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Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum

Old Masters - Thomas Bernhard's 1985 novel written in the form of one unending paragraph spanning 156 pages is a torrent of passion and ideas that will captivate and fascinate readers who enjoy reflections on art and aesthetic experience, on literature, music and the interplay of culture and society.

The opening sentence sets the scene: "Although I had arranged to meet Reger at the Kunsthistorisches Museum at half-past eleven, I arrived at the agreed spot at half-past ten in order, as I had for some time decided to do, to observe him, for once, from the most ideal angle possible and undisturbed, Atzbacher writes." Indeed, the tale revolves around the museum's Bordone Room where Atzbacher, the novel's first-person narrator, reports how his friend Reger, a man in his eighties, has been sitting on a velvet-covered settee in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man every other day except Monday for well over thirty years.

Longtime widower Herr Reger studied music in Leipzig and Vienna and continues to write music reviews for The Times even in his advanced age. Young Atzbacher, in turn, has made a career of art appreciation as well as writing unpublished philosophy essays. Alzbacher slides back and forth in his telling between Reger's obsessive thinking and his own. The more pages I turned, the more Reger reminded me alternately of Hermann Hesse's Harry Haller the Steppenwolf and Alceste the Misanthrope from Molière's famous play. There's good reason why Thomas Bernhard labeled Old Masters a comedy.

Since we are at the magnificent Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of Austria's grand jewels, let's begin with a quote from nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.� Well, just so happens Schopenhauer is among Reger's favorite thinkers and Reger let many exquisite paintings from the golden age of the old masters speak to him. And what did these revered masterpieces have to say to Reger? As we come to learn, Herr Reger judges these so-called masterpieces as nothing more than a third-rate batch of kitsch created by grossly overvalued bunglers more interested in amassing wealth than anything resembling true art. What!?? Why such an outrageous, harsh pronouncement?

Here's a snippet from Reger's rant that goes on for pages: "The old masters, as they have now been called for centuries, only stand up to superficial viewing; if we view them thoroughly they gradually become diminished, and when we have studied them really and truly, and that means as thoroughly as possible for as long as possible, they dissolve, they crumble for us, leaving a flat taste, in fact most of the time, a very bad taste in our mouths."

And the main culprit responsible for producing such bad art? According to Reger, without question the diabolical prime cause is the state, particularly the Catholic state. In support of his position, Reger says, "Just look at Velazquez, nothing but state art, or Lotto, or Giotto, always only state art, just as that dreadful proto-Nazi and pre-Nazi Dürer, who put nature on his canvas and killed it . . . The so-called old masters only ever served the state or the Church, which comes to the same thing."

And the main tool for making sure the Catholic state snuffs out opposition and gets exactly what it wants? Both Reger and Atzbacher sharpen their critical swords and go on the attack when speaking of schools, art education and teachers. "These teachers teach what this Catholic state is and instructs them to teach: narrow-mindedness and brutality, vileness and meanness, depravity and chaos." Atzbacher draws on his own schoolboy days to recall how he received nothing from these feeble-minded, perverted mediators of the state but their incompetence, dull-wittedness and brainlessness. One of his abiding memories is his fingers swollen from repeated canings administered by a hazel switch. Beginning at an early age, these dullards ruin a youngster's artistic taste and drive out any spark for art.



In the spirit of the novel, I can imagine Reger and Atzbacher requiring all schoolteachers and museum guides wear a large placard around their necks to serve as warning: I'M A DULL, VICIOUS MOUTHPIECE OF THE SOUL-DESTROYING STATE

Reger's slam continues well beyond the visual arts. He is relentless in his attack on literature and one of his fellow countrymen comes in for a particular scalding: Adalbert Stifter - a writer Reger recognizes as nothing more than a philistine blockhead. And the fact Stifler committed suicide alters not one iota his mediocrity and the undeniable fact he was a muddled poopstick capable only of the most cramped verse and constipated prose.

And German-Austrian philosophy. Ha! For Reger, Martin Heidegger expresses a kind of German sausage feeble-mindedness, "the women's philosopher, straight from the scholars' frying pan." This is only the warm up. Reger's Heidegger rant goes on for several pages.

Lets pause and step back. Why all the ranting and raging? As we discover in the second half of the novel, Reger is a broken man, a man racked with intense unending pain since the death of his beloved wife ten years prior. The undeniable, ever-present reality of death is the lens through which Reger has come to view all life and art.

Art has let him down, big time. On two counts. First, he can see painters, art historians, museum-goers, the general public use art as a shield to seal off the reality of death - art as a colossal distraction; art as sublimation and illusion. In Reger's words: “Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt - an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect - to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception."

Secondly, on a profoundly more personal level, Reger himself has attempted to assuage his suffering over the death of his dear wife by immersing himself even more in music, literature and the arts. Try as he might, the arts have failed him. The reality of death, the suffering and psychic agony he has had to endure for the last ten years have triumphed.

Old Masters was my second Thomas Bernhard; Gargoyles was my first. I can see why the author is considered one of the major voices of postwar Europe. Since I'm especially drawn to novels of the existential variety, I plan to read more Thomas Bernhard.


Austrian author Thomas Bernhard, 1931-1989