ART REVIEW : Visions of Doom and Gloom at County Museum

At the tender age of 28, German artist Ludwig Meidner began to paint the end of the world. Spending the years before World War I living in dire poverty in a Berlin studio described by a friend as “a dark hole of a garret dominated by piles of ash and refuse,” he created a series of violent landscapes that explode with the fury of a culture about to derail into chaos.

Little known because he was only peripherally involved with the major art movements of his day (Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter), Meidner’s convulsive reflections on the twilight of civilization are the subject of “The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Ludwig Meidner,” on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Dec. 17.

Begun in 1912, when a scorching heat wave held Berlin hostage from April to August, Meidner’s images of a society on the brink of collapse are evocative mementos of Germany as it waited to be devoured by World War I.

Combining the fractured perspective of Cubism with the unbridled emotionality of Expressionism, Meidner used clashing colors, ominous tilting planes and bold forceful lines to sketch out his vision of the fall--and a grisly vision it is too.

The stench of death hangs like a putrid fog over crumbling buildings that seem to writhe in agony, as surging crowds of people flee cities erupting into fire. Three nude figures, each missing a limb or two, sit and survey the wreckage in “Horrors of War,” while robotic figures in black roam aimlessly across a ravaged landscape in “The Last Day.” Meidner’s vision was essentially an existential one, and the helplessness of the individual in the face of cataclysmic events is the leitmotif in this body of work.

Like many of his contemporaries, Meidner interpreted the massive 1906 San Francisco and 1908 Messina earthquakes, the 1910 appearance of Halley’s comet and the 1912 sinking of the Titanic as portents of greater disasters to come. Deeply affected by the writings of Nietzsche, Meidner was also a big fan of the Baroque (an art movement unmatched when it comes to scenery chewing), the ecstatic visionary William Blake, Edvard Munch, Hieronymus Bosch and Van Gogh.

Fed on this kind of diet, Meidner was bound to fall prey to some fairly purple emotions, and these fevered paintings make perfect sense considering that his creative ideology was kicked into hyperdrive by a punishing heat wave, pending war, grinding poverty and the severe case of scabies that afflicted the artist during that fateful summer of 1912.

There was something else eating away at Meidner too--namely, a religious crisis. As a young man, he scorned the Bible and repudiated his Jewish faith but, as can be seen in his paintings of a godless world, he was never too comfortable with his tiff with the Lord. In 1912, Meidner had a mystical experience and began reading the Bible, then in the mid-’20s he became a devout Jew, saying “peace of mind was achieved, my years of struggle were over.”

Well, not quite. Labeled a degenerate artist by the Nazis, he was forced to flee the 1939 invasion of Poland and wound up being interned as an enemy alien for a year in England. In 1953, he returned to his beloved Germany, where he lived until his death in 1966.

Though the horrors of World War II were certainly equal to anything Meidner witnessed as a young man, his style nonetheless evolved from the subjective frenzy of his early work to a mood of calm introspection. One can only attribute this to the fact that he found his god--and if ever there was a man who needed the protective buffer of religious belief, it was Meidner.

As a young man, sensitive, high strung and estranged from any kind of spiritual grounding, Meidner apparently lacked the filtering device that allows us to buffer ourselves from the horrors of life. He took reality straight, no chaser for a few years there, and it left him howling as he hammered out a raging visual vocabulary of terror and dread. Said Meidner of that period of his life: “The great universal storm cast its glaring yellow shadow across my whimpering brush hand.” That he was able to turn out paintings extravagant with life as he grappled with death makes him an artist of the first rank.