Do you Believe in Magic?:Art in Weimar Germany.

"What I want to show in my work is the idea that hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible" - Max Beckmann.

For a free show, Tate Modern's Magic Realism:Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33 (but including works from at least a decade after) was impressively large and surprising comprehensive. It contained art that was sumptuous in colour, dark in subject matter, and often problematic. Not least in its depiction of women. Objectification and fetishisation hardly begin to cover some of the transgressive works on show (as we'll see later). It may be incorrect to judge actions from nearly a century ago by today's standards but, surely, there are some things that are always beyond the pale?

Getting your rocks off to women hanging dead from the ceiling, you'd think, would be one of them, but to add to the viewer's confusion some of the most concerning works were among some of the most artistically innovative. Challenging. In more than one sense of the word.

Max Beckmann - Anni (Girl with Fan) (1942)

Rudolf Schlichter - The Artist with Two Hanged Women (1924)

Rudolf Schlichter (one of many artists in the show I'd hitherto been unaware of) has depicted his spectral self indulging in one of his favourite masturbatory fantasies. These tended to include ladies in leather boots and ladies 'play-acting' at being hanged. Each to their own. Sex can be a confusing thing and everyone has their specific tastes, but as the show develops it seems that dishing out violence, sexual or otherwise, towards women becomes something of a recurring, and disturbing, theme.

This isn't an excuse. But perhaps it's a reason. Following the end of  World War I, many in Germany felt they'd been treated too harshly by the victors and the cost of the reparations had left Germans impoverished, uncertain, and looking for answers in the wrong places. One of the factors, certainly not the only one, that led to the rise of Hitler.

The artists who operated within the time of the short lived, between the wars, Weimar Republic were a disparate group. Some were vilified, ostracised, by the Nazis. Some left Germany to escape the Nazis. Some had their art banned by the Nazis. Others were celebrated by the regime and others, still, were ardent supporters of the Third Reich. While Schlichter's Artist with Two Hanged Women could be read as a warning against, or even a celebration of, extremist views it could also be seen as, admittedly kinky, reportage. With welfare cuts and mass unemployment the order of the day in 1920s Germany, suicide was rife and the tabloids of the time raked over the details with a tactless glee all too familiar to those who've ever picked up a copy of The Daily Mail. By mistake, hopefully.

I'd considered Schlichter's piece as the front cover of the blog but instead went for Max Beckmann's more enigmatic, and frankly more beautiful, Anni (Girl with Fan) because I didn't want to be seen to be celebrating, in any way, violence against women. Both Beckmann and Schlichter were denounced by the Nazis as 'degenerate art'. Schlichter was banned from exhibiting (and then had his studio destroyed by Allied bombs - shot by both sides indeed) and Beckmann escaped, first to Amsterdam, before eventually relocating to the US.

Beckmann's work is not completely free of the male gaze but exhibited next to Schlichter and others it has an innocence that makes it far more forgivable. Lustmord (or 'sex murder') cropped up alarmingly frequently in Weimar culture. Alfred Doblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz opens with the chief protagonist being released from prison after serving a sentence for murdering a sex worker and in the same year Georg Wilhelm Pabst directed the film Pandora's Box in which the heroine (Lulu, played by Louise Brooks) is driven to prostitution and has the misfortune of having Jack the Ripper as her first 'trick'. Thus coming to a predictably grisly end.

This misogyny and violence could hardly fail to seep into the national mood and, of course, the painting of the time. Otto Dix may not have been a misogynist, or to use the current euphemism - a 'dinosaur', but the idea that his paintings were simply metaphorical illustrations of a society turning in on itself loses some of its currency when, with each new image, it's always the woman suffering at the hands of the man.

Of course, that could be exactly what he was trying to say all along. These are the decisions both artists and those who write about art are faced with all the time. Elsewhere, we can compare the fetishistic works of Otto Griebel with the more painterly, nuanced approach of Lovis Corinth's fleshy Mary Magdalene. Griebel's women, to me, are naked while Corinth's Magdalene is nude.

