UP-TO-DATE BERLIN ART: LINK TO L.A.

The clown-white face of Joel Grey appears on the screen singing, “Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome.” Words emerge from a smirking black lipsticked mouth and every adult American knows he is in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin of the ‘20s: international, decadent and newly emerged as a creative force in every field from film to cabaret ditties and art.

A significant triangulation exists among Berlin, New York and Los Angeles. Thanks to Bob Fosse’s Broadway version of “Cabaret” and his Hollywood movie adaptation, the Berlin mystique came alive for a general American audience and, at least by implication, so did its art, for surely Fosse’s choreographic imagery was inspired by the drawings of George Grosz and the scalpel-sharp paintings of the German New Realists.

The L.A. connection: The story of German artists who fled the Nazis to settle in L.A. has yet to be properly told. The average Angel City native is barely aware that Bertolt Brecht lived in his town, as did Thomas Mann and Wilhelm Furtwaengler, not to mention some of the most gifted movie people of their generation. (Lubitsch, where are you when we need you?)

Isherwood lived in Los Angeles for decades, and thanks to the breadth of his culture and his companion, artist Don Bachardy, a link was formed between advanced L.A. art, modern literature and mythic Berlin that gave our art a patina of cultural density it has not always deserved. Imagine going to Bob Graham’s Mexican-theme birthday party for Billy Al Bengston and finding a frail Isherwood clinging to the arm of Stephen Spender.

And that is just the arty esoteric stuff. Everyone who remembers the Berlin airlift and Kennedy at the Wall is tickled that Berlin is an L.A. sister city and burns a candle for the big birthday she celebrates this year. They say it is the 750th, but, as with a Berlin courtesan caked in cosmetics, the age of the lady is somewhat in question.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art planned to celebrate with a Berlin show, but it fizzled out. The city’s cultural affairs department is doing a couple of exchanges, but the big American Berlin whoopee at the moment is “BERLINART, 1961-1987,” at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art to Sept. 8.

Organized by MOMA’s contemporary art curator, Kynaston McShine, it includes 150 works by 50 Berliners and foreign artists associated with the city.

Given the mental baggage we all bring to our image of prewar Berlin, doing a show about its art since its division and isolation from the West virtually guarantees disappointment. What is supposed to compete with a mystique that takes in Marlene Dietrich singing in the cabarets, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting the stylish hookers of the Kurfuerstendamm or Max Beckmann looking beefy and sophisticated in his smoking jacket?

Not this, for sure.

MOMA’s special exhibitions galleries in the basement seem more drab and tight-fisted with every show since the museum’s renovation. The effect of low ceilings and make-do space is heightened when the quality of the offering does not distract, and this one does not.

What went wrong? Berlin has a reputation as the seed-bed of German Neo-Expressionism that put Europe back on the map after nearly two decades of American artistic hegemony.

Maybe it’s all them furiners. Who needs a coterie of auslandisch talent when Berlin has so much of its own?

Truth to tell, it is the foreign artists who lend the exhibition most of its interest. With the best will in the world, one cannot find quality German art that justifies this as a revival even though it would satisfy so many good wishes.

“Ha! Take that, you rotten Commies, great art from free people made right under your noses. Ha! Take that, oh shameful shade of Schickelgruber, the art you tried to destroy is back stronger than ever.”

It is as if the Berlin artists are living out a metaphor of the town’s present ambiance. Life is hectic and gay as ever but with the added weirdness of being acted out in a bubble of democracy that could, in principle, burst at any second. Painting is all done in one layer, as if it had to be finished in a hurry.

The painter called Salome evokes Berlin’s past as a haven for kink, but his images of wraith-like skin-heads in leather has only the physical substance of a poster and no social context. It’s just a narcissistic fantasy.

Helmut Middendorf’s nightmare image of a bomber over a flaming city is striking, but it scans and digests so fast it has no staying power.

The art cannot make up its mind whether it is abstract or realistic, as if stuck between Berlin’s ever-present ambiance of political ideology and the artists’ need to respond to life. It’s a paralyzing dilemma. K.P. Brehmer is trenchant in openly political works, such as his “Correction of the National Colors According to the Distribution of Wealth,” but such topical work risks aging badly.

Olaf Metzel is driven into one of those nostalgic plaster-cast ruminations on German history, K.H. Hoedicke makes platitudes about a haunted city and Eugene Schonebeck revives an image of Germany as an innocent monster struggling for redemption that was more successful as the theme of “Berlin Alexanderplatz.”

Not to say that the German renaissance is a hoax, just that it seems to need to produce wheat-and-chaff proportions of art to come up with first-rate works.

The late Joseph Beuys can usually be counted on to save the day and he does here with a surprisingly moving case full of street sweepings and a broom. Georg Baselitz spends entirely too much time painting portentous allegorical figures seeking friendship in incinerated landscapes, but when he gets off it, he can be good. A series of paintings of grubby old human feet tells us more about violence, humanity and redemption than all the trumped up symbolism on the walls. Martin Kippenberger lightens the air with graphic humor and earthiness that labels a painting of a refrigerator “My Love.”

Berlin’s reality may dictate the skewed subjectivity of some of this art and the need to catch up with lost history in much of the rest. Fred Thieler is a pretty good Abstract Expressionist of the Pollock persuasion, but his place in the development of modernism has certainly been swamped by larger history.

Berlin, in short, seems to welcome art and artists while being a tough place to make art. Artists who come and go seem to do better.

That impression could reflect the prejudices of another foreigner or reflect those flashes of perception that sometimes give strangers better insight into a place than the locals.

William Eggleston’s photographs of a radiator or a neo-classical nude give more detached understanding of German preoccupations than half the art in the show. It takes a Beuys to beat Christo’s spooky drawing of the Reichstag draped in tragic cloth. Malcolm Morley capitalizes on Berlin’s lurking sense of chaos by extending the metaphor. He paints his landscapes on the format of a Los Angeles Yellow Pages directory.

As if to complete the L.A.-Berlin link, a noticeable group of artists who have lived and worked in both places is on view. Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz are best-known. They are very tough and funny in “The Kitchen Table,” a cast bronze satire on Teutonic heroism and heimlichkeit. They are downright flinty in “Mother With Child With Child” and its neo-Nazi theme.

David Hockney brings Anglo-American romance to “Berlin: A Souvenir,” Jonathan Borofsky shows them what paranoia really is and Leland Rice found the graffiti on the Berlin wall a subject that beefed up his formal excellence.

The two cities should use each other as therapeutic spas. L.A. artists who get too laid back should spend a season in Berlin and the Berliners ought to come out our way to unwind just a little.