Expressionism Revisited at LACMA : Exhibition Dramatizes the Confusion and Anguish That Haunted the Reality of Interwar Germany

Curious how the Western world can’t seem to get Germany off its mind. Somehow you keep thinking that nation that was the horrible Hun in two world wars will finally settle down to being just another European country. After all, that bad stuff was a very long time ago. Have a bier . Forget it. Prost .

Just when you think the matter is cooled the Easterners make a great score in the Olympics or PBS takes a notion to rebroadcast “Shoah!”, the classic French Existentialist documentary on the Holocaust or something.

It’s always something. Es gibt immer etwas.

Especially in art.

First West Germany has the greatest art museum boom on that side of the puddle, then produces a Neo-Expressionist art that ignites an international style plus bringing in two of the most notable artists of the past 20 years, Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer.

Fine, but Germany is a long way off. It’s cold and rainy. There is no particular reason for any of that to be an extra big deal here in the land of perpetual smoggy summer. No particular reason except that one is increasingly convinced that modern Kalifornia Kultur would not be what it is without infusions of Deutsche kunst along with surfers, hot rodders and rock ‘n’ roll. It must be significant that Germans do marvelous rock ‘n’ roll. They have a genius for percussion.

East German Loans

The latest manifestation of the L.A.-German axis is a landmark exhibition opening today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and continuing through Dec. 31. “German Expressionism 1915-1925: The Second Generation” is a notable event on any number of counts. Among more than 200 works on view some 50 are from East German museums, unprecedented loans of pictures rarely shown even in their home galleries.

The ensemble is a coup of organizational originality for Stephanie Barron LACMA’s curator of 20th-Century art. Added to her revelatory “German Expressionist Sculpture” and her work on “The Avant-Garde in Russia” this show confirms her as a ranking curatorial talent with a knack for unearthing forgotten art movements that combine aesthetic and social resonance.

According to received wisdom, German Expressionism fizzled out at the beginning of World War I after producing its defining movements, Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). It didn’t really get its act back together until the Neue Sachlichkeit, the cynical and chilly new objectity, the mannered hallmark of the decadent later 1920s. Barron’s show unearths virtually forgotten art of 1915-25 when troubled and idealistic young Germans responded to the disastrous outcome of the war and the social turmoil that erupted from the rubbled dismemberment of the country and the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

A Trifle Compulsive

Anybody who sallies forth to this epic exercise with expectations of experiencing the urbane wit of a David Hockney or the formal blandishment of abstraction had better just go out to brunch or better yet bone up on Barron’s exemplary catalogue. OK, it gets a trifle compulsive in its detail but so does the art and the payoff is worth it in both cases. This show is a real can of nudeln, layered with Teutonic complexity.

If its density is hard to chew, it is ultimately revelatory of more than art. Surely one central reason for civilization’s persistent fascination with modern Germany is the question of what went wrong. How did the land of Goethe and Beethoven, Durer and Mozart become the breeding ground of Hitler and the Holocaust? If a civilization this high could simply lose its collective mind could it not happen anywhere? The there-but-for-the-grace feeling never quite goes away.

The enigma will remain but this exhibition dramatizes the confusion and anguish that haunted the reality of interwar Germany with its political chaos, famine and an economy so inflated that by 1923 a dollar would buy you 4.2 trillion marks. Trillion.

Late in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland, an event followed by the so-called November Revolution in Berlin which installed a moderate interim government and uncorked a snake-bed of rival political factions spanning the spectrum from Social Democrats to anarchists. The indelible trauma of a period searching desperately for social justice was the murders of the leaders of the communist Spartacus revolution, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg.

Artistically the situation reflected in the advent of a large and complicated number of art groups in virtually every city and dorf in the land. Berlin spawned the Novembergruppe, Dusseldorf Das Junge Rhineland, and in Dresden the Dresdener Sezession Gruppe. They in turn spewed forth dozens of posters and artists’ periodicals on the model of the classic Expressionist’s publications Der Sturm and Die Aktion.

Characteristically the artists muddled radical artistic ideas with extreme political positions. Their hearts were in the right place. They believed in liberty and compassion for the poor worker. Never mind that the proletariat held the artists in contempt or that the artists couldn’t really tell the difference between the collective imperative of the communists and the individualism of the anarchists.

