Talking with Paintings. Robert Walser about Albert Anker

In the mid 1920s, undoubtedly the time of his boldest creative work, Robert Walser vividly expresses his profound admiration for the popular Bernese painter Albert Anker (1831-1910), whose creations are regarded as being refined but rather conservative. The prose text Das Ankeralbum (1926) and the poem Der Berner Maler Albert Anker (1931) however reveal a more ambivalent relationship to Anker than perceived at first glance. By staging either a highly unreliable first person narrator a narrator who, instead of working with the originals of the maitre, refers to black and white reproductions or by showing a highly ironic style, both texts call into question Walser's unbiased praise of the painter. Yet, one of the paintings referred to in the prose text, a children's wake for a passed girl (also mentioned in the poem), prompts a more serious attitude in the narrator and inspires his deep felt sympathy. The result is his very own literary way of describing the scene, which in turn creates a paragone-like competition with the painting's way of depicting it. This exchange shows the respect Walser has for Anker's work after all : for him Anker represents the artist that refuses like himself but unlike his brother, the painter Karl Walser to follow artistic styles dictated by the latest fashions.