Glitter and Doom
German Portraits from the 1920s
A Special Exhibition Review by Gail S. Myhre
At their best, museum special exhibitions have as their outcome a new way of looking at or engagement with the art being showcased. The way an exhibition is curated can shed new light on specific periods or genres, establish a connection between the art and our own view of the world, and lend immediacy to the works displayed.
Of course, this is a relatively rare occurrence. Most special exhibitions today showcase popular art with which the viewer is already familiar, imagery with which we are comfortable and know we enjoy. There are also those types of exhibition, all too well-known to us now, which are sometimes called "blockbuster," which are specifically designed to appeal to and draw a wide audience.
In Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, we have a wonderful synthesis of the two types of exhibition, the familiar and the new. In this case, there has never before been assembled a collection of portraiture in the style called Verism, a branch of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). The very existence of such an assemblage forces us to look at these portraits as a separate subgroup within the style and gives us a new engagement with the way in which artists viewed this particular subject, namely, the people who lived and worked around them.
But we are already very familiar with the artistic idiom and sensibility of Verism. Our collective cultural consciousness contains within it an image of Weimar Germany as decadent, gorgeous, crackling with sexual tension and ultimately doomed. The image is instantly recognizable to us in the waif-thin flapper with bobbed hair smoking a cigarette or the fey gentleman wearing tuxedo and rouge. It's as though an entire era has been distilled for us into the film Cabaret.
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
The Dancer Anita Berber, 1925
Oil and tempera on plywood
47 1/4 x 25 9/16 in. (120 x 65 cm)
Loan of the Landesbank Baden-Würtemberg in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
The works shown here take us beyond that glittery surface view of the decadent yet elegantly civilized society which was in the process of collapsing in Germany during this era. The portraits here depict two main types of model: the social outcast or average working man or woman who has been ruthlessly used and then thrown aside by the exigencies of his society; and the relatively prosperous and liberally-minded middle-class businessman, doctor or lawyer who is both that society's beneficiary and its victim.
Ultimately, the irony behind the portraits is that at bottom, both types of model are the same. The crippled or disfigured war veteran, the prematurely aged prostitute and the fat, hard-eyed art patron have all been twisted by the unbearable social pressures of the time. Even the self-portraits display the artists themselves as degenerate, decadent and dislikable. This is Verism's message.
The stated point of Verism is to portray an image hyper-realistically to the point of distortion. One has penetrated the surface of the model or subject, and the resulting visual study lays bare the psychological reality beneath. When this philosophy is coupled with social and political disaffection, the results are scathing. Applied to perfectly ordinary-looking people, Verism can twist them beyond recognition. Of Otto Dix in particular, the captioning in this exhibition notes that the people who knew him and sat for his portraits understood that his depictions would be Dix's first, likenesses second (if at all). So the solidly bourgeois Dr. Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann (1890–1945) is blown up by Dix's portraiture into a nearly unrecognizable bloat, while in his painting of Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann (1920), the Dresden psychiatrist (1865–1948) is given pale countenance, drawn and anxious brows, and red-rimmed eyes that positively shine with ill-health.
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Dr. Mayer-Hermann, 1926
Oil and tempera with mixed media on wood
59 1/16 x 39 3/8 in. (150 x 100 cm)
Gift of Philip Johnson, 1932
The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Licensed by
SCALA/Art Resource, NY
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
By this same process, people who were seen by the artist as actually disfigured, whether physically by war wounds, syphilis or mere aging, or psychologically by greed or violence, are exaggerated practically beyond their own humanity. In the Otto Dix painting Skat Players (1920), three World War I veterans playing cards together are rendered in grotesque and surrealist detail, with none possessing a full complement of arms and legs or having an unmarked face. Meanwhile, in The Eclipse of the Sun (1926), a structurally similar tableau by George Grosz, the German president Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) sits growling and warlike with florid face and bared teeth, surrounded by headless ministers, while a piggish industrialist whispers direction into his ear.
George Grosz (American, born Germany, 1893-1959)
The Eclipse of the Sun, 1926
Oil on canvas
81 5/8 x 71 7/8 in. (207.3 x 182.6 cm)
The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York
© Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Even in the most true-to-life portrayals the artists felt obliged to display evidence of their subjects' moral degeneracy. In the iconic image which the Museum has chosen to represent this exhibition, Christian Schad's oil Count St. Genois d'Anneaucourt (1927), the Count, elegantly dressed in evening clothes, stands before two figures garbed in sheer gowns. They eye each other as if rivals for his attention, one a rather severe and mannish woman, the other a transvestite. Nor did the Verists spare themselves this searching and ultimately condemning criticism. In his Self-Portrait (1927), Schad places himself on a rumpled bed with a naked yet completely indifferent woman. The two figures do not address each other. Rather, the artist scowls at the viewer while the woman gazes away, heavy-lidded. A symbol of the true basis of their relationship is placed pointedly between them in the background: a single white narcissus flower.
