The following account is taken from pages 262ff. of Volume Fifteen of Moderne Kunst, a German art magazine; the issue was produced in 1901, while the artist was still alive.
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Machine translation from the German was used. The original German text is also available.
The decorative aspect of art is not a secondary matter in art, but one of the main things" - this saying of the great Swiss has always been proven by the younger Baden master, Ferdinand Keller. When the twenty-four-year-old appeared at the Paris World Exhibition of 1867 with his colorful "Death of Philip II of Spain", it was clear to all those in the know that this southern German had a decorative genius that only a few contemporary artists can call their own.
Born on August 5, 1842 in Karlsruhe, Ferdinand Keller attended the grammar school in his hometown, but even at school the boy realized that it was not science but art that was the goddess to whose service he must dedicate his life. In 1858 his father accepted a call to Brazil, where the skilled engineer was to build large railways and bridges. An older brother helped his father and Ferdinand, the sixteen-year-old, was allowed to use his beloved brush and pencil to his heart's content. The mighty nature of the tropics, the splendor of its flora and fauna had a truly intoxicating effect on him; after a four-year stay he brought back loads of sketches and studies. He was determined to live from then on as a landscape painter, dedicated to the mission of depicting the wonders of color and form of those unknown forests on canvas. However, his idealistic striving and his sanguine enthusiasm were already mixed with serious self-criticism; despite all his composing and copying from nature, he had become aware that he had not yet laid any effective foundations for real skill. Without hesitation he went to Karlsruhe and in the autumn of 1862 became Schirmer's student, under whose guidance he deepened his studies of Brazilian nature; the most famous Keller painting from that period is "Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco," which was immediately purchased by a Karlsruhe art lover. After the death of his teacher Schirmer, Keller was a student of Hans Gude for a while; but when the Viennese Canon appeared in Karlsruhe, the young artist was so captivated by both his intelligent personality and Canon's brilliant skill that he quickly decided to switch from landscape to figure painting. The first work created under Canon's direction, which aroused general admiration through the power of the depiction and the bright colors, was the "Death of Philip II" mentioned at the beginning.
Shortly after this victory, Keller went to Rome and stayed there until he was appointed as a teacher at the Karlsruhe art school in 1872. In the city on the Tiber, Keller often lived with Feuerbach; their studios were very close to each other. The enormous art world of Rome, with its moving impressions, had a strong influence on the deeply sensitive artist; it did not allow him to create larger works, but his portfolios were constantly filled with landscape and figurative sketches; when he returned home, they provided him with the material for his large painting "Nero at the Burning of Rome," whose local studies he had made with the utmost care on the spot.
The old masters and the skies of Italy inspired Keller to studies with an immediacy of conception and original luminosity of coloring, which often greatly excited his fellow student at the time, Anselm Feuerbach, for while he hesitated and hesitated to move from wanting to being able, Keller quietly and seriously turned his thoughts into actions, which the artist Feuerbach admired without envy. So it happened that during those Roman years several pictures were created in Feuerbach's workshop, in which Keller played a major role; at that time both of them knelt before the same gods, their lines and their coloring were dominated by a congenial trait.
A decade and a half later, when Feuerbach was dead and his works were gradually gaining appreciation, Keller, who had meanwhile become a professor and member of the gallery commission in Karlsruhe, was greeted by the late Lübke at a meeting of that commission with the words: "We have found a lovely Feuerbach, I want to buy it for the gallery." Keller, who was usually very quiet, blurted out at first glance: "Deception, that is a study of mine that I did in Rome in 1872." The picture: a naked boy with a flute, was signed "Feuerbach 1852", but Keller found it easy to prove his authorship and to the horror of the art connoisseurs who had praised Feuerbach before Keller's arrival, one of Keller's students, the well-known painter W. Voltz, also came forward and declared the picture to be a study by his master, unmistakable to anyone familiar with Ferdinand Keller's style.
Like an unleashed mountain stream, Keller's decorative genius breaks through in the historical painting from 1875, which the Karlsruhe gallery calls its own, "Margrave Ludwig defeats the Turks in the Battle of Sylankament". This magnificent work is particularly characteristic of his first period. The interweaving of countless painterly subtleties with a powerful depiction of the raging battle produced a composition that could hardly be imagined to be more lavish in color and at the same time more imaginative and orientally authentic. The tapestry-like effect of a painting, which was uncritically admired in Frank Brangwyn's pictures in Paris after two decades, is already present here, with the only difference being that the Baden artist knows how to choose the tones of his color language more brightly, more energetically and, above all, more richly than the blasé Belgian. Keller jokingly calls this picture his “youthful sin”, but it is one that, despite everything, no one passes by carelessly today; it contains power and a true sense of colour.
