Julius Meier-Graefe

Julius Meier-Graefe (born June 10, 1867, Resicza, Austria-Hungary [now Reșița, Romania]—died June 5, 1935, Vevey, Switzerland) was an art critic and art historian widely regarded as a pioneering figure in the early development of 19th- and 20th-century art history.

After studying engineering in Munich, Meier-Graefe moved to Berlin in 1890, eventually cofounding the journal Pan in 1894. His enthusiasm for French art quickly brought controversy and prompted him to move to Paris in 1895. There he became involved with the artists and designers of the emerging Art Nouveau movement and became a public champion of that movement through his work as the founding editor of Dekorative Kunst (“Decorative Art”). In 1899 he opened La Maison Moderne, an Art Nouveau gallery. The gallery closed in 1903, and Meier-Graefe returned to Berlin, where he wrote and published the three volumes of Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (1904; Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics), a study now widely regarded as establishing and codifying current assumptions of the movement’s stylistic evolution.

Modern Art focused on art from Eugène Delacroix to the Post-Impressionists, advancing the view that innovation in art was primarily a matter of solving a succession of formal problems. Reflecting the formalist influence of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Die klassische Kunst (1899; “Classic Art”; Eng. trans. The Art of the Italian Renaissance: A Handbook for Students and Travellers), Meier-Graefe downplayed the influences exerted by social and economic factors, choosing instead to view art as an attempt to “transform everyday life” and to present solutions to formal problems. His thinking took an idealizing turn toward the existential in 1910, when he published a rhapsodic biography of Vincent van Gogh that cast him as the epitome of moral, spiritual, and cultural heroism.