INTO OBLIVION: JULIUS SCHMID, ARTIST
INTRODUCTION
My research on the life of Julius Schmid began after I completed a Schubert Iconography which was later published.* I found it intriguing and puzzling that the name and reputation of the artist who produced one of the most popular artworks featuring Schubert had disappeared from sight. In 2000, I began several years of research and visited Vienna in 2001 with the intent of preparing the groundwork for a monograph on Julius Schmid. In 2002, I received a reply to my inquiry that the artist’s great-grandson, Prof. Wolfgang Prohaska, was planning to write a major biography of his ancestor using the correspondence and papers of Julius Schmid in Prof. Prohaska’s possession which would not be available to outside researchers. I put my project aside, and in 2004 I heard from German art history doctoral student Silvia Freimann that her dissertation would include a study of Julius Schmid and Eduard Veith. Not wanting my research to be for nought I shared much of my research with then Frau Freimann, now Dr. Freimann, to help speed along her dissertation to completion. In the past five years I did nothing on this project expecting to hear that the biography of Julius Schmid was soon to be published. As of April 2009 I still look forward eagerly to Prof. Prohaska’s biography of Julius Schmid but decided this year to put online whatever research I had gathered for other researchers to use. I was especially gratified to hear from several descendants of Julius Schmid – Miguel Prohaska of Toronto, Canada and Dr. Hans J. A. Schmid of Brione, Switzerland. It was Miguel Prohaska who found a brief reference about Julius Schmid I had placed at the nongovernment Austrian cultural information website known as AEIOU <http://aeiou.iicm.tugraz.at/>. I hoped that some information online would spur more interest in Julius Schmid but I note that in the intervening years the situation has remained about the same. Because of the five-year hiatus in my research (which I updated briefly) any errors are mine alone.
Janet Wasserman, June 2008-April 2009
Julius Schmid (1854-1935) was an academic artist of his era - a landscape, historical, and genre painter as well as a very successful portraitist of the Austrian Imperial family, the nobility, and of the Vienna haute bourgeoisie. Vienna born, Schmid was a student at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts from 1871 to 1878 and also traveled through Austria and visited Munich. In 1878, Schmid won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to study in that city for two years. After he completed his studies in Rome, Schmid traveled extensively through Italy, in particular Naples, Florence, and Venice, to expand his knowledge and technique. Upon his return to Vienna, Schmid spent some months in Hans Makart's atelier. In 1881, Schmid joined the Genossenschaft bildender Künstler Wiens, also known as the Künstlerhaus, Vienna's exhibition organization for those in the fine arts. In 1884, Schmid produced the first poster for the Künstlerhaus. It was this organization from which the Vienna Secession artists, led by Carl Moll (1861-1945) and Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), seceded in 1897 because the Künstlerhaus membership represented the status quo and would not recognize the artists of the existing Munich Secession. Schmid had several exhibits of his work at Künstlerhaus: in 1925, in 1937, and in 1954 - the last being on his 100th birth anniversary. Künstlerhaus issued a brochure in 1934 dedicated to the artist on his 80th birthday.
From 1884 to 1902, Schmid worked at the Academy of Fine Arts as assistant to the noted artist August Eisenmenger (1830-1907) and in 1902, as befitted his artistic and intellectual inclinations, Schmid became a professor in the same academy where he had studied. He worked his way up through the professorial ranks eventually succeeding Eisenmenger whose student and disciple Schmid had been. Eisenmenger's reputation today is strongly founded on his portraits and on the contributions he made in the 1880s to the interior decoration -- wall and ceiling frescoes -- of some of the new buildings which comprised the just-created Ringstrasse complex.
Schmid was a full professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts from 1919 to 1925 when he finally retired to private life. He was awarded numerous prizes including the Reichel Prize (1891), the Kaiser Prize (1892), the Gold Medal of the City of Berlin (1894), and the Knight's Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph (1898). Schmid was given high honors on his 75th birthday in 1929 by both the City of Vienna and the Republic of Austria.
