The German Expressionism show at the Neue Galerie is small but beautifully mounted, and it carries a big punch. Walking into the first room, where the midnight blue walls are covered with spotlighted, brilliantly colored paintings, is like walking into a box of jewels.
Ernst Kirchner's hot pink, yellow and black "Tightrope Walk" hangs alongside Erich Heckel's rainbow-hued "Bathers in a Pond." Cobalt blues jostle moss greens and alizarin crimsons. It's enough to take your breath away. And that's before you stop to study the individual works. When you do, the experimental fervor of these mostly pre-World War I paintings is more thrilling yet.
Although they didn't know it, the bohemian artists who came together in Dresden, Munich and Berlin during the early years of the 20th century were dancing on a precipice. With their communal living, sexual experimentation and fascination with the "primitive" and-in the case of the Blue Rider artists-with the mystical theories of the influential Madam Blavatsky, they were wildly improvising in both their art and their lives. These Expressionists, as they came to be called, were probably as close to our own American '60s generation as anyone in Europe will ever get.
The psychedelic jangle of those times is perfectly expressed in Vasily Kandinsky's "Murnau: Street with Women," where storybook houses in day-glow reds, blues, yellows and greens seem to sprout out of a flowing, golden street. In the foreground, three stylized figures stare at the viewer with ghostly gazes.
Kandinsky, the most famous of the Blue Rider group, hangs near the lesser-known but equally impressive Gabriele Münter, the only woman in the room. Münter, who was for a time Kandinsky's student and lover, is represented by just three canvases. I wanted to see more.
Her "Woman in a Garden," a joyful piece painted in 1912, places a honey-hued riot of flowers in the foreground, while a small female hovers behind them. Take that as a metaphor for women in the art world of her day, perhaps. Or maybe as a statement suggesting that all artists, like gardeners, are dwarfed by their creations. Any way you see it, the painting combines the pleasures of Post-Impressionism with an Expressionist sensibility and a touch of modern humor.
Disasters of the warIn August 1914, two years after Münter painted "Woman in a Garden," World War I broke out in Europe. In little more than a moment, the whole world had changed irrevocably.
Of the Blue Rider group, which was based in Munich, Kandinsky quickly returned to his native Russia, now Germany's enemy, leaving Münter behind. Franz Marc enlisted as a cavalryman and died in the Battle of Verdun at age 36. August Macke died at the front during the second month of the war. He was just 27.
The Dresden-based Bridge group fared slightly better. Erich Heckel did time in Belgium as a medical orderly. Kirchner enlisted in the cavalry, where he suffered a mental breakdown. Hermann Pechstein was sent to the Western Front where he fought, in the Battle of the Somme. After the war, all three miraculously managed to pull themselves together enough to keep on painting-at least for a while.
Other Expressionists, including Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckman, Otto Dix and George Grosz, also served military time and were forever scarred by the brutalities of the Great War and its devastating aftermath. One can't help but wonder how these intensely creative personalities would have developed if diplomacy had defused the crisis of 1914 and trench warfare had never happened.
Needless to say, Dix never would have, never could have conceived his gut-gripping "Der Krieg" war etchings, and Kirchner wouldn't have painted his 1915 "Self-Portrait as a Soldier," with a yellow-faced man displaying the symbolic stump of an arm. Probably there would have been far fewer postwar paintings of flabby whores, fat-cat johns, amputee beggars and flame-red street scenes. But the real question is how the voices and visions of these Central European artists might have developed otherwise. That, of course, is a question that can never be answered.
The uneasy art of the Weimar RepublicBut this show makes it all too clear what did happen next. After the intense sensuality of the blue room, the Neue exhibit leads you into the ash-grays, browns and beiges of the next gallery. Here the work is mostly postwar; Neue director Renée Price and associate curator Janis Staggs focus on portraits and cityscapes by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad and other artists of the defeated Germany, known as the Weimar Republic.
"Panorama," a wonderful 1919 ink and watercolor by Grosz, is an urban chaos of buildings, street corners, naked women and angry men, sliced up and refracted as if through slivers of broken glass. Grosz was one of the few artists to wrangle Cubism to an emotional purpose. When you see this piece, you know how the Berlin of that day felt to him.
