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Open Letter on “Mors Imperator” (1887)

from several Berlin papers, 5–6 Aug. 1887; repr. Grazer Volksblatt, 10 Aug. 1887 · 1887 ·draft

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Her own furious, point-by-point answer to the jury that rejected Mors Imperator from the Berlin academic exhibition. Sent to several Berlin papers, which printed it on 5 and 6 August 1887 (among them the Kreuzzeitung and the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung), and reprinted across Austria — here from the Grazer Volksblatt of 10 August 1887, under the sardonic headline “Byzantinismus.” It names the officials, exposes the jury's shifting grounds, and dares the public to judge. The paper added a barbed coda of its own: “Poor Holbein — with your Dance of Death you too would flop today!”

Open Letter on “Mors Imperator”

By Hermine Schmidt von Preuschen, Munich

When I sent “Mors Imperator” to Berlin, a picture that in Munich was rightly understood by all the artists and critics who saw it, and declared a serious work of art, I took the occasion to mention at the same time that its pendant, “Regina vitae,” with which “Mors Imperator” was together to set forth the biblical text “Love is strong as death” (Song of Songs 8:6), was not finished, and that I could therefore send only the one picture.

After some time a person of high rank wrote to me that she had learned, from someone officially involved with the exhibition, that “Mors Imperator,” although well painted, was to be rejected by the jury solely on account of its subject. I travelled to Berlin at once, believing I could talk the jury out of its misgivings.

The President of the Academy, Herr Professor Becker1, declared to me repeatedly and in the most definite terms, in the presence of Privy Councillor Zöllner, that the subject was the sole ground of the rejection, that such a picture could not possibly be shown to the Kaiser in his academic exhibition, and further, that the picture could only be exhibited if the Kaiser himself gave to understand that he wished it.

Under these circumstances I turned for help to His Majesty the Kaiser, who, after a photographic print of “Mors Imperator” had been laid before him, graciously had it declared, in the well-known telegram to Herr Professor Becker, that if the subject alone had been the occasion of the rejection, he took no objection to it.

Despite this pronouncement, the jury believed it must persist in rejecting the picture, and now no longer on the ground originally given to me as the only one, but supposedly on account of “unartistic treatment of an unartistic subject.” So much for the facts!

Surprising as it already was for me to hear that political motives were imputed to a picture meant to depict the transience of fame, power, and love — a thought entirely remote from me, wholly excluded by the whole conduct of my life, and whose baselessness His Majesty the Kaiser has acknowledged, for which I am grateful from the bottom of my heart — I must all the more lodge decided protest against the jury's new verdict, now dressed up in artistic motives, which is calculated to injure my artistic honour.

This is not — as I may surely say without immodesty — the work of a nameless beginner; and so the jury might well have left the judgment of my work's artistic worth to the criticism of the press and the public. I confidently throw my artistic reputation into the balance against the jury's verdict.

For a separate exhibition of “Mors Imperator,” to be held shortly, I call upon the sound judgment of the public to be the judge in my honest cause.

Berlin, August 1887. Hermine Schmidt von Preuschen (Munich).