ART REVIEW : Brucke: Back to the Future : Art: The pre-World War I German group pushed for ‘freedom of life and action against established forces.’

Sometimes art makes more progress going backwards than forging forward. Fifteenth-Century Italy tried to revive ancient classical art and wound up with the Renaissance. Nineteenth-Century England tried to retreat to the Middle Ages in the Arts and Crafts movement and unwittingly set the stage for modernism. Just goes to show that art’s growth is as much circular as linear.

In 1905 a gaggle of Dresden architectural students sparked by 25-year-old Ernst Ludwig Kirchner formed a group called Die Brucke (The Bridge). Their aims were as youthfully muddled and idealistic as later hippie communards, but they did know they believed in the future and wanted to achieve “freedom of life and action against established and older forces.” Some of the raw, heartfelt fruits of that impulse have just gone on view at the County Museum of Art (to Oct. 7).

“Die Brucke Woodcuts” presents some 60 prints, books, newspapers and catalogues from the museum’s Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation collections. Intense, fractured images show nudes as blocky as fortresses and portraits as stark as icons. Anybody might wonder what this atavistic vision has to do with the future. Buck Rogers it’s not, but it could be an omen of a Germany scorched and suffering from the two world wars it would wreak upon the planet and lose in this now-flickering century.

That was decidedly not what the Brucke artists had in mind. They dug into the past for values they missed in the culture of Deutschland’s philistine burghers. They revived the woodcut technique of medieval southern Germany and stood transfixed by the African art in the Dresden ethnographic museum. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s “Sitzendes Madchen” (Seated Girl) makes no bones about its debt to the art of the Cameroon. They wanted a future that brought back pure primitive emotion and the metaphysic of nature. They found it where they could--in Gauguin’s exoticism, Van Gogh’s passion, Munch’s anxiety. When the admired Norwegian first saw work by Schmidt-Rottluff he said: “May God protect us; evil times are coming,” but he later became a fan of The Bridge.

Erich Heckel even thought he saw the holy vision in Oscar Wilde. The show includes a fascinating suite of prints based on “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Heckel was too intense to visually parallel Wilde’s ironic cadences, but he did catch his lurking sense of horror in “Angst,” a Caliban-like monster that evokes the poet’s line, “Alas it is a fearful thing to feel another’s guilt.”

At first look it’s distinctly difficult for even a practiced observer to sort out who did what in this show. That’s partly because the woodcut technique has a slightly homogenizing effect and because some personalities are muffled by the choices of curator Timothy Benson who allows Kircher and Heckel to dominate the show numerically. Emil Nolde, for example, is only represented by two works but their brutal intensity is intact.

Mostly, however, the problem of identity here reflects the fact that the Dresden Brucke was among the most tightly-knit and self-effacing of pioneer modernist cells. The gang shared everything from food to models, joint exhibitions and a tiny income derived from a support group of subscribers and sympathizers who initially paid about $3 for annual membership.

A strong element of what we would call populism ran through The Bridge. They sometimes avoided signing their works, made posters and contributed illustrations to popular newspapers like Der Sturm that were passed around in the cafes. Happy the art buff who hung on to the catalogue issued for their first Berlin exhibition in 1912. It included two small original woodcut prints on pink paper by each of the participants. Prime examples for a few groschen.

The move to cosmopolitan Berlin seemed to release the genie of personal styles among the artists. Kirchner’s urbanity and sense of social satire oozed out of “Fling Dance.” Heckel’s “Bather’s at a Pond” shows a curious combination of moral purism tinged with decadence. Max Pechstein is melancholy, Otto Mueller stylized and Schmidt-Rottluff as tribal as ever.

Berlin was the big time for Die Brucke, but the town fostered an individualism that fractured its solidarity. In a last-ditch effort to glue Humpty together again Kirchner wrote and illustrated a history of the group. Ironically, wrangles about the accuracy of the text caused the ultimate rift and The Bridge collapsed in 1913, just in time for World War I to begin the next year.

The legacy of these intense young intellectuals includes a revival of the art of the woodcut, but there is more to it. We see here a foreshadowing of a German art that reanimated its traditional concern with moral, social and political issues. It flowered again after the wars in figures like Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer eventually to become a central concern of international contemporary art. A lurking sense of apocalypse staining Die Brucke’s idealism reawakened in the German Neo-Expressionists. This sense of living in the last days spread so deeply into the American version that somebody cracked that these days Yankee artists wish they were Germans.

We don’t seem to have the knack, and with rare exceptions neither do the contemporary Germans themselves. Maybe present efforts will finally get something good out of the back-to-the-future effect. It has happened before, but doubt is cast by the fact that the original German Expressionists were just better artists. For all its sharded harshness, Die Brucke art had a crackling energy and moral fervor. Our version is too often merely ironic and weary. This has been a tough century.