It's a distinction I read somewhere in which nudity is the state of being without clothes (except high heels and a pair of black stockings in Griebel's work) at one's own behest whilst nakedness is a form of exposure that has been demanded or forced upon the subject. It's a simple case of choosing to make one's sitter a subject or an object. Corinth's work seems to me a precursor, and thus surely an influence, on British portrait painters like Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, and William Coldstream. There's a humanity to it that's lacking in Griebel, and even Dix.

Otto Dix - Lust Murder (1922)

 

Otto Dix - Lust Murderer (1920)

Otto Griebel - Two Women (1924)

 

 Lovis Corinth - Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair (1919)

George Grosz - Self-Portrait with Model in the Studio (1930-37)



George Grosz - Suicide (1916)

George Grosz's Self-Portrait with Model in the Studio seems to have influenced the makers of saucy seaside postcards more than Lucian Freud. It's only one string to Grosz's bow because he, too, was not adverse to painting the horrors of his age. His 1916 Suicide is bathed in blood red paint, there's a dead animal joining the dead man, and, of course, there's a woman flashing her boobs and a bit of her bush.

Grosz, a 'verist', aimed to satirise and expose the church, the middle classes, and the military. One suicide, in a presumably seedy bar, is supposed to represent a symptom of a wider social malaise following the end of the Great War. Things didn't really improve over the next couple of decades and they soon got, as we all know, considerably worse. About as bad as things have ever got.

There's a timeline as you enter the show that takes us from the end of World War I and the creation of the Weimar government to the Reichstag fire and Hitler's appointment as Chancellor via the worldwide economic crisis set off by the crash in the New York stock exchange, mass unemployment across Europe, and the German banning of socialist and communist parties.

Culturally it was the time of the Bauhaus, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Rainer Marie Rilke's Duino Elegies, F W Murna's Nosferatu, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera and Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich. In 1925 the exhibition New Objectivity:German Art since Expressionism opened in Mannheim before touring the country and Franz Roh published the book Post-Expressionism - Magic Realism:Problems of the New European Painting.

Which was something of an eye opener for me. I'd always thought of magic, or magical, realism as predominantly a Latin America thing (Gabriel Garcia Marquez was Colombian, Jorge Luis Borges Argentinian, and Alejo Carpentier grew up in Cuba) but it turns out I'd been wrong all along - and even a simple glance at Wikipedia would have told me this.

It was Roh who coined the phrase and came up with many of the ideas that would later be associated with the loose movement. He'd observed German artists moving away from the idealist, romantic tendencies that had informed their work before the war and identified two new approaches becoming prevalent. The first were the classical artists who tended to record everyday life through precise observation and the second were the verists, Grosz etc;, who employed satire and distortion to expose social inequalities. Both groups had 'an eye for the uncanny and the grotesque' and, because of this, and when they weren't painting women being hanged or people killing themselves, they found great nourishment in the circus. A place where fear and desire are played out within reasonably safe boundaries but also a place for weirdos, misfits, and taboo busters. For the people they wanted to be, basically.

Otto Dix - Circus:International Riding Act (1922)



Otto Dix - Circus:Illusion Act (1922)

Albert Birkle - The Acrobat Schulz V (1921)

Otto Dix - Circus Scene (Riding Act) (1923)

Otto Dix had been traumatised by his experiences as a soldier at the Battle of the Somme and it's believed that his Circus series was, in some small way, his method of coming to terms with what he'd witnessed. A coping mechanism where the oddness of the circus and all that goes on there stands in lieu of the horrors of war.

Paul Klee had seen close friends and fellow artists (Franz Marc, for example) die in the war and he took a more abstracted approach. Inspired by student parties and theatrical performances, Klee's work proved highly influential if slippery to pin down. He had a foot in both the surrealist and the cubist camps and, often, when art historical narratives are presented he falls between the two stools and is sometimes all but ignored but one look at 1921's Comedy and you can see he is worthy of a place at the top table along with Wifredo Lam, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and even Pablo Picasso. Why, he even inspired this blogger. My Facebook photo album of artworks, Taking a line for a walk:Journeys into the art of London, was inspired by a famous Klee quote.

