Art Review: Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s

Ending the string of top-notch shows of German art ranging from Dada at MoMA to the recently-closed Sigmar Polke "Bernstein-Amber" show at the Michael Werner Gallery, the extraordinary retrospective of Weimar-era Germany Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s at the Metropolitan Musuem runs for another three weeks and should not be missed.

Indeed, during the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement centered in tubulent Berlin, numerous artists imbued with the infectious pessimism of the post-World War I era painted hauntingly expressionist canvases, and "Glitter and Doom" features some of the finest paintings by Max Beckmann, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Karl Hubbuch, Ludwig Meidner, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz, and Gert H. Wollheim. While the Weimar era of course had many multimedia offerings that also reflected such sentiments, ranging from the era's tremendous films (such "The Blue Angel" or "Kuhle Wampe") to drama (e.g. Erwin Piscator's "The Good Soldier Schweik"), this exhibit brilliantly encapsulates a number of leitmotifs of the era.

In the past two months I've returned a dozen times, on each occasion seeing something completely different: the heady influence of cabaret; of wacky doctors and modern medicine; of Neue Sachlichkeit and the tortuous realism of the Weimar Republic; and numerous other influences from the magic Realists to the demi-monde of prostitutes and their johns. Here sleek elegance meets tattered old whores, and scads of twisted and contorted figures underscore so much of the depravity and grotesqueness of the era. Early this morning, for example, I encountered a guard staring transfixed at George Grosz's "Pillars of Society" (1926); she offered the most prescient comment before the exhibition rooms began to fill up: "At first, it wasn't so crowded, but word of mouth spread like wildfire." And indeed, within 30 minutes once again the galleries were packed, with patrons examining the hideous figures, ominous scenes, and deeply insightful views on war. As with his "The Eclipse of the Sun" (1926, on loan from the Heckscher Museum in Huntington), Grosz deftly attacks the inept Hindenburg government, making no secret of his obvious detestation of the evil forces at work in Weimar society. Hideous, twisted veterans figure in various paintings, less prominently in Grosz's "Gray Day" (1921) than in Dix's utterly wrecked "Skat Players" (1920, photo above). With their nearly-innumerable prosthetic devices, one figure holds cards with a foot, another holds a card in his teeth.

Otto Dix's portraiture is also unforgiving of the aging figures of Berlin. Poet Iwar von Lücken (1926) is depicted in rumpled and shabby clothes, with huge, rake-like hands, a head with huge, bulging veins, craggy face and sunken eyes. Poor von Lücken starved in Paris during the first winter of World War II. Sadness seems transformed into rapaciousness in Dix's portrait of the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim (1926), whose enormous and similarly rake-like hands suggest the money-grubbing inherent to his art business; in addition to the enormous nose, tweed suit and Cubist (i.e. dated) painting on the wall, all the elements crudely and succinctly reduce Flechtheim to the archetypical greedy Jew. Dix had two years earlier painted the art dealer Johanna Ey, whose unflattering portrait features this enormous, full-bodied figure in a fur-trimmed purple dress, here appearing almost aristocratic with a tiara, ruby earrings, huge eyes and elongated chubby face. Rotundness also figures in a painting of Dr. Mayer-Hermann (1926), where the portly doctor's bulbousness seems magnified by the all cylindrical objects surrounding him. Dix's portrait of Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann (1922), meanwhile, reduces this patron of Dada to a possessed freak with Svengali-like, hypnotic eyes. In a sharp suit with flowing hair and a greenish-grayish face, the clenched hands of Stadelmann lend an additional otherworldly if not demonic demeanor. Twisted and contorted hands also figure prominently in Dix's cruel portrait of the Jeweler Karl Krall (1923), where vibrant tones highlight this dandy with a birdlike chest, standing in an effeminate pose, with reddish-gray cherubic face and hands splayed suggestively on his hips. Little wonder Krall quickly gave the portrait to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin!

Manicured and lacquered claws also figure prominently in paintings of females; Dix paints Anita Berber (1925) as rather spent from years of drug use—she died three years later—in a wild red dress, tightly shaped around her otherwise supple body. Though the paunch of this aging starlet is obvious, her face is haunting, with pursed red lips, green eyes, outlandish mascara, thin penciled-in eyebrows and wild red hair. All these reds—as with Krall—seem additionally vampirish against the red background. Stated differently, the lady is a vamp? Similarly, Grosz's portraits are no less haunting: Max Herrmann-Neisse (1925) depicts the writer as wrinkled, with sagging features, an enormous skull, sunken eyes and huge protruding veins. A somewhat more gentle and less dramatic version from 1927 hangs inconspicuously in the rather hidden third-floor staircase at the Museum of Modern Art. The latter portrait nevertheless still depicts a grotesque and veiny skull, though sans enormous ruby ring that figures so prominently in the Mannheim painting.

There is no shortage of hideousness in the Weimar depiction of women, ranging from youngish whores to elderly whores. Dix's The Salon 1 (1921) prominently portrays one aging prostitute squeezing her right breast while the other three seated together at the table stare off into space. The wallpaper, drapery and white lace contrast sharply with these chalk-colored painted ladies. Indeed one could probably write a doctoral thesis comparing the milieu of this painting with that of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon fifteen years earlier. Christian Schad's "Two Girls" (1928) features a rather lush masturbation scene; his "Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove" (1929) offers the contrasting sideshow freaks of a busty black woman at front and the hideously deformed Agosta at rear; and heady sexuality impregnate both "Baroness Vera Wassilko" (1926) and "Count St. Genois d'Anneaucourt" (1927). Do additionally inspect the female hands as portrayed in "The Old Actress" (1926) by Max Beckmann plus his portrait of Fridel Battenberg (1920). Then perhaps contrast these females with the wild decadence seen in Beckmann's "Self Portrait with Champagne Glass" (1919) and Dix's "To Beauty" (1922), wherein Dix poses next to a wild-looking black jazz musician. (Note Dix's clenched left fist on the telephone, right hand in pocket.) Coupled with Schad's dreamlike and hypersexual "Self-Portrait" (1927), it seems the artists' self-indulgence or wallowing in whoring allows them to depict these women as their accessories in a slightly more flattering milieu. Nevertheless, all three self-portraits show deeply conflicting emotions, the pain simultaneously felt with pleasure.

Perhaps it is appropriate that as you exit the exhibit you'll be confronted just outside on your left with Finelli's marble bust of the notorious Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1632). Nephew of Pope Paul V, Borghese wielded enormous power at a time of great corruption, in addition to being a quintessential patron of the arts—two themes all-too-familiar in Weimar Germany.

Finally, two upcoming events pertaining to the exhibit are of interest. On Sunday, February 4th, a lecture titled "Fearless Sitters" will examine the merciless portraits of glittering and rootless members of society painted by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, among others. It begins at 3 pm in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. And on Saturday, February 10th at 3 pm, John Angeline will give a gallery talk that meets at the Gallery Talk Stanchion in the Great Hall.

photo: Otto Dix "Skat Players" (1920), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Tags:   bernstein amber, blue angel, Christian Schad, dada, Georg Scholz, George Grosz, Gert Wollheim, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, kuhle wampe, Ludwig Meidner, Max Beckmann, met, michael werner gallery, moma, neue sachlichkeit, Otto Dix, Rudolf Schlichter, scipione borghese, sigmar polke, weimar

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Posted on 1/28/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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