Along the Paris-Berlin Axis

By ROBERT HUGHES

Europe's top summer show at Paris' Pompidou Center

By far the most important art show in Europe this summer is "Paris-Berlin, 1900-1933" at the Pompidou Center in Paris. It is the second of three exhibitions designed to describe the links between Paris and three other capitals of modernist culture: New York, Berlin and Moscow. The project made a lame start with the Paris-New York show in 1977, a patchy curatorial bungle. It finds its feet with this exhibition. The theme is large: nothing less than the whole panorama of the German avant-garde in its most spiritual, subversive or idealist aspects, from the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II to that of Adolf Hitler. It embraces film, photog- raphy, architecture, industrial design and printing, as well as sculpture and painting, and it covers an extraordinary ferment of ideas and images. In short, it is the first major exhibition--as the Pompidou Center proudly and rightly claims--to trace the development of the range of German culture in the first third of our century.

The quality of German visual art has traditionally been downplayed by a Francocentric version of art history, so that--especially for those born between 1930 and 1945-- there were relatively few vivid images of a civilized "modernist" Germany to set against the overwhelming iconography of Nazi terror. Now this is changing. "Paris-Berlin" comes hard on the heels of a splendid group of exhibitions mounted in Berlin last fall by the Council of Europe under the general title "Trends of the '20s." They focused on German Dada, on the Bauhaus and its circle, and on international constructivism. "Paris-Berlin" overlaps the earlier shows in those areas; many of the "classics" of the '20s, like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's light-space modulators and constructivist paintings, or the ferocious social satires of George Grosz and Otto Dix, or the Dada visions of mechanized man by Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, are on view again in Paris. But the new show deepens the argument by paying more attention to the social and political aims of the German artists and to the country's expressionist art that preceded the outbreak of World War I.

It is, of course, a spectacle very different from French art. Instead of the relatively ordered conversations of the masters of the School of Paris, we see a kind of telephone exchange buzzing with impacted messages and manned, much of the time, by desperate operators; among the shouts and static and discontinuous sentences there is a certain visionary urgency--a belief that art could act directly on the world--whose intensity had few parallels in art communities located to the west of the Rhine.

We have to finish once and for all with the current of French tradition, which almost totally dominates German painting," Grosz wrote to a friend as the first World War was ending. "We have to finish with these weary painters of sentiment and vagueness, Cezanne, Picasso and the rest." Certainly, for the first 20 years of the century, the current between the avant-garde of the two capitals ran only from Paris to Berlin. As the German art historian Werner Spies remarks in the catalogue to "Paris-Berlin," the visits made by Henri Matisse or Robert Delaunay to Germany were "marked by a condescending paternalism," in contrast to the tentative and supplicatory visits that German artists like August Macke, Wilhelm Lehmbruck or Max Beckmann made to France: the French went to Germany as living demonstrations, the Germans by and large to Paris as students.

"With us," Macke wrote in 1910, four years before he was killed in battle, "each risk is the desperate and chaotic experience of a man not in command of his tongue." The principal influence on Macke was French: the paintings of Delaunay, like A Window, 1912-13, which had been seen in Berlin in 1913. Its light-filled space, saturated with color--not the sober browns and grays of cubism, but the full radiance of the spectrum from high yellow through to ultramarine, with a vestigial slice of trusswork from the Eiffel Tower rising in the top third of the painting to remind one that this was a view of Paris--made a deep impression on the young German, to whom color had an absolute value. But instead of following Delaunay into abstraction, he grafted his color system onto the figure; paintings like Pierrot, 1913, were the result.

There was a time lag between the two cities--inevitably, given the state of communications before World War I and the lack of traveling shows. That it was no longer was largely due to artists' organizations in Germany, chiefly the Blue Rider group, a large and amorphous body of painters, sculptors and writers started in Munich by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Directness of expression, unmediated purity of color and a faith in what Kandinsky called the "inner necessity": these were the watchwords, and what they helped produce--as in Alexej Jawlensky's Young Girl with Peonies, 1909--was a northern equivalent to what the Fauves had been painting beside the Mediterranean for some several years past.

Yet as the principles of the Blue Rider were taken up by the younger German artists who were the backbone of the expressionist movement, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Beckmann, it soon became clear that they were painting in a world apart from that of Matisse or Andre Derain. The kind of repose and certainty, not only of looking but also of pictorial procedure, that emanates from works like Matisse's Blue Window, 1911, was absent from German expressionism. The stomping figures of Nolde's Dance Before the Golden Calf, 1910, are a Matissean subject--a ring of dancing celebrants--but they are violent, heavy-set and robed in an apoplectic yellow that Matisse would almost certainly have found coarse. And whereas the countryside or the coastal village, seen as an undisturbed arcadia, is the backdrop to Fauve painting, expressionism made the city into a protagonist--the ravenous street, blazing with artificial light and imagined by Kirchner as a kind of menacing theater of neurosis, populated by thin, modish Liliths.

Kirchner's was the exemplary character of expressionism: a man of febrile intensity, lucid, narcissistic, self-ruinous (his collapse in 1917-18 was due partly to emotional anguish at the war but partly to a grave drug addiction) and relentlessly self-critical. He was as much a peintre maudit as Modigliani, but a far larger talent; beside him, the Fauves look calm and deliberate. His paintings were metaphors of anxiety. The constant agitation of line, the abruptly shuffled planes of leg or face, the pervading sense of irritability and impending breakdown-- all of this was indeed a long way from the prevailing forms of French experience.

Though Kirchner only developed in contact with the teeming life of the city, other expressionists, like Nolde, went to the remote extreme, painting rural scenes of an almost pre-Hesiodic primitiveness. Nevertheless, the basic content of radical German art, from 1910 onward, would be urban. The city was the theater of all human conflict, psychological or political; it was the relentless focus of Dadaism, the backdrop of expressionism, the obsessive subject of the reforms proposed by the constructivists and the Bauhaus group. In Germany the miseries of 20th century city life were articulated in art with as much care as the pleasures of Paris had been by the artists of France 50 years before. For this reason alone, German art is of vast importance to our retrospective grasp of the 20th century that we inhabit: for it was in Germany that art first showed what modern man could not endure to be. Robert Hughes

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