Politically the art that emerged was an ecstatic and angry testament that tends to back the claim that Germans of the period were a touchingly credulous lot, eager to follow anybody on a white horse who could spout inspiring slogans and put things in ordnung.

The Disillusionment

The final section of the presentation is devoted to religious subjects which some artists turned to in deepening disillusionment with the social agenda. The fervor of this art--especially Christoph Voll’s remarkable sculpture “Ecce Homo” and Karl Albiker’s “St. Sebastian” proves that what they were really looking for was something or someone to believe in.

Artistically and expressively the artists were on more certain ground. The exhibition aspires to show us a whole lost generation. What it does is to give us a peek at battalions of shadowy talents (about 70 artists are included) along with people as reknown as Kathe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann and George Grosz. Some unknowns such as Voll or Gert Wollheim look like the tips of icebergs of genius, others like Albert Birkle like gifted caricaturists and quite a few including Peter Auguste Bockstiegel half-formed talents with the mechanical and academic traits characteristic of second generation art.

None of which dilutes the fascination of the ensemble with its graphic excellence and updated medieval images of deaths-heads in Prussian helmets, masses shedding their chains, evil bureaucrats in swallowtail coats, piggy prostitutes and Christlike artists puffing pipes and wearing monocles. Excellent or ordinary, the art is bound by technical aptitude and emotional conviction that makes the current crop of Neo-Expressionists look like a pack of wimpy sophomores anguishing over broken fingernails. No question this is the real stuff. No question of its being taken in on a single visit.

The payoff that emerges from that, however, is considerable. The sections on war and revolution find no group of artists more adept at the distillation of extreme feeling. (Well, all right, sometimes their intensity creates a bit of unintented humor). Sections on the various cities find hints of collective sensibilities emerging despite the fact key artists moved from one place to another. Berlin seems urbane and propagandistic, Dresden wry and tough, Cologne and Dusseldorf given to an almost touchy refinement.

Passionate Cubism

Among individual artists the greatest revelations are not flat-out but rather fresh insights about established icons. Otto Dix has long been known for his furious war etchings and surgical Neue Sachlichkeit portraits and satires. Here he steps several paces further inside the circle of reknown with works from his ignored Expressionist period. In schematic terms he shows himself to have been an artist of greater range than suspected. He adapts Cubism to passionate ends. In “Die Skatspieler,” three horribly maimed card-players dress as dandies despite the absence of most of their key body parts. The work is not only a wonderful combination of ribald satire and virile compassion, it is a brilliant adaptation of French collage and mechanical Dada. There is a Mercedes-Benz engineer lurking in most German artists.

George Grosz’s barbed-wire drawings and graphics will always set the standard for the scabby reality behind our fantasies of the “Cabaret” version of Weimar Germany. Here we are reminded of his excellence as a painter. In “Sonnenfinsternis” (Eclipse of the Sun) he does more than bring the fundamentals of caricature into paint. This paranoid denunciation of that military-industrial complex shows how authentic anger can wring the flippancy and exaggeration out of satire, making it a vehicle of fuming sincerity.

Floating Away

If one artist here really emerges from the minor shadows into the full light of necessary reevaluation it is Conrad Felixmuller. His portraits of fellow artists are incisive if occasionally hasty. His masterpiece is the complex, “Death of the Poet Walter Reiner.” The young writer--a friend of the artist--took cocaine to avoid the draft and then got hooked on it to ward off the devils of poverty and obscurity. Felixmuller shows him jumping from a window one night, needle in hand. The ghastly business is shown with a masterful poetic grasp of night’s light. Reiner is painted in Felixmuller’s own rather elegant-scholarly persona and seems to be happily floating away like a dancer rather than plunging to a messy death. Not an easy subject for subtlety.

Finally Barron brings on a section called “Abstract Expressionism” showing artists who came almost to the brink of pure abstraction. A few of the paintings are pretty good but their most telling trait is their inability to go the whole distance. They keep human traces and measured space.

It makes you think that maybe the fascination of German art goes back to its fundamental originality as the art that tells stories and draws morals about animals who are just so many bags of skin-wrapped entrails, so many walking wursts who are yet capable of violence that would make a tiger blush and ecstatic transcendence that makes the gods believe in them. German art is not interesting because it’s German. It’s interesting because it is us.