Last Twitch of German Romanticism

By ROBERT HUGHES

German expressionism, which flowered between the late 1800s and the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1932, is the orphan of modern art: plaintive, clotted with turbulent emotion, snotty and--outside Germany--somewhat inaccessible. Its local significance was immense, its international resonance small; even today, the expressionist works that survive best seem to be in film (Fritz Lang) or theater (Brecht-Weill) rather than in painting.

A common attitude toward German expressionist artists like Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, Franz Marc, Karl Schmidt-Rottluffor Max Pechstein used to be that their work was a talented but provincial response to French Fauvism.

It was not--or not only that. Whereas Matisse sought what he called "an art of equilibrium, of purity and tranquillity, without disturbing or preoccupying subject matter," expressionism tended to become an art of social commitment.

"Tended," because some of the artists also had a pronounced mystical streak --Franz Marc, for instance, and others in the "Blue Rider" group that formed around Kandinsky in Munich just before World War I--while others, like Paul Klee, were pure fantasists.

Impassioned Protest. They were the exception. The typical expressionist posture was one of impassioned protest against a world that seemed, especially to young people raised in the stiffly hierarchical coils of German society and then traumatized by the war, mechanized beyond redemption. It was the last expiring twitch of German romanticism, replete with hopes for primitivism, rural simplicity, the brotherhood of man and the death of authority, all of which, the expressionists naively thought, they could hasten to fulfillment by painting pictures. (It is only fair to recall that Hitler, who banned expressionism as "degenerate art" in 1933, shared this delusion about its political potency.) Emotional vulnerability became the expressionist weapon on behalf of the masses--"those individual people," as Martin Buber wrote, "naked under their clothes, blood coursing under their skins, all of whose exposed heartbeats together would drown out the united voices of the machines." The pictorial result was a labored and rather masochistic fortissimo, executed in the belief that feeling was all: jagged lines, dissonant and fulgid colors, heavy gloom. The level of sophistication, except in Klee, Feininger, Schiele and occasionally Beckmann, was close to zero. Expressionism was a young man's movement, the creation (like Dadaism) of people in their 20s.

Last week, as a pendant to its superb show of modern French drawings organized by Curator William Lieberman, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened a small exhibition of 56 German expressionist graphics from its collection. This is hardly more than a sketch (MOMA's cellars are weak in most forms of expressionism other than the American abstract variety), but it is instructive. There are some gaps: nothing by Paula Modersohn-Becker, nothing but hasty trivia by Kirchner. There are also surprises. One is a late crayon drawing by Lovis Corinth, The First Human Beings (1919), an almost psychotic jumble of frontal meat that anticipates the kippered nudes of Jean Dubuffet. Another is the work of the little-known Gottfried Brockmann (born in 1903), an early '20s imitator of Giorgio di Chirico who painted chilling temperas of tailors' mutilated dummies propelling themselves through empty streets.

Ferocious Contempt. Most of the show is the mixture as expected: eminently "representative." It includes a parade of bright primary-colored landscapes, sinister alleys straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, garish cabaret scenes, sad-visaged intellectuals, repulsive capitalists. The mood of the style is faultlessly struck by Otto Dix's Cafe Couple (1921): a pair of fashionable Berliners, she bright-eyed and vapidly strung out, he walleyed and decorated by a dueling scar, each bathed in gratuitously ferocious contempt.

It is the expressionist anger that generates the cultural distance from moderns: it is stretched to a monotonous pitch that finally becomes absurd. There is probably not an artist living today who would even try to produce an image of such ridiculous misogyny as George Grosz's Circe (1927): a grotesque whore in cloche hat and high heels, licking the porcine muzzle of a businessman and turning him into even more of a pig than he was before. Such overwrought fantasies about feminine evil seem very dated (but then no modern art movement has outstripped German expressionism in its degree of sexual hostility). They remind us how rarely Grosz managed to transcend his usual level of political cartooning, and how platitudinous moral rage becomes when it turns into a convention. -Robert Hughes

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