Art Review : ‘E.L. Kirchner’ Brings Out Past Lessons

The way we see art is not fixed. For decades the persistence of Germanic art and artists in Lotusland didn’t entirely make sense. Whether it was filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, architects Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler or collectors like Galka Scheyer and Robert Gore Rifkind, the Germanic sensibility was at once too rigorous and too passionate for good old fun-loving, laid-back Los Angeles.

Now in still economically discouraged, post-riot, fire and quake L.A., German Expressionism appears as a wise, if unsettling Cassandra who has been trying all the while to teach us something about the nature of tragedy.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just opened “The Graphic Art of E.L. Kirchner,” a selection of prints from the Rifkind Center organized by its curator Timothy O. Benson. Five years ago the show would have been just another praiseworthy aesthetic exercise for people who like that sort of thing. Today it’s an apt object lesson in the feel of daily life in a haunted land.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a leader in founding Die Brucke (The Bridge) in 1905. The movement, started by a group of young Dresden students, effectively launched modern Expressionism. They admired the singular Norwegian Edvard Munch, but they reacted against the self-conscious decadence of Art Nouveau. They kept its love of craft and graphic design but jettisoned its elegance in favor of the bracing, raw primitivism they saw in the art of Dresden’s ethnographic museum.

Unlike Picasso and Beckmann later they did not try to make life into myth. Their sharded style is a kind of modernist naturalism, where the everyday is shadowed by the savage.

Kirchner’s color woodcut “Bather’s Tossing Reeds” is just a picture of guys having fun skinny-dipping, but its blunt manner speaks of wildness untamed behind the game. His later “Bathers on Rocks” evokes a baptism. A church tower has the quality of something comfortingly familiar suddenly turned aloof and threatening. The old beliefs aren’t working. A still life of a pitcher and flowers tries to gain a moment’s peace but curdles saccharine in the attempt.

Better go visit friends. Too much solitude. Kirchner’s “The Theosophist” depicts a lean, insistently ordinary German intellectual whose interest echoes the spiritual fragmentation of the epoch. His “Portrait of Dr. Ludwig Schames” offers a picture of bearded authoritarian dignity with a lascivious nude girl in the background.

There’s a good idea. Let’s go downtown and leer at the Madchens. There are plenty of them. Kirchner sees skinny hookers with pendulous breasts, cabaret dancers and acrobats that perform like mechanical marionettes with soft thighs. His fancy turns guiltily to thoughts of lust.

His lovers are sometimes of indeterminate gender. In “Love Scene,” it’s clear that the acid-apple-green body is the woman while the ketchup-colored one is the man. Later he murders her and stands aghast at himself.

To cast ordinary human activities in such anxious terms means something has gone badly awry, usually in either the individual or collective psyche. In Kirchner’s epoch it was both. He saw tough Nietzschian idealism shattered in World War I, and then turned into a grotesque monster by the Nazis. He was safe in Switzerland when Hitler started his campaign against “degenerate” art, but the news was too much for this most sensitive and brilliant of the Bridge artists.

He killed himself in 1938, leaving a memorable record of how it feels when everything just goes all wrong.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 25, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (213) 857-6000.