Paul Klee - Comedy (1921)

Heinrich Campendonk - The Rider II (1919)

Marc Chagall - The Green Donkey (1911)

While Klee looked east towards abstracted patterns other German artists were celebrating bold, bright, and frankly unnatural colours. You can see the influence of Henri Matisse and Andre Derain's fauvism in the work of Heinrich Campendonk but also that of contemporary Russian artists. That's not surprising when you consider that the excellently monikered Campendonk was associated with the Munich based group of post-expressionists called Der Blaue Reiter. A group that had been founded by Russian emigrants like Kandinsky and Jawlensky. Marc Chagall may have painted his Green Donkey in Paris but he was born in Vitebsk, now in Belarus but then part of the Russian empire.

An empire that crumbled and gave way to the Soviet Union less than a decade after The Green Donkey was painted. The world was changing, and changing fast. The philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin remarked that "a generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn street car now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds".

Conrad Felixmuller - Portrait of Ernst Bucholz (1921)

Otto Dix - Portrait of Bruno Alexander Roscher (1915)

And art, as ever, both imitated life and influenced it. Vaguely realistic portraits of military men posing in their uniforms or with their medals were soon sharing gallery space with riots of colour, compositions painted from unorthodox angles, and a fucking giant man in a red suit sat in front of a landscape that belongs more in science fiction than in Western Europe!

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen's portrait of the poet and critic Theodor Daubler is truly an extraordinary piece of work. Daubler had written about the contemporary Italian metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico who was an important influence on many of the German artists in this show, in one instance there's an outright rip off of de Chirico. I love the red of Daubler's suit, I love the blue of the oceans behind him, the purple of the mountains, and the verdant green grass but, most of all, I love the two tiny figures to the side of Daubler's right leg who look up towards him in what appears to be awe but could be fear. This play on scale, to me, makes Davringhausen's work the most magical realist of all on show here - and there are plenty of contenders.

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen - The Poet Daubler (1917)

Harry Heinrich Deierling - The Gardener (1920)

There's something about Davringhausen's Daubler, and Harry Heinrich Deierling's Gardener too, that seems to speak of a need, a desire, for a reawakening, a new start. I shy away from the woolly word 'spiritual' as much as I can but here it seems an appropriate adjective. The 'spirituality' in these paintings is a vague one, a necessary wish for something larger, something better, that seems to come through in times of hardship and uncertainty (there are nods to Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and Rabindranath Tagore's universalist Hinduism). It's not an answer but, perhaps, it is solace. It's certainly better than seeking the answers in Hitler, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, or Brexit.

Richard Muller's quirky painting of a man in an atelier full of classical statuary seeking to evict a gatecrashing bird stands in stark contrast with the fact that the artist was later adopted by the Nazi regime. It served him well at the time but he's all but forgotten now, he hasn't even got a Wikipedia page, which seems fair enough. If you choose to tie your colours to the fascist mast then you should suffer the consequences. Ignominy surely awaits.

Conrad Felixmuller had his work seized by the Nazis as degenerate art but he's got a Wikipedia page so shove that in your rohr and smoke it, Muller. It's hardly a surprise that Hitler and his gang didn't like Felixmuller. They did their best to paint an idealised portrait of Germany and images of beggars, even if they were specifically identified as being in Czechoslovakia rather than Germany, were not the sort of thing they felt the public should be exposed to. Beggars needed to be painted as societal sponges, not with sympathy or empathy. Next to The Beggar of Prachatice a notice informs us that "the cobbled street seems to buckle in sympathy with the fallen man". 

Richard Muller - In the Studio (1926)

Conrad Felixmuller - The Beggar of Prachatice (1924)

Other street scenes and architectural set pieces appear more traditional, and less moralistic, in their design. If no less aesthetically pleasing. Carl Grossberg's Rokin seems to borrow the flattened perspectives of Winifred Knights and make a path for the monumental grandeur of American artists like Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford that would follow in a decade or so's time, while Albert Birkle's Passau, a Lower Bavarian town on the Danube, is a touch more impressionistic but only marginally less satisfying.  

While cities were prettified or celebrated for their existing beauty so too, of course, were women. It wasn't all murder and suicide, some of the portraits were remarkable more for their capturing the mood of the time or the sitter than for anything shocking or gory. In fact, in many it is the backgrounds where the painter lets their imagination run free, while the sitter is portrayed, often, with a dignified confidence and, even more often, with an impenetrable gaze. It's as if the women in these paintings are staring back at us, the viewers of them, to see how much we'd like being critically invigilated to the degree they have.