Schmid's oeuvre is represented by numerous portraits as exemplified by those of Emperor Franz Joseph (1848-1916), Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914), and famed Austrian writer, poet and playwright Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916). Like Eisenmenger, Schmid was commissioned to do wall and ceiling frescoes at which he too excelled. Examples of these frescoes are in Vienna's Schottenkirche. The Raimund Theatre has a classical scene by Schmid painted on its main curtain. Schmid's historical scenes and portraits, in fresco and grisaille, of musical performances and of famous Austrian composers, in Vienna and in Graz, are perhaps his greatest artistic legacy.
Schmid was born between the generation of Hans Makart (1840-1884) who he admired, and Gustav Klimt, an artist who by virtue of Schmid’s great esthetic differences with Klimt, Schmid would and could not join in the Vienna Secession. Klimt professed great admiration for Makart, who was both Klimt's and Schmid's teacher for a very short time. While Makart was an artist both Schmid and Klimt respected neither of them would follow Makart's idiosyncratic historicist lead. Schmid was fully honored by academic prizes and medals in Austria and Germany but he never captured the imagination of the public as had Makart and Klimt, both of whom have been re-discovered by succeeding generations of art viewers into the 21st century thanks in part to the Internet and World Wide Web. Klimt has retained and enlarged a following, as Schmid has not.[1]
Except for his Ein Schubertabend in einem Wiener Bürgerhause, Schmid has been consigned to oblivion. While he has lost his historical stature as an artist and his name goes unrecognized, his Schubertabend achieves a solid amount of reproduction in books and magazines, on CD covers, and in numerous other media. The popularity of the painting is mainly due to the worldwide appreciation and ever-constant performance of the music and Lieder of Franz Schubert, and to an avid public who still continue to read about Schubert, attend Schubert concerts, and buy Schubert recordings and CDs. The Schubertabend ranks high internationally as a choice selection from stock photo agencies and photo archives whenever a user needs an immediately recognizable image of Schubert in the milieu of his own era, or merely a representative scene of the Biedermeier/Romantic era in music. In the same vein, reproductions in books and on CD covers of Klimt's The Kiss have been used to personify Gustav Mahler's music as emblematic of his Jugendstil era when Mahler was director of the Vienna Hofoper.
Schmid's painting, Schubertabend (172x255 cm), was submitted in a competition, which expressly set a Schubertiad as its theme. The Viennese industrialist, art connoisseur, and Schubert admirer Nikolaus Dumba (1830-1900) funded the 1897 competition celebrating Schubert’s 100th birth anniversary. Among the competitors was Gustav Klimt. Schmid's submission won. It is claimed that this painting by Schmid had earlier been awarded a gold medal in Berlin, in 1894. This 1894 award would call into question the dating of the Schubertabend and the original reason and purpose for its creation. The date attribution of 1894 appears in an otherwise authoritative art lexicon, but no other source - lexicon or dictionary - has the 1894 medal in a Schmid entry. The 1894 medal cited as being for the Schubertabend seems to be in error.[2]
Schmid's Schubertabend was exhibited at the opening in January 1897 of the famous centennial Schubert exhibition in Vienna's Künstlerhaus.[3] In the portrait, Schubert is half turned from the piano, one hand on his thigh, with a crowd of smiling and very well-dressed Viennese grouped about him in obvious appreciation of the composer. According to the 1997 Nikolaus Dumba exhibit catalog of the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, some of Schubert's admirers encircling him in this painting include several of his historically authentic friends: Katharina Fröhlich (1800-1879), Sophie Müller (1803-1830), Eduard von Bauernfeld (1802-1890), Johann Baptist Jenger (1793-1856), Johann Michael Vogl (1768-1840), and Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871). Schmid had done extensive historical and archival research in order to reproduce as closely as possible the known portraits of these friends, their costumes, and the interior décor and furniture of this Biedermeier salon. The painting was the template for the same scene in the 1953 Austrian film, "Ein Leben in zwei Sätzen," (also released as "Franz Schubert - ein unvollendetes Leben"). This film was one of the many fictional and saccharine portrayals of Schubert's life, in this case of his unrequited love for his real sweetheart Therese Grob, who married another in 1820. Unlike Schmid's painting, she is erroneously shown in the film's re-creation as being one of the attendees at this Vienna salon. However, no matter the number of times this smiling group of Schmid's music-loving Schubertians is used in a book, a film, an online site and a magazine or CD cover, the name Julius Schmid does not acquire any greater luster. He has essentially been forgotten.
