘awakened the artist’ in his students may be a bit pretentious and not always quite true but he did open many eyes that had been shut and he was the rare kind of teacher who could know not only the abilities of his students but could also judge their characters and their personalities and so could foresee to a considerable extent in what manner and how fast they could learn and develop as students and as artists” (II, 61). The section on Hofmann is continued in Appendix A.

  11. Letter from Holty to a Mr. Gelre on December 23, 1978.