Graphic Content: Graphic Art of German Expressionism at the MoMA

“Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth,” German artist Franz Marc once wrote. “All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.” When the German Expressionists searched for a way to get back to basics and recover for the present what they saw as the lost primitive passions of the past, they turned to printmaking and the graphic arts as the ideal medium. In German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art through July 11, 2011, the glory days of German Expressionism, both before and after World War I, live again. The content of these graphic works—life, love, war, peace—inspires, informs, and even offends, but never fails to touch something inside you with the “genuine” force Marc wrote about that “guarantees its truth.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Graphic Content."

[Image: Franz Marc. Riding School After Ridinger (Reitschule nach Ridinger). 1913. Woodcut. Composition: 10 9/16 x 11 3/4" (26.9 x 29.8 cm); sheet: 12 13/16 x 14 3/4" (32.5 x 37.5 cm). Publisher: unpublished. Printer: Maria Marc. Edition: One of an unknown number of posthumous impressions. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1940.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials for German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs through July 11, 2011.]

Out of the Ashes: Art Stolen by Nazis Rediscovered

It’s a sad fact of human history that the leadership regime most obsessed with art belonged to that of the Nazis. From Adolf Hitler the frustrated painter to obsessive collectors such as Herman Goering and Joseph Goebbels (who knew enough to step aside when Hitler lusted after an object), the Nazi power circles thought about art and its effect on their country’s culture continually, more often to art’s detriment than to its benefit. Exhibit A of the detrimental effects of that cultural concern is that dark episode in modern art history—the infamous Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition of 1937 that defined for Germans what was and what wasn’t acceptable art. Some of those “degenerate” works and the artists that made them escaped Nazi clutches, while much of that condemned art seemed lost to posterity in the same conflagration that consumed the Nazis themselves. A recent discovery, however, adds a small, but happy coda to the tragic symphony of the Nazis destructive love of art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Out of the Ashes."

The God of War

Of all the artists who served in World War I, Otto Dix may have seen the most bloodshed. Born December 2, 1891, Dix actually volunteered for service out of a sense of fervent nationalism. As part of a machine gun unit, Dix fought at the Battle of the Somme in France before being pulled to the Russian front in 1917. As the war wound down, the German military pulled Dix back to the Western front to participate in the last-gasp Spring Offensive that marked the beginning of the end of the war. Along the way, Dix earned an Iron Cross and many serious wounds. In 1915, Dix painted Self-Portrait as Mars (above). In a tangled, almost Futurist composition, Dix assumes the role of the Roman god of war, perhaps reveling in his role in the German army, crouched behind a machine gun and dealing death. It’s hard to judge when Dix’s enthusiasm for warfare gave way to the realization of the human cost. The fact that Dix paints in a Futurist style makes me believe that he shared in their naïve lust for action, but the way Dix obscures his face in that style also makes me wonder if he was beginning to see the depersonalizing effects of mechanized mass murder.

After the war, Dix, along with George Grosz and other artist veterans, promoted a harsh style that cast a bright light on post-war, Weimar Germany known as Neue Sachlichkeit or the New Objectivity. Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (above, from 1925) shows in garish red the highly sensual, spiritually void world of German society between the wars. For Dix, the greatest injustice always remained the abandonment of World War I veterans after the war. Physically and mentally crippled, these veterans found themselves abandoned by society, an inconvenient reminder of the war years and the diminished stature of Germany. Dix often examined the idea of Lustmord, or sexual murder, recognizing a similarity between sexual perversion and the thrill to kill. For Dix, the decadence of the post-war years simply redefined a deep-seated need that the war’s bloodshed couldn’t answer.


When the Nazis assumed power in the early 1930s as the German people sought something to fill their spiritual void, Dix certainly recognized another war looming on the horizon. In 1934, Dix painted The Triumph of Death (above), in which a crowned, skeletal figure personifying death wields a scythe over other characters in an allegory of Germany on the brink of war. On the left, closest to the scythe’s blade, a common German soldier stands with the same pride Dix exhibited before the First World War, oblivious of the cost he will be asked to pay. An innocent child plays in the flowers in the foreground, also oblivious to its sad fate. On the right, an almost nude seductress caresses her lover, continuing Dix’s fascination with the connection between the sex drive and the impulse to destroy. The lovers are decadent rather than procreative, emptily sensual rather than soul mates. The Nazis recognized Dix’s opposition and counted him among the “Degenerate Art” artists in 1937, a final slap in the face for the decorated war veteran. The lessons of Dix’s paintings went unheeded by the Nazis, who were determined to learn them firsthand.

Tears of a Clown

Every family has at least one elderly aunt who collects tchotches of some kind. I have one who collects clowns in all forms—painted plates, porcelain figurines, snow globes, you name it. If only she had something by Walt Kuhn, I could forgive her. Born October 27, 1877, Kuhn painted clowns and other circus performers repeatedly over the last eight years of his life in the 1940s, when mental instability and chronic ulcers plagued him. Kuhn reportedly obsessively attended circuses such as Ringling Brothers Circus, perhaps seeing something of himself in the faces of the performers. Fright Wig (above, from 1940) shows one of the clowns in an almost menacing way, totally devoid of laughter. Today, Kuhn is remembered more for his efforts to introduce modern European art to America than his own paintings, but works such as Fright Wig seem frightfully close to the best that German Expressionism offered decades before.

Along with Walter Pach and Arthur B. Davies, Kuhn helped organize the (in)famous 1913 Armory Show that gathered together somewhere in the vicinity of 1,250 works of art by more than 300 of the best European and American artists painting in Impressionist, Fauvist, Cubist, and other modern styles. Thanks to the Armory Show, figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse finally found a toehold on American shores and invaded the American art scene for good. Much of Kuhn’s art appears to be an attempt to respond to those artists—a reply in hopes of sneaking out of their huge shadows. In 1918, Kuhn traveled to the western part of the United States to paint a series of works he called An Imaginary History of the West. In The Longhorn Saloon (above, from 1918), Kuhn evokes the smoky atmosphere of the stereotypical Wild West barroom. You can almost hear the piano player in the background. The rough handling of the figures shows Kuhn’s debt to European modernism, but the subject matter illustrates how Kuhn sought to take those European models and make them unquestionably American.

All of Kuhn’s paintings of circus performers carry a sense of sadness you sense even if you don’t know anything about Kuhn’s mental state at the time. A work such as Roberto (above, from 1946) shows a typical clown in an atypical pose of weariness with the world. Looking at the starkness of Kuhn’s portraits of circus people, usually set against a plain backdrop, I think of German art again, not the Expressionists but instead the New Objectivity of artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Christian Schad. Like those German artists, Kuhn wanted to paint reality as he saw it—not just the surfaces of society but also the soul suffering underneath. Kuhn’s ability to render the fixed stare of his subjects into something both pleading and accusatory lends his portraits a deep psychological intensity. First mired in World War II and then caught up in the sad recognition of a world in which the Holocaust and Hiroshima are possible, Kuhn dealt with life through his art as best as he could. Like his clowns, however, Kuhn thinly disguised his inner turmoil through his art.