Schmid's 1897 Schubertabend was not the last time Schubert was painted by Schmid. The beautifully decorated and acoustically excellent Kammermusiksaal, or chamber music hall, in what is now known as the Grazer Congress - the Graz Convention Center - has among its three ceiling lunettes painted by Schmid another Schubert completed around 1908.[4] The building was originally designed and constructed by the Steiermärkischer Sparkasse, a local banking institution that lent its position and prominence, as well as its funds, to many cultural and educational ventures. In fact, this building replaced an earlier structure of the Steiermärkischer Sparkasse in Graz that had in it a famous concert hall, the Stefaniensaal (Stefanie Hall). For the new building, a new Stefaniensaal was planned. The Stefaniensaal was named in honor of Stefanie, wife (and later widow) of Crown Prince Rudolf who himself became famous, as well as infamous, for his suicide at Mayerling in 1889 with his seventeen-year-old mistress who he apparently murdered as part of their death pact. For this second Stefaniensaal and for the new Kammermusiksaal Schmid was commissioned for music-related portraits in both concert halls.
In Schmid's lunette in the Kammermusiksaal, Schubert is seated at the piano with the great opera singer and first interpreter of Schubert's Lieder, the baritone Johann Michael Vogl and two of the four famous and musically accomplished Fröhlich sisters, Katharina (1800-1879) and Josefine (1803-1878). Schubert is shown in full right profile against a dark background. The figure standing behind the piano to provide the dark background for Schubert's full profile is Vogl. The Fröhlich sisters are quite beautiful and elegant while the slightly bemused Vogl, in his formal dark coat, casually leans slightly on his left elbow, which seems to be resting on a music stand placed right next to the piano and listens as Josefine, who is also standing, sings. This sister, known affectionately as Pepi, had serious voice training in a Vienna conservatory and a subsequently successful career on the concert stage. Seated slightly behind Josefine and to her left is her sister Katharina, with her left arm dangling somewhat over the back of her chair, and with elbow bent her left hand is up and against her neck. Katharina, like Vogl, is listening to Josefine sing from music she holds in her hands. Schubert is gazing at Josefine, his hands on the keyboard. The other lunettes are equally famous for Schmid's portraits of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. The Graz Convention Center Stefaniensaal also contain a series of fourteen medaillons done in grisaille, portraying great Austrian and German composers, including, of course, Schubert.
In 2000, yet another Schmid portrait of Schubert surfaced, this time as a Sotheby's auction item from a Viennese dealer. This is a 1900 watercolor of Schubert obviously after the detail of Schubert in the Schubertabend. An English collector of Schubertiana acquired the watercolor.[5] In the period 1990-2000, seven works of Schmid were offered at auction, almost all portraits. As recently as January 2001, a Schmid portrait of a Viennese banker was offered at Sotheby's auction online. In its online depiction of the Austrian Mint's 500-Schilling gold commemorative coin dedicated to Franz Schubert issued in 1997, images of the coin's obverse and reverse sides are superimposed on the upper left of a portion of the Schubertabend. The coin itself has the Kupelwieser drawing and the Schwind Schubertiad on its sides. Nowhere on the Austrian Mint's web site does there appear the attribution to Schmid while reproducing part of his Schubertabend. These Austrian coins have now been replaced by the Euro.
