The Inspirational Genius of Germany

Matthew Potter uses images, art criticism, and the public writings and private notes of artists to reconstruct the intellectual history of Germanism during a period of heightened nationalism and political competition. Key case studies explore the changing shape of intellectual engagements with Germany. It examines the German experts who worked on the margins of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, the engagements of Victorian 'academics' including Frederic Leighton, G.F. Watts, Walter Crane and Hubert Herkomer as well as avant-gardists like the Vorticists, the reception of Arnold B cklin and Wassily Kandinsky by the Britons during the dawn of modern art, and the last gasp of enthusiasm for German art that took place in defiance of the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.