The 1870s also saw Keller's victory over ninety competitors in Dresden; his design for the curtain of the court theater built by Semper was unanimously awarded and chosen for execution. The center of the magnificent composition, which is still characterized by the beauty of the drawing and the harmony of the colors, is the winged fantasy; raising her torch, the lovely daughter of Jovis sits enthroned, surrounded by equally graceful representatives of history, music, poetry and dance; visitors to the temple of the muses are captivated again and again by the festive, cheerful and yet harmoniously calm color chords that the artist allows to fade away on his canvas.
Keller's brilliant talent for large-scale decorative painting was clearly evident, but the tasks to put it into practice were slow to come, and this is to be regretted for the sake of German art. Although several monumental works were executed by Keller in the 1870s and early 1880s, what could this artist, who created with sovereign ease and with an overflowing imagination, have thought up and executed compared to large surfaces that inspired him! He was certain that frescoes were the only true expression of his painting talent, and he found his first opportunity to do so in the Heidelberg Jesuit Church, where he painted a "Plimmelfahrt Mariä" using this technique. But the staircase of the Karlsruhe Museum, which also houses a library and a collection of paintings and sculptures, also received significant wall decoration from Professor Keller's hand. The frescoes there depict "classical and romantic art and science" in numerous perfectly formed groups; These paintings, too, are an eloquent testimony to Keller's rich talent in their combination of idealism and realism. The large mural that decorates the auditorium of Heidelberg University also belongs to this era. The founding of the Ruperta Carola is represented here by a triumphal procession of Pallas Athene; a cheering crowd of students is the goddess's herald, followed carefully by the most famous teachers of the university; the Roman chariot carrying Athene approaches the throne of Elector Rupert, the founder of the alma mater, whom the city goddess of Heidelberg gratefully crowns for this favor. Here again Keller demonstrates his rare skill in combining allegorical ideal figures with the bearers of history in historically authentic costumes to create uniform compositions of great style. Our gray-on-gray reproduction only gives an idea of the beauty inherent in the great original in terms of form.
However, Keller's power was far too agile and strong to be expressed only in those great compositions. The "living in beauty", which the majority of mortals completely misunderstand, has found in Keller one of its most amiable and subtle embodiments. Extremely unassuming and simple for himself and his personality, he is of the noblest distinction in every movement and expression; his immediate surroundings: his house and studio in Karlsruhe, his villa, garden and workshop "Malfried" on Lake Starnberg, were furnished by him in a way that was artistically rich and yet harmonious, which few can match. Equally far removed from Lenbach's artificial interior decorations, which revel in past centuries, as from the primitive sobriety of a van de Velde, Keller created living spaces whose furnishings are pleasing to the eye, comfortable for those who spend time there, and awaken many memories of the beautiful past for the owner, a buen retiro in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, such as the present, with all its chic and refinement, rarely offers. The staircase and the dining room in Karlsruhe, the garden sloping down to the lake in the Bavarian “Malfried”, the terrace in front of which Lake Starnberg spreads out in all its loveliness and solemn beauty, the leafy walkways in the park, the bathhouse on the shore with its cosy bay window, the sailing flotilla and the rowing boats, the shady place for the diligently cultivated game of skittles - all these domestic details have been given an artistic character by Keller's sense of beauty, which is doubly attractive and homely precisely because of the unwanted. Building boats and cupboards himself, designing his home so happily and picturesquely that every guest feels a kind of Sunday peace, a festive atmosphere, this is one side of Keller's artistic personality that cannot be overlooked when assessing his work. And in this artistically simple and yet elegant way of life, his talented, amiable wife, "mistress of the house", stands loyally by his side as his best companion. Anyone who knows the social life in Baden's capital knows how the Keller house has set the tone for educated circles for decades, and the hospitality in Malfried is no less charming.
