MUNICH, GERMANY.- Haus der Kunst – Muenchen, presents A View for the People - Art for All, on view through September 3, 2006. In October 1885 the Munich publishing house Bruckmann printed the first edition of "Die Kunst für Alle" (Art for All). The magazine was characterized by its use of progressive photographic reproduction techniques and for nearly six decades it represented the attempt to bring artistic understanding to a wider public. Its circulation of 18,000 was high and the price of at the utmost one mark equaled the cost of a museum admission. In the beginning the magazine was published bi-weekly, but after the middle of 1943 only every two or three months. It was on the market for an unusually long time, nearly unrivalled. In 1944 "Die Kunst für Alle" was forced to suspend its production because of "war-related circumstances that led to absolute concentration measures in the press."

Friedrich Pecht (1885–1903), Friedrich Schwartz (1903–1914) and Paul Kirchgraber (1914–1944) were the magazine's publishers and editors. Friedrich Pecht was both a renowned and feared art critic and already 71 years old when "Die Kunst für Alle" was launched. He was a nationalist, promoting Germany as a nation state, and it was he who determined the magazine's early literary character, writing over 30 articles in the first year alone.

After Pecht's departure in 1903, the magazine's tone changed. Personalities with more modern views, such as Alfred Lichtwark, Julius Meier-Graefe and Hugo von Tschudi, became regular contributors. They championed artists of the Secession – Franz von Stuck, Lovis Corinth, Hans Thoma and Raffael Schuster-Woldan – and Impressionists. Avant-garde art, however, was ignored. The Brücke movement was paid no heed; detailed articles on Der Blaue Reiter were published without illustrations.

From 1918 to 1933, during the Weimar Republic, the magazine represented a moderate pluralism, which, as in the past, was limited to representational art. In the 1930s it promoted the art of German painters, but refrained from using the agitating methods typical of the press tinged by National Socialism. In so doing, they created a kind of counterweight to publications such as "Die Kunst im Dritten Reich." The notorious exhibition "Entartete Kunst," housed in Munich's Hofgarten in 1937 and serving as a testament to Hitler's denigration and rejection of modernism and abstraction, was not referred to in the magazine at all. "Die Kunst für Alle" was a moderate voice of the middle class and, as such, was neither reactionary nor did it actively oppose the art promoted by the party.

At the same time, "Die Kunst für Alle" employed slogans and catchwords such as nation, health and race with an educational intent. These were an integral part of many essays in both early and later volumes, eventually becoming the slogans used by the National Socialists and the catchwords in Hitler's speeches on art and political culture.

Photographic Reproduction
When "Die Kunst für Alle" appeared on the market in 1885 photographic reproductions had only been technologically possible for a short time. Such photographs and reproductions enabled readers to view works of non-local galleries and museums for the first time. Art reproduction had developed into a new industrial branch and Munich, home to two international publishing houses, Bruckmann and Hanfstaengl, became its center.

The Exhibition
In this exhibition original editions of the magazine are juxtaposed with paintings by Lovis Corinth, Franz von Defregger, Franz von Stuck, Hans Thoma and other works by artists included in the Major German Art Exhibitions as well as with postcards and other reproductions. The chronological line spans from Gabriel Max's painting "Kränzchen," executed in 1889, to Udo Wendel's "Die Kunstzeitschrift," included in the 1940 Major German Art Exhibition and purchased by Hitler. "Kränzchen" depicts a group of apes regarding a valuable oil painting – an ironical play on art critics and the public in front of an original work. Udo Wendel's "Die Kunstzeitschrift" shows the artist with his parents contemplating a reproduction in the magazine "Die Kunst im Dritten Reich" – serious, decent and assiduously striving cultivation; sixty years later the reproduction draws just as much attention as the original did. The majority of the exhibited works' themes center around the act of viewing: the subjects gaze at objects of interest, one another or the public itself.

An advertising column stands at the entrance of the exhibition and is covered with excerpts from "Die Kunst für Alle." The presentation is a kind of reference to the readers' middle-class urban setting. In the first room all essays and tables of contents are available digitally.

A large number of the exhibited oil paintings are normally kept in storage facilities: works that were familiar to the general public in the late 19th century but are now no longer shown publicly and have all but disappeared from our image memory. Deeply rooted in a historic context, these works continue to testify to the original viewers' tastes and mental horizonts at the time: the image of woman had been characterized by her function as a mother or a nude figure for decades; men are presented as simple soldiers, leading military figures, farmers or political citizens. Other favorite themes include religion and mythology. Artists who were promoted by "Die Kunst für Alle" were hardly interested in interacting with the then Avant-garde, today's classical modern. Their works, however, served as an identification source for a large majority, while the Avant-garde appealed to the taste of a minority.