ART REVIEW : Culture With a Capital K at County Museum

Envision this: Berlin as the Kapital of Kultur, home to the most vibrant population of artists, filmmakers, writers and thespians on the planet. Best museums, finest theaters, most creative fashions. Makes New York look like Cleveland and Paris like Lyon.

Some intellectuals believe that could have happened in Berlin during the Weimar Republic (1919-33) if Hitler and his thugs hadn’t usurped power. One doubts it. Despite an artistic flowering that included everyone from Max Beckmann to Marlena Dietrich, from Ernst Lubitsch to Alfred Doblin and Thomas Mann, social conditions were ghastly. The period was bracketed by runaway inflation at one end and the Great Depression at the other. The notion of Berlin becoming top town under such conditions finally reads like a wistful pipe dream.

Today’s different. This is a moment when pipe dreams come true. With West Germany a world economic powerhouse, national reunification gaining momentum and East Germany’s healing, moving apology for the Holocaust, anything seems possible. Even good things. Perhaps the vision of an artistically great Berlin will turn out to have been but a deferred reality.

All these matters and more lend unusual interest to “Envisioning America” opening today at the County Museum of Art. It’s a relatively small but intensely pungent compendium of 70 prints, drawings and photographs emphasizing the scathing satire of George Grosz and contemporaries such as Otto Dix and Rudolph Schlichter.

The show comes with a particularly smart catalogue but even without it the material provokes so many ideas it makes Conceptualism look vapid. And it’s real art. The installation looks better here than it did at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum where it was organized by the university’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, but the game’s the same. It’s name is Amerikanismus --a passion for things Yankee that gripped the Berlin avant-garde who pictured their American imaginings and emulated the States’ cocky Charleston style. Grosz dedicated a self-portrait to Charlie Chaplin, Dix pictured himself as a red Indian, Helmut Herzfelde changed his name to John Heartfield.

Wonderful images lace the show. An entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition shows the building as an Indian chief in the pose of the Statue of Liberty. Nobody seems to have noticed this art as a precursor of Pop. The Germans were fascinated with our popular culture. They glorified filmmaking and made Chaplin an honorary Dadaist. “Modern Times” proved them right. Black jazz musicians and wiggly white girls enchanted. Josephine Baker wowed them with her revue in 1926.

Beckmann suggested the psychological complexity of the attraction in his frenetic etching “Tauentzienpalast.” It shows a white woman and a black man dancing. Looks like straight social satire but it gets more complicated. The man may be Beckmann himself in blackface, the others his wife and son, the staging a metaphor of his crumbling marriage.

These artists hung highly personal feelings on racial, gender and even occupational types. A shrink would certainly see highly subjective longings for primitive childhood freedom in their troubled romance with blacks and Indians or macho power fantasies in their limning of capitalist (but important) plutocrats. But they are not going to get by in these touchy times without being suspected of prejudice and stereotyping. The whole genre of caricature is called into question in a epoch when absolutely nobody is properly the butt of a joke except politicians and tyrants. What satire has going for it is democracy. It razzes everybody equally. Real caricature is ambivalent in spirit. The objects of its mirth reflect the universal human capacity to love and fear something simultaneously. You can spot real downer caricature in an instant in the despicable catalogue illustration for the Nazi’s 1938 “Degenerate Music” exhibition. You see its black jazz saxophonist with the star of David on his lapel and your blood runs cold.

“Amerikanismus” was all about the artist’s waffling feelings toward the American myth. It stood for progress and modernity against the stuffy hypocrisy of the German burgher establishment. It was cool and free, rapacious and depersonalizing at once. Paul Klee adored the aesthetic perfection of “Negroid Beauty” while Gerd Arntz saw “Things American” as child-art bathing beauties lined up with a lynched man. Silliness and violence. Heartfield borrowed elements of film montage and snappy Yank graphic design, but he used it to praise Upton Sinclair and trash Henry Ford, the “KarKing.” A determinedly left-wing lot with too much artistic detachment to be truly ideological.

What is all this about then, really? It’s about traveling someplace you’ve never been except in imagination. Wanderlust is a German word and they seem to have invented the impulse. Their cultural Sehnsucht for America doesn’t begin with the Dadaists. It started a century earlier with the translation of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” tales, the same ones that turn up as a Pop icon in Karl Hubbuch’s 1921 “Lederstrumpf.”

It resurfaces in the Brecht-Weill opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” longing for an Alabama moon and is a regular theme of filmmakers from Wim Wenders to Werner Herzog. Everybody is on an alienated quest for utopia. When Grosz and other Germans fled to the promised land to escape the Nazis, most were bitterly disappointed. Nobody has found utopia yet but in these days when anything can happen it might turn out to me right there in the old Heimatstadt , hometown Berlin.