‘Utopias’: Germany’s Lost Hopes : LACMA show focuses on Expressionist work from World War I through the Weimar Republic. The exhibition reflects the anger and cynicism of artists seeking a better world.

For decades Los Angeles was an Edenic place to live, coming close to Sir Thomas Moore’s definition of a utopia--a kind of three-dimensional “dream of the future.” These days Angeltown has the feel of utopia’s opposite--a dystopia, a place where conditions and the quality of life are dreadful. That’s just one reason why the L.A. County Museum of Art’s newest exhibition is so sharply compelling.

Titled “Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy,” it deals with the dreams and disappointments of German artists, architects and intellectuals from World War I through the social and economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. Inflation was so bad you needed a wheelbarrow full of marks to buy a loaf of bread.

The show is a LACMA original and a personal best for its organizer, associate curator Timothy O. Benson. He oversees the museum’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. Its holdings have been heavily tapped for the 230 works on view. They are, with the exception of a few architectural models, the stuff of exhibitions often taken for minor--works on paper. Prints, drawings and collages, books and broadsides coalesce into an experience of major thematic proportion due to a starkly handsome installation by the design group Coop-Himmelblau and a very smart catalogue. The whole deflates smug expectation and inflates insight.

German Expressionism created some of the greatest and most impassioned art of the century, but it remains a stepchild. Too tough for many viewers, its anger, disillusionment and cynicism strike the eye with a force that blots out what Benson makes it see. These artists were fueled by a passion for a better world.

The early Dresden group, Die Brucke (The Bridge) had a flower-child passion for nudity and nature. They were a back-to-Eden bunch whose longing for purity and innocence inspired the almost-medieval simplicity of woodcuts by the likes of Erich Heckel. Later, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider group) went pantheistic in galactic abstractions by Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Klee and others. The young Franz Marc welcomed the coming of war, thinking it would purge the world of rottenness. He was killed in battle at age 36. So much for idealism.

*

But cities, not nature, were the focus of the modern world and the artists had to face up to them. Berlin was ugly, suburbs as dreary as everywhere. When we see Kirchner, Grosz, Meidner or Dix depicting squalor, we pick up their moral disgust, but may deny the fun of all this decadence. Times were so awful, the mood was apocalyptic. So why not enjoy the cabaret life with its weird carnival of painted hookers, flashy pimps, aristocratic transvestite drug dealers and good German beer? This art is compelling because of the tension between disgust and celebration.

Still, utopianism persisted under the classic definition that a cynic is only a disgruntled idealist. If Constructivists pretended to be hard-noses, it was to cover leanings to Platonic purity. If Dadaists like the gifted Hannah Hoch pronounced the world a mechanical absurdity, it was out of a longing that it make sense and have feelings.

If anyone remained free to have their ideals in post-war Germany it was the architects. Virtually nothing was being built, so everyone from Bruno Taut to Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn imagined outlandish fantasy architecture that would constitute a Gesamtkunstwerk --the total work of art. Designers like Wenzel Hablik imagined unbuildable pleasure domes in crystalline style like his “Festival Buildings.” Hermann Finsterlin left the show’s most entertaining objects called “The Style Game”--simple colored wooden geometric shapes are joined into every major monument style from Greek amphitheater to Chinese pagoda with the elegant economy of true wit.

Such lightness is rare and fading. Soon we are confronted with a still from the classic Expressionist horror film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” with its nausea-inducing angles and vertiginous drops. We see Erich Kettelhut’s oppressive, dehumanizing designs for Fritz Lang’s classic “Metropolis,” and we know what’s coming next. It’s not on view, but the mind sees the designs of Hitler’s architect--Albert Speer.

“Expressionist Utopias” raises the chilling old question: Why do humankind’s attempts to engineer social perfection so often result in Frankenstein’s monster?

The show is one of a gaggle of exhibitions on modern German Art now at LACMA. They add up to an education that, by contrast, makes life in L.A. look lovely still.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Jan. 16. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.