Schmid's Schubertabend is an academic work of its era by an artist whose reputation and name, if not his Schubert, have all but disappeared from view. Why? Possibly because Schmid was quite simply left behind as the ferment in the arts and in the Old Order began to mutate into the 20th century. The pace of modernity, rapid technological innovations, nationalistic restlessness among the Austrian Empire's multi-ethnic peoples, and the shifting power balance among the European nations left Schmid and so many others with a shrinking foothold in a society that was shifting and tilting off-center. The Habsburg Empire of the 1890s and early 1900s was a wreck in the making. The Habsburg dynasty ended its active life of rulership with the dissolution of the empire in 1918 and the establishment of the Republic of Austria. Secession gave way to Expressionism.
Schmid had achieved all that a young man of rather middle rank (his father was a merchant) could achieve based on his talent, intelligence, and persistence. For him to leave behind the stature that he had gained as a professor in Vienna's leading art academy and a portraitist of Vienna's industrial, artistic and titled elites by joining the Secession, a movement that held no esthetic or intellectual appeal for him, was not a viable option. He remained solidly entrenched in the academy where he was known, appreciated, and honored. After 1914, well into his sixties, Schmid might not continue to flourish as a society portraitist but he still had a place that anchored him in society. However, it was a society that was beginning to slide into irreversible dissolution. There is no doubt that since around 1900 portrait photography made an impact on the livelihoods of some artists as a few of the more adventurous among the upper classes, who formerly commissioned oil portraits, used the services of a well-trained portrait photographer. Nevertheless, in 1898 his success enabled Schmid to purchase a house at Maxingstrasse 18, formerly owned by Johann Strauss, Jr., where Die Fledermaus was composed. In a district then known as Old Hietzing (today known as Hietzing and across from Vienna's Zoo), Schmid lived in comfort with his wife Leopoldine [née Schlesinger] and his children. According to the memoirs of a family friend of Fritz Prohaska (a grandson of Schmid), the library of the Maxingstrasse house served as the model for the salon in the Schubertabend painting.[6] In the 1920s, Schmid's daughter and son-in-law Margarete [known as Putzi] and Carl Prohaska and their three sons lived at the Maxingstrasse house as part of an extended family. A Prohaska family member has resided in the same house up to the present day [as of 2004].
Schmid lived under the Habsburg monarchy until its disappearance at the end of the disastrous First World War, and then under its successor the Republic of Austria. The aftermath of World War I was the devastating collapse of Austria's economy and the consequent impoverishment of its citizens. Schmid would certainly have lost his personal financial wellbeing and that of his family. Schmid, who had died in 1935, three years before Austria's 1938 annexation by the Third Reich, once more came to the attention of Germans and Austrians when in 1942 his art was featured in the pages of the Nazi regime's ideologically correct journal Kunst dem Volk - People's Art. We know of Julius and Leopoldine Schmid's very close and warm almost half-century friendship and correspondence with the great Austrian musicologist Guido Adler (1855-1941), considered the father of modern musicology, and Adler's wife, Betti (née Berger, 1859-1933) both of whom were Jewish. Based on this long friendship with the Adlers and the fact that Leopoldine Schlesinger Schmid was Jewish, one could surmise that had Schmid lived until the publication of this issue of Kunst dem Volk he may well have been disturbed at this use by the Nazis of his art and his name.
Schmid's legacy encompasses nothing beyond his art as far as having dedicated followers, and today few of his works are noted and remarked upon with the exception of the ever-popular Schubertabend. At the time of my 2001 visit to Vienna, none of his works were on display in the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien (or noted in its catalog), or in the Künstlerhaus, or in the Dom- und Diözesanmuseum der Erzdiözese Wien (supposedly the first owners of Lasset die Kindlein zu mir kommen). The Schubertabend is owned by the Wiener Männergesangverein but the society’s greatly limited hours of public access restrict visitors from viewing the original painting. No students or disciples of Schmid's are known as Schmid himself was known in his era as a student of Eisenmenger. No catalogue raisonné has yet been produced for his oeuvre. His name is omitted from the major works and monographs of Viennese artists and movements affiliated with the successors to the Ringstrasse generation, or with fin-de-siècle Vienna, or later. The State honors in 1929 have faded from memory. Only the Künstlerhaus honored him, as an early and distinguished member of this artist association. Since that occasion in 1954, celebrating his birth centenary, little has been heard or written about him although portraits by Schmid began to appear at auction houses in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s. No public municipal marker in Vienna is known to honor Schmid. No street has been named for him in Vienna, unlike the Carl-Prohaska-Platz named for his son-in-law Carl Prohaska (1869-1927) who was a well-known composer and sought-after teacher and father of the internationally known conductor Felix Prohaska (1912-1987).
