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Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Trial of Gustav Graef: Art, Sex, and Scandal in Late Nineteenth Century Germany, German History, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2018, Pages 460–461, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghy055
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When can a legal case be made to stand in for a major shift in cultural or political sensibilities? How do trials like Dreyfus, Beilis or London’s Maiden Tribute come to signify something deeper and more generalizable than a mere clash of judicial interpretations? Barnet Hartston poses such questions in The Trial of Gustav Graef: Art, Sex, and Scandal in Late Nineteenth Century Germany, leveraging the drama surrounding the 1885 prosecution of Gustav Graef, a respected sixty-year-old Berlin professor, painter and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, to comment on important transitions within Germany’s liberal political culture. The case itself was part of a series of sensational affairs in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that focused European attention on questions of public obscenity, the power of the press, the influence of Jews in public life and state efforts to subvert an increasingly restless working class. Hartston unpacks the various social tensions surrounding the Graef trial, using it to project what he sees as the German Empire’s ‘twisted road toward modernity’ rather than its inexorable decline into authoritarianism and eventual Fascism (p. 12). At the heart of the trial was the accusation that Graef had previously perjured himself in denying a sexual relationship with the then fourteen-year old Bertha Rother, an occasional prostitute of Jewish background who had served as the nude model for some of his most famous works of art. The case revolved around a challenge to Graef’s honour as a bourgeois gentleman for having allegedly lied in his original testimony rather than questions about his possible sexual liaison with an under-age girl. The Berlin public was nonetheless captivated by the beautiful and sensual figure of Bertha, whose image was replicated in endless sketches, photos and newspaper accounts long after the case was concluded, raising questions about the connections between social class, definitions of pornography and high art. Should mass-produced nudity posted on shop windows be merited the same artistic value as naked images in paintings full of symbolic gestures? As the debate raged, Graef became an unwitting symbol of all that was wrong with modern art in Germany, the unwelcome influence of French naturalism and a newly debased German culture that had become shallow and immoral. Regardless of how one viewed Graef’s paintings, the trial itself showed that the art world was already in turmoil well before the rise of the secessionists at the end of the century.
