A GERMAN ART BLITZ HITS LONDON

The city is like an immense mastodon flywheel dressed in a hairy woolen sweater. Set in motion when the sun never set here, it turns on inertia in a gray twilight, imperceptibly slowing over the years. Now the average Englishman is poorer than the average Italian--and it shows. It shows in the jaunty way the Englishman can still wear a shabby mantle of eccentricity as if it were cloth of pure gold. It shows at the National Gallery when they remove a painting from the wall and there is suddenly a clean rectangle on the damask.

It shows in the fact that the big-bugle fall exhibition here has to exercise its fascination through the grime of the Royal Academy’s poignantly dignified and threadbare galleries, where art is made to stand in tedious queues like Londoners waiting for a bus in a drizzle.

The subject of that exhibition--on view to Dec. 22--is “German Art in the 20th Century.” If there is any resentment of the fact that the guys who lost World War II now appear dramatically better off than the chaps who won, no Briton is seen to complain. Bygones are bygones, and besides, the artists here represented were themselves severely victimized by the Nazis or traumatized by the war’s aftermath.

What does emerge from this landmark exhibition of 300 works by 50 artists are a number of nice, large cultural insights, some of which are hitched to fairly subtle organizational moves.

The most resonant note sounded probably emerges from the cultural tension created by focusing on German art in England. The circumstance reminds us that the national artistic traditions of both countries are frequently seen as standing apart from the rest of European aesthetics. They are united by a tendency to approach art as a representational vehicle for storytelling and the probing of philosophical and psychological themes.

They part company, however, on the issue of toughness. No one, of course, can accuse a Francis Bacon or Henry Moore of a namby-pamby approach to art, but a Howard Hodgkin or David Hockney reminds us that the British also have a long history of concern with an art infused with large dollops of beauty and charm. By contrast, it is downright amazing how hard one has to think to come up with comparable German examples. Lucas Cranach was surely not the last really seductive German artist, but the difficulty of calling others to mind suggests that they have another set of priorities representing a great alternate tradition.

This exhibition makes it clear that serious German art is virtually never satisfied to record visual surface. It is out to strip bare the human soul, and does so with such unflinching intensity that we are alternately riveted by its fervid revelation, exhausted by its doggedness and annoyed by its lapses into schlock or self-pity. Never, however, do we finally reject its moral courage in sacrificing nice taste to jolting insight.

Germans have such an entrenched reputation as anxious Expressionists that one might imagine they’d grow tired of it and play curatorial tricks to tip the balance another way. Here, on the contrary, they seem to go out of their way to dramatize trauma. No clean line of Bauhaus purism is included. Paul Klee is shown at his least playful and Max Ernst is cast as a German Medieval fantasist rather than an international Surrealist.

The opening salvo of this exhibition leaves no doubt that Germany produced an indispensable body of modernist art, erupting with wracked energy at the beginning of the century, then slowly fizzling into confused giantism in a fashion surprisingly similar to the rest of Euro-American modern art. Same scenario, different order of events.

The now-familiar main outlines of the German avant-garde remain unchanged here. Passion still bursts from Nietzschean romanticism and ignites the young artists of Die Brucke (The Bridge) to a passionate longing for woodland innocence and a fatal attraction to the nighttime city. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is still their best artist. Once regarded mainly as a painter, he is now proven a powerful sculptor in curious works like “Two Friends.”

Russian mysticism is still at the bottom of the art of Der Blaue Reiter. Wassily Kandinsky remains the great Thor of non-objective art and Franz Marc is still the tragic naif of transcendence. George Grosz’s visual vituperation leaves him the master Dadaist of the Weimar Republic. A German leaning to concoct schools and movements from Worpswede to Dessau is still leavened by unclassifiable strongmen like Emil Nolde and a necessarily rare giant like Max Beckmann.

What is oddly striking in this crowded convention is the size and general demeanor of the paintings. Time and again we are faced with fabled icons like Nolde’s “Candle Dancers,” Grosz’s “Homage to Oscar Panizza” or Lovis Corinth’s “Ecce homo” and their most striking quality is something other than the Expressionist wildness for which they are famous. Most are cabinet-size pictures suitable for living rooms and many are framed in traditional or ornate styles. Five seconds of inspection reveals that these are very solidly structured works indeed. Of course their expressive effect is a revelatory cry of anguish, but it is not a flatulent abandonment of technical control.

German modernist art more than any other is linked to its own past. Its purpose was to bring Grunewald’s bleeding passion and Duerer’s philosophical intensity into the present. They had to paint in a way that was clearly modern while proving they were in command of their means. This contradictory need to demolish and distill tradition while demonstrating that they were still “real artists” created the tension that makes “classic” German modern art just that.

The circumstance probably goes some way in explaining the almost shocking difference between German Expressionist art before and after World War II. The various Abstract Expressionist and realist movements of the period vacillate between impotence and bombast. The current and widely publicized gang of German Neo-Expressionists looks overblown and silly next to its predecessors. People like George Baselitz and A. R. Penck need a canvas the size of a barn to make the impression that their forebears could compress onto a cigar-box lid.

The work of the Neo-Ex crowd seems not only poor but redundant. Most everything it sets out to do was accomplished with considerably less fuss by such relatively minor early figures as Christian Rohlfs. The amazingly underrated Ludwig Meidner is seen in a 1912 “Apocalyptic Vision” that predicts Jackson Pollock and caps Neo-Ex.

If this exhibition is as definitive as it pretends to be, it clarifies both what is wrong with Neo-Ex and its significant saving graces. The problem is these guys can’t paint. The work lacks density and a sense of healthy competition with an antagonistic set of conventions. The exceptions to this disappointing state of affairs are Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. Beuys is heavily conceptual and political in his aesthetic; Kiefer is known mainly as a painter and is poorly represented here. Nonetheless the artists share the pursuit of a theme of monumental and elemental tragedy.

Both are involved with earth as a symbol of organic profundity. In the near term Kiefer’s straw-imbedded landscapes and Beuys’ huge bronze “Lightning” can be seen as grieving ruminations on the blasted earth of war-torn Germany and the insane circumstances that brought the devastation. The work is like the awesome contemplation of a man who once ran amok slaughtering his neighbors and then came to his senses. Forever after, guilt and the longing for redemption will live in his mind, like the weight of a palace that turned to mud in a mighty storm.

The clarity with which Kiefer’s and Beuys’ works express all that is moving, partly because the means are mute and thus more eloquent than words.

But the German art that seems to speak to the British audience in crisp and timely accents is that of the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s. Still only fractionally as well known as other German modernist styles, this “New Objectivity” was associated with Weimar-period Berlin between the wars in the decadent ambiance that produced Christopher Isherwood’s famous short stories, as well as a ripe burst of creativity that spawned a generation that included everybody from Marlene Dietrich to Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. (There is an excellent portrait of Brecht by Rudolph Schlichter, who observes him with sympathetic wryness.)

The artists of jazz-age Berlin saw life with reptilian coldness alight with a white flame of anger and obsession. Otto Dix was the movement’s laconic surgeon and his “Homage to Beauty” gives us “Cabaret” unvarnished. Christian Schad is like an updated Bronzino painting portraits of elegant alienation. His people dress in tuxedos, inhale champagne and consort with characters of the demimonde without finding them odd. Their narcissistic isolation speaks from West Berlin via London to Los Angeles, losing nothing in translation.