The second grandson of Julius Schmid, Friedrich or Frederico Prohaska (1914-1970), a professor of meteorology, played the harpsichord as an accompanist of the Fine Arts Quartet at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The third grandson of Julius Schmid, Carl Prohaska (1921-1968), was a flautist at the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. One of Felix Prohaska's two sons, Andreas Prohaska (b.194?), is today a theatre and opera director, and professor at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin. The other son, Dr. Wolfgang Prohaska (b.1943), is an art historian and curator of the Gemäldegalerie at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. Dr. Wolfgang Prohaska teaches at the University of Vienna and presently lives in the Maxingstrasse house [as of 2004].
The son and daughter of Andreas Prohaska, the great-great-grandchildren of Julius Schmid, are Daniel (b.1973), a tenor and actor in opera, musical theatre, operetta, and straight drama, and Anna (b.1983), a soprano with a developing career in opera and Lieder. Julius Schmid's descendants left their imprint more decidedly on music than on art, at the very least placing them in orbit of Schmid's composer portraits.
On the paternal side Dr. Hans J.A. Schmid (b.1925) is a grandson now living in Switzerland although he was born and raised in the former Czechoslovakia, the son of physician and professor of medicine Hans Hermann Schmid (1884-1963), the only son of Julius Schmid.[7]
Curiously, Julius Schmid's name resurfaced in 2004 in a Spanish novel Maria Rebeca published online by its author, Joaquin Vergara Urrutia. The novel opens in Santiago, Chile, in late 1829, when the narrator is admitted to an elegant mansion and into its luxuriously decorated music salon. In the salon is a beautiful pianoforte, and on the walls are remarkable paintings. One of them is Schmid's Schubertabend. It is, of course, an historical impossibility for an 1897 painting by Schmid to be found in Chile in 1829. However, the fictional use of the painting, a deliberate anachronism, equating the mansion's guests with "Austrian high society," bespeaks the exalted social status and musical sophistication of the mansion's owner.[8]
Copyright © 2001-2009 Janet I. Wasserman
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to Stephen R. Edidin, Curator, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, for obtaining the auction history of the Schmid portraits for the period 1990-2000. With thanks also to the late Professor Emeritus Edward R. Reilly, Vassar College, for his assistance in providing the pages for the Schmid-Adler correspondence in his inventory of the Guido Adler Collection; Dr. Thomas (Tom) C. Adler, San Diego, for our ongoing discussions about his grandfather, Prof. Guido Adler; Lee (Lisl) Auerbach, New York, for her memories of Professor Guido Adler, her late sister's father-in-law; Dr. Gabriele J. Eder, Vienna, for our discussion about Schmid and Guido Adler; John Diamond, Chairman of the Johann Strauss Society of Great Britain, for his information about the Strauss house; the Bezirksgericht Hietzing, Vienna, for the documentation of the Maxingstrasse house; Richard Morris, of The Schubert Institute (UK); Dr. Sylvia Freimann, Mühldorf am Inn, Germany, and her doctoral dissertation (art history) “Die Maler Eduard Veith und Julius Schmid und das späthistoristische Interieur.”
For his gracious support and help, my warmest appreciation to my brother, Marvin Wasserman.
My thanks and appreciation for information and material to Dr. Peter Marboe, Cultural Councillor of the City of Vienna; Dr. Wladimir Aichelburg of Künstlerhaus, Vienna; Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Wien; and Dr. Helmut Kretschmer, Oberarchivrat, Magistrat der Stadt Wien, Magistratsabteilung 8, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv; Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien.