For his own self-portrait, Max Beckmann (1884–1950) has chosen to seat himself in a nightclub interior holding a glass of champagne. The perspective of the setting is badly skewed; walls, table, chair, all are mismatched in space. Only the glass of champagne is upright and unaffected. In this disordered and unstable setting, Beckmann himself looks over his shoulder, which he touches languidly with one ringed hand, and sneers.
Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950)
Self-Portrait with Champagne Glass, 1919
Oil on canvas
25 9/16 x 21 7/8 in. (65 x 55.5 cm)
Private collection, courtesy W. Wittrock, Berlin
Photo: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
As might be expected from their subject matter, most of these artists were in fact acutely political, or at least politically aware. Otto Dix had served as a gunner during the preceding World War, and produced a "cartoon" self-portrait, How I Looked as a Soldier (1924), portraying himself as a stone-faced, lowering brute in torn uniform holding a machine gun. George Grosz was a staunch Communist, probably joining the party during the winter of 1918, and his loathing of the corrupt politicians and war profiteers provided some of Germany's most well-known images of that class. We see this most clearly in his Gray Day (1921), where Grosz quite deliberately places a brick wall between the fat and cross-eyed bureaucrat and the crippled war veteran who walks unnoticed behind him.
With these sensibilities, it should come as no surprise that the only figures treated with sympathy are the down-at-the-heels, the plain, the working class stiffs. Otto Dix's The Poet Iwar von Lücken (1926) portrays its subject, a vagabond down-and-out baron, as tall, gangling and mild in muted tones. In Rudolf Schlichter's portrait of the prostitute Margot (1924), the model might be any of thousands of secretaries or saleswomen leading ordinarily respectable lives in Berlin at the time. Her garments, as different as can be imagined from the sequins and feathers of the time-ravaged prostitutes depicted by Dix, are simple, loose and no-nonsense. Only her heavy exhausted eyelids and the rather hard and professional callousness of her features hint at her profession.
Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)
Margot, ca. 1924
Oil on canvas
43 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. (110.5 x 75 cm)
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Of this society it has often been asked by we who have come after, "How could they have done nothing?" The answer shouts from every picture in this exhibition. These people did nothing because they felt themselves inadequate to the task. Their inaction was in the end born not of ennui but of a pervasive feeling of hopelessness in the face of vast historical forces which were completely inimical to them. In this place and time we may have the first modern instance of an entire class of people who felt themselves completely disconnected from the milieu in which they chose to live – the insider was outsider, and vice versa.
Of course, in the end, events unfolded exactly as these artists, their subjects and indeed everyone in Germany had been expecting. This outrageous and extreme society first imploded, and then exploded with a fury that set the world on fire. In the ensuing conflagration of World War II, many of these artists' works were banned as "degenerate" or "un-German," and in fact several of Dix's and Grosz's works were exhibited at the National Socialist "Entartete Kunst" exhibition in Munich during the summer of 1937. Over 500 of Max Beckmann's works were seized by the Nazi Party that year, and he fled to Amsterdam on the opening day of the "Degenerate Art" show.
This exhibition, in bringing Verist portraiture together in a single museum presentation for the first time, forces us to look at the human face of this extravagant culture, to see the passion and intensity which illuminated it, though it burned for such a short period, as well as the final ashes of the flame. We can look at the period, the artists and their work with the advantage of hindsight and criticize their inaction, but we are forced to understand as well. Then, too, we are ultimately compelled to admire the terrible clarity of vision which produced these powerful works.
About the catalogue:
Rewald, Sabine, Ian Buruma and Matthias Eberle.
Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s (exh. cat.).
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.
The exhibition's 304-page catalogue features scholarly essays illustrated by color and black and white images that describe Verist portraiture in the short-lived Weimar Republic. Texts that accompany the illustrations reveal how these portraits, indeed, mirrored a glittering, doomed society.
"Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s" is on view from November 14, 2006 – February 19, 2007 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, NY 10028-0198. (Telephone: 212-535-7710; Website). The museum is open Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM, Friday and Saturday from 9:30 AM to 9:00 PM. Suggested admission is $20.00 for adults, $15.00 for seniors and $10.00 for students. Paid parking is available in the Museum Garage.
**************************
From your Guide: Gail S. Myhre, Correspondent for Museums and Special Exhibitions, is a specialist in Roman art and history who also appreciates a wide variety of Modernist movements. You may read all of her Special Exhibition Reviews here.