But the works that really your grab attention are two large canvases by Otto Dix and one by Christian Schad. Painted in styles much closer to traditional realism and using subdued palettes that reflect the deprivation of the postwar years, these works-and many of the others in this room-were dubbed part of a Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement by art historian Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, who organized an exhibit in Mannheim in 1925.
Neue Sachlichkeit: no nonsense artThe artists deemed part of Neue Sachlichkeit, which might better be called the No Nonsense movement, were partly reacting to the intense subjectivity of the early Expressionists. But some, like Dix and Grosz, had fought in the trenches, only to come home to empty pieties. More than anything, they were raging against the lies.
"Seated Female Nude," painted by Dix in 1930, shows a ghastly redhead, wearing nothing but stockings and white face powder. She's clearly a prostitute whose better days are past. Her skinny, wrinkled body makes a mockery of Eros, and she stares straight ahead, as if counting the minutes. Just another dollar for another job.
"Halbakt," done by Dix six years earlier, is more sympathetic. Here, the aging prostitute half-covers her sagging breasts in a self-protective gesture. Her brow is furrowed. Her kohl-smeared eyes meet ours, and it seems she's about to cry. This is a painting it's hard to walk away from. Don't leave me! the woman seems to call. Dix has grabbed you by the collar, and he's hissing in your ear: you, my fine friend, are a first-rate scoundrel!
Close by hangs "Two Girls" (1928) by Christian Schad. Painted in a stiffly realistic mode, it depicts a couple of blank-eyed brunettes on a bed, masturbating for an unseen voyeur. That would be the painter, of course. But why did he paint it? Who was the market? And where was it first hung-over an aristocrat's imposing mantelpiece or tucked away in somebody's boudoir? The Neue exhibit doesn't offer anything in the way of context to help answer those questions. But it's difficult to look at these idealized, bloodless bodies, painted in a palette of blacks and beiges, without thinking of Nazi poster art.
There is a fine line between eroticism and pornography and between pornography and Fascism. In many ways, the idealization of a body in art and the idealizing of the Aryan race are connected. The difference between the perfect thigh or breast and the perfect Aryan nose is not so great.
The rise of NazismIt should come as no surprise that in 1937, when the Nazis organized the notorious Degenerate Art show that derided over 650 works of modern art-including those by Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse and almost all of the Expressionists and New Objectivists-the paintings of Christian Schad were exempted. Some of his less racy pieces were actually offered up as ideals in the Nazi's counter-show, "Great German Art." None of this history is discussed in the Neue exhibit, which contains no work completed after 1930. But anyone who believes they can truly make sense of Schad's work, without considering what followed, is mistaken.
Although the first two rooms of the Neue's "German Expressionism" show are the most spectacular, there is more that's well worth seeing. A hallway is lined with drawings, including some superb work by Lovis Corinth, somewhat older than the Expressionists and closer to Impressionism. There's a large gallery devoted to the decorative arts and a room that contains nothing but works on paper. Wonderful woodcuts by Heckel jostle those by Ernst Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Franz Marc. Here, we are mostly back in the innocence of pre-war Europe. Yet, for all the experiments with texture, many of these works, with their heavy black shapes and lines, seem to suggest the darkening times.
Of course, the Nazis did more than deride these artists. They confiscated their work, destroyed much of it, and drove many of the artists into exile. Some, like Kirchner, committed suicide. Dix moved to a town near the Swiss border, where he turned out nondescript landscapes in the style of the Old Masters. Grosz, who'd left for America in 1933, continued painting, but the quality of his work dropped precipitously. No doubt he was suffering post-traumatic cultural shock disorder. Other artists worked in other parts of Europe, in reduced circumstance. For all practical purposes, the New Objectivity and the Expressionist art movements died in 1937.
Surveying the Neue Galerie's small but potent show, you can't help but feel it's a miracle that we have as much of the period's fine work as we do. Yet the complex ways these pieces and their creators fit together, and the full story of their roles in German culture and history remains a puzzle. One can't help but feel it will be many years before we entirely understand.
"German Expressionism 1900-1930." February 7-April 22, 2013 Neue Galerie - 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street - New York City 212-628-6200