Julius Meier-Graefe - Biography

Biography

Meier-Graefe was born in Pesitza, Banat, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now located in modern Romania. He was the son of Eduard Meier, a government civil engineer, and Marie Graefe, (d. 1867) who died giving birth to him. The family, including his brother Max Meier, moved to a small town near Düsseldorf, Germany. He chose the hyphenated surname Meier-Graefe to honour the mother he never knew.

After studying engineering in Munich in 1888 and marrying Clotilde Vitzthum von Eckstädt (who was related to the art historian Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt), he moved to Berlin, where, in 1890, he took up the study of history in general and art history in particular. He began his literary career as a fiction writer with two novellas, "Ein Abend bei Laura" (1890) and "Nach Norden" (1893), His first work of art criticism was published in 1894; the topic was Edvard Munch. In 1895 he was among the founders of the arts and literary periodical Pan, but he left the magazine after a year and founded the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) magazine Dekorative Kunst in 1897 and soon thereafter opened La Maison Moderne, a gallery that showcased Art Nouveau works. The gallery closed in 1903.

The centennial exhibition of German art in the National Gallery in Berlin in 1906 featured Meier-Graefe's presentation of previously little-known works, and through his efforts, the art of Caspar David Friedrich was first introduced to a wider audience. Similarly, his 1910 book "Spanische Reise" ("Spanish Journey") led to the "rediscovery" of El Greco and the positioning of the artist as a forerunner to the Expressionists.

Relocating to Paris, Meier-Graefe turned his attention on 19th century French painting; his 3-volume history of modern art (1904 and 1914-24) canonized the importance of French Impressionism. He wrote important biographies of many artists, including Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.

Like many assimilated Jews of his era, Meier-Graefe was a loyal German, and when World War One broke out, he volunteered in the German army. He was sent to the Eastern front in 1915 and was captured and interned in a Russian POW camp in 1916. Upon his return to Germany in 1917, he divorced his first wife and married his second wife, Helene Lienhardt. The couple lived in Dresden, but travelled often, and considered France, especially Paris, a second home.

Meier-Graefe's third marriage was to Anna Marie Epstein (October 14, 1905 - ), who was about 38 years his junior, and a wealthy heiress. She was the only child of Else Kohn (March 22, 1880 - ) and Walter Epstein (May 11, 1874 - February 3, 1918); her grandparents were Adolf Kohn, a prominent German-Jewish banker, and Anna Michaelis.

In 1930, Meier-Graefe and Epstein rented an estate called La Banette in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer and they stayed there to escape the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany, where he was under sttack for his promotion of what the National Socialists called "Degenerate Art." Meier-Graefe and Epstein encouraged and helped the landscape painter Walter Bondy and the writer René Schickele to relocate to the area as well, and they were a decisive impetus in the formation of a large German-Jewish refugee arts-colony in neighboring Sanary-sur-Mer, whose members included Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Ludwig Marcuse.

He died in Vevey, Switzerland at the age of 67.