Keller has been teaching for decades with enthusiasm and dedication. He has had hundreds of students, including some who are now masters themselves. They all look up to their teacher with grateful admiration, who sensitively addressed their individuality and effectively stimulated and promoted it. There is agreement that the blossoming of the Baden art school is one of Ferdinand Keller's achievements. His sense of idealism, his great, lively way of composing, his eminent sense of color, combined with serious drawing skills, as well as his diverse experience in all areas of painting technique, enabled him to become the driving force that guided numerous young talents with enthusiasm. The versatility of his talent is also reflected in the careers of Keller's students. The atmospheric landscapes that he never neglected and successfully cultivated, the portrait in spiritual and coloristic perfection, ideal compositions, poetic individual figures, the whole range of figures from an ideal and real world that once urged Rubens and Tilpolo to create, also attracted the mind and hand of the Baden master. Everything technically difficult was always something that Keller took for granted: fresco, oil painting of all kinds, tempera, watercolor, chalk, pastel, he handled everything with a confidence that often surprised not only laymen, but even more so serious self-creating artists. He also tried his luck in the field of sculpture, as our sign testifies. Architecture, landscape, nudes, costume figures of all times, horses, dogs, putti, birds, ornaments, flowers, weapons - "in a word: the great and small world, he gives it back to us in a mirror image" - is what Fontane famously says of Menzel, and in a certain sense the same applies to Keller, with the only difference being that his mirror image transfigures nature, envelops it in a brilliance and shimmer that only a true colorist like Ferdinand Keller can command. Menzel has said to me several times with sadness, "I am not a colorist, I lack that"; well, Keller does not have this shortcoming, colorism, the decorative element, is his strength and gives him that superiority that the master of color has.
Ferdinand Keller is the only one who created a pictorial document of that greatest era of our country's history in the "Glorification of Kaiser Wilhelm I", which is owned by the Berlin National Gallery. In 1887, the man from Baden courageously took on the enormous task of uniting the father of the fatherland in a brilliant triumphal procession among the heroes who helped him found the empire. The glorification of the Flerrscher, beloved by all, in the most ideal way imaginable was the core of his endeavor. The bold man from Baden undertook it; he showed us North Germans, who for decades had seen the deeds and great moments of that time immortalized almost exclusively in the strictly realistic depictions of A. v. Werner, Röchling, etc., how such a theme could be ideally understood. The fact that he could not completely succeed in this difficult undertaking of bringing the reality known to us all to a close with the half-visionary world of the spirits in an accord of completely satisfactory harmony is due to the limited ability, the limits of which everyone, even the greatest artist, feels painfully; on the other hand, however, everyone who has an open eye for the great difficulties of this task - which seem almost insurmountable to a North German critical mind - will gratefully acknowledge that here a patriotic, sensitive artist has achieved something for whose completion every German owes him thanks.
At the beginning of the 1890s, Keller completed a smaller apotheosis of Emperor Frederick III. Of course, there is no trace of the roaring jubilation of "glorification" in this work; a serious tone surrounds the composition, the center of which is the hero of Wörth on a towering horse. Wildly torn terrain, ramparts, are reminiscent of the battlefield, the imperial crown that the genius offers him is veiled; dark clouds gather, only a golden glow shines from the distance on the horizon. The picture is painted with astonishing genius and expresses a moving mood.
In the next few years, Keller not only received countless portrait commissions, which he often turned down, but also decorated the State Trade Museum in Stuttgart, built by Neckelmann, with two large, monumental murals that depict the history of Württemberg in a decoratively powerful way. The huge wall surfaces of the Stuttgart building, which would have made any other artist shudder, inspired Keller to work with a speed and joy that was phenomenal for the onlookers. In the Swabian capital, where until very recently people were used to seeing art develop and mature very slowly, Keller's ingenious approach, which produced such an excellent result, was downright exciting.
The Baden master has received numerous medals and awards, and the Württemberg Crown Order, which confers personal nobility on its owner, has also belonged to him for a long time, but he is one of the rare living artists who disdain the decorative "von", believing that the honest father's name alone is sufficient. Keller took part successfully in the competition for the paintings of the Hamburg town hall; one of our paintings reproduces, in colorless form, part of those brilliant color sketches that brought him first prize but not the desired execution. Much to the detriment of the artistic physiognomy of the Hanseatic city's town hall, the paintings themselves were entrusted to a North German colleague. But in true artist style, who receives the impulse to create from within, not from without, he took such failures in his stride; In a steady succession, those creations emerged from his studio, which reveal in every line and in every tone the highly gifted painter who was given the rare ability to embody the supernatural and ideal in the visual arts in captivating color beauty.
The pictures in our Keller issue, which were all created in the last three years [i.e. 1898 to 1901] with the exception of the Heidelberg mural, which is extremely representative of a longer creative period, show the versatile artist at the height of his creativity.
Keller has shown that his talent is very active in the task he is given, so it is a legitimate hope that the near future will provide a theme for his great talent in which his luxuriant painterly imagination can once again unfold its wings for the benefit of German decorative wall painting; the high vaults of the foyer of the German Reichstag building would be a setting for this. But even without this wish being fulfilled, Ferdinand Keller, the Baden master of colour, remains one of the greatest colourists of our century, whose quiet, harmonious development and tremendous skill are already appreciated by thousands and will one day have even greater significance in the judgment of art history - for he has few comrades who have won similar victories with the power and charm of colour.
