Julius Meier-Graefe


Julius Meier-Graefe was a German art critic and novelist.
His writings on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism as well as on art of earlier and more recent generations, with his most important contributions translated into French, Russian and English, are considered to have been instrumental for the understanding and the lasting success of these artistic movements.

Biography

Meier-Graefe was born in Reschitz, Banat, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now located in modern Romania. He was the grandson of , and son of, a government civil engineer, and Marie Theresie Meier née who died giving birth to him. The family, including his brother, moved to a small town near Düsseldorf, Germany. He chose the hyphenated surname Meier-Graefe to honour the mother he never knew.
After studying engineering in Munich in 1888 and marrying Clotilde Vitzthum von Eckstädt, he moved to Berlin, where, in 1890, he took up the study of history in general and art history in particular. He began his literary career as a fiction writer with two novellas, Ein Abend bei Laura and Nach Norden, His first work of art criticism, regarding Edvard Munch, was published in 1894. In 1895 he was among the founders of the arts and literary periodical Pan, but he left the magazine after a year and founded the Jugendstil magazine Dekorative Kunst in 1897 and soon thereafter opened La Maison Moderne in Paris, a gallery that showcased Art Nouveau works. The gallery closed in 1903.
The centennial exhibition of German art in the National Gallery in Berlin in 1906 featured Meier-Graefe's presentation of previously little-known works, and through his efforts, the art of Caspar David Friedrich was first introduced to a wider audience. Similarly, his 1910 book Spanische Reise led to the "rediscovery" of El Greco and the positioning of the artist as a forerunner to the Expressionists.
Relocating to Paris, Meier-Graefe turned his attention on 19th century French painting; his 3-volume history of modern art canonized the importance of French Impressionism. He wrote important biographies of many artists, including Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.
When World War I broke out, he volunteered in the Red Cross. He was sent to the Eastern front in 1915 and was captured and interned in a Russian POW camp in early 1915. Upon his return to Germany in late 1915, he divorced his first wife and married his second wife, Helene Lienhardt. The couple lived in Dresden, but travelled often, and considered France, especially Paris, a second home.
Meier-Graefe's third marriage was to Anna Marie Epstein, an illustrator and painter about 38 years his junior. A wealthy heiress, she was the only child of a Jewish couple, Else Kohn and Walter Epstein ; her maternal grandparents were Adolf Kohn, a prominent German-Jewish banker, and Anna Michaelis.
In 1930, Meier-Graefe and Epstein rented an estate called La Banette in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer and they stayed there to escape the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany, where he was under attack for his promotion of what the National Socialists called "Degenerate Art." Meier-Graefe and Epstein encouraged and helped the landscape painter Walter Bondy and the writer René Schickele to relocate to the area as well, and they were a decisive impetus in the formation of a large German-Jewish refugee arts-colony in neighboring Sanary-sur-Mer, whose members included Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Ludwig Marcuse.
He died in Vevey, Switzerland at the age of 67.

Writings