Warmest thanks to Dr. Hans J.A. Schmid, MD, Brione, Switzerland, grandson of Julius Schmid, for his information and enthusiastic support. He was undaunted in his fight to have his grandfather’s works restored to him by the Czech Republic in 2006 even though it was only a partial success. It is a fifty-years-long story and one which I hope one day may be made known fully.
Special thanks to Dr. Wolfgang Prohaska, Director of the Gemäldegalerie, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, great-grandson of Julius Schmid, for his informative assistance.
Special thanks and appreciation to Miguel Prohaska of Toronto, great-grandson of Julius Schmid, for information about Schmid artwork in his possession as well as those owned by his sister Irene Aliota in Milwaukee.
To Dr. Nikolaus Breisach, Managing Director, and Frau Petra Nahold, of Grazer Congress, my thanks for their special assistance in obtaining images of Schmid's work in the Kammermusiksaal and Stefaniensaal; my thanks to the staff, and especially to Mr. Chuck Barber, of the University of Georgia Hargrett Rare Books and Manuscript Collection; the librarians of the art and music collections of The New York Public Library; the Raimundtheater Wien; the Kleine Zeitung (Graz); and the Neue Freie Presse (Vienna).
My thanks to Joaquin Vergara Urrutia, San Francisco, for his English translation of the opening chapter of his online novel Maria Rebeca.
* SEE: Janet I. Wasserman, "A Schubert Iconography: Painters, Sculptors, Lithographers, Illustrators, Silhouettists, Engravers, and Others Known or Said to Have Produced a Likeness of Franz Schubert," in Music in Art; International Journal for Music Iconography, [City University of New York, Research Center for Music Iconography], XXVIII, 1-2, 2003, 199-241. Online at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/rcmi/WassermanSchubert.pdf
[1] Janet Wasserman, "Franz Schubert as Painted by Gustav Klimt and Julius Schmid," The Schubertian, July 2001, 14-20.
[2] The source of the Gold Medal attribution is Heinrich Fuchs, Die oesterreichischen Maler des 19. Jahrhunderts, Wien: Fuchs, 1972-74, 4 vol.; Schmid: IV, K22. Fuchs is considered otherwise reliable: "Für sein Gemälde 'Schubertabend in einem Wiener Bürgerhause' wurde er im Jahre 1894 in Berlin mit der Goldmedaille ausgezeichnet."
[3]A photograph of the installation can be seen in James Leggio, ed., Music and Modern Art, New York: Routledge, 2002, page 3.
[4] The Convention Center is a monumental late 19th century building, built by a local bank, with a palatial interior that has been carefully conserved, including the Schmid ceiling paintings done around 1908 and restored in 1980 when the building was converted to a meeting center. No full-scale reproductions of the ceiling lunettes other than long-shot photographs have yet been found.
[5] Information about the acquisition of this watercolor is by personal communication from the new owner, Richard Morris, October 2000, who has been long associated with The Schubert Institute (United Kingdom). Mr. Morris, a collector of Schubertiana, is also the owner of an early 20th century postcard (postmarked 1912) with a photograph of the Graz Schubert lunette.
[6]Note an online memoir: Dr. Otto Fleming, a friend of Fritz Prohaska: in JUDEN IN HIETZING, see
http://projekte.vhs.at/judeninhietzing/stories/storyReader$60>. I have seen no images of the Maxingstrasse library by which to confirm this.
[7] See G. Seidenschnur, “Hans Hermann Schmid – On His 100th Anniversary,” Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie, 1984, 106(18), 1288-1291.
[8] Described in Spanish as a novel in two parts on the life of a family of Santiago in the late 19th century and ending in the 20th century. The plot is developed in conjunction with the contemporary heroes and politicians of the eras the family lives through. The Spanish text was originally posted at <www.notisur.homestead.com/mariarebeca.html> but this link is broken. Instead, for information about the novel, go to http://cuentoschilenosjvergara.homestead.com/cuentoschilenos.html.