Carl Grossberg - Rokin (Rokin Street, Amsterdam) (1925)

Albert Birkle - Passau (1925)

Karl Otto Hy - Anna (1932)

Hans Grundig - Girl with Pink Hat (1925)

They range from Karl Otto Hy's slightly mundane interior and expressionless Anna to Hans Grundig's quirky (a word, like 'spiritual', normally to be avoided but, hey, it's 2019 - new rules) Girl with Pink Hat and on to Herbert Gurschner's Japanese Lady. It's a great painting but it has to be said there is something about it that suggests Gurschner was guilty of exoticising the Oriental. It was painted ten years before Edward Said was born but his theories on Orientalism would find a receptive audience in those looking at this painting with critical eyes. 

Unlike Karl Otto Hy and even our old friend Rudolf Schlichter (Speedy with the Moon, the subtitle of Lady with Red Scarf, refers to the sitter's name - Speedy), Gurschner seems not to have bothered finding out his subject's name. Japanese Lady will do. These foreign names can be a bit tricky.

Certainly Schlichter seems to have undergone something of a 'journey' in the nine years since we saw him jacking off to the dangling corpses of dead women. He'd got hitched. To Speedy. Or to give her her non-Anglicised name, Elfriede Koehler. It certainly seems to be a far more loving depiction than he'd been capable of a decade earlier.

Rudolf Schlichter - Lady with Red Scarf (Speedy with the Moon) (1933)

Herbert Gurschner - Japanese Lady (1932)

Josef Eberz - Dancer (Beatrice Mariagraetel) (1923)

 

 Jeanne Mammen - Boring Dolls (1929)

If you weren't painting women (or fantasing about killing them) you could go to the cabaret to see them dressed as harlequins or performing song and dance routines. Cabaret is probably the art form that best represents the Weimar Republic's mix of decadence, satire, and potential sexual deviancy but, at its heart, it was a tolerant place where you could share a drink or a chat with people from all different cultures and countries. Rare for the time, the women of the Weimar Republic could visit bars (and cabarets) without the same degree of scrutiny or judgement as in Germany, or elsewhere, before.

In the case of Jeanne Mammen, this meant she was able to paint female portraits from a female perspective and in the unfortunately titled Boring Dolls she's done just this - with no little panache. When the Nazis gained power Mammen was told her work was too 'Jewish', too lesbian, and that the women portrayed weren't submissive enough. She was given the option of changing her art but refused to comply with Nazi demands. Throughout the war she practiced an 'inner emigration' that saw her paint in private and sell books on the street to survive. Only resuming in public as a painter after the end of World War II. A good egg, basically.

Prosper de Troyer - Erik Satie (The Prelude) (1925)

On entering the final room of the exhibition me and my accomplice Anita were warned of adult and disturbing material. But how could an exhibition that comes to a fairly abrupt end with the rise of Nazism be anything but disturbing?  

With the Vatican's neutrality during the rise of the Nazis seen as all but a tacit approval of the regime artists rejected Christian imagery and even went so far as to manipulating and distorting Renaissance tropes to their own ends, often to mock Christian beliefs or suggest, at the very least, a new kind of religion. It didn't stop the Nazis becoming ever more powerful, ever more amoral, and ever more murderous. In fact, there is even a suggestion that in some way this mocking of, and violent critique, of German Christian values helped foster more support for Hitler and his goons.

Gurschner's paintings, particularly 1927's Triumph of Death, may have been held in such high regard that he earned comparisons with Giotto and Paolo Uccello and Albert Birkle's 1921 Crucifixion may have been mentioned in the same breath as Matthias Grunewald's 16c Isenheim Altarpiece but these were mostly being seen in the UK and France while in Germany more pressing concerns were occupying people's time. Like trying to avoid being gassed to death.

Herbert Gurschner - Triumph of Death (1927)

Herbert Gurschner - The Annunciation (1929-30)

Herbert Gurschner - Lazarus (The Workers) (1928)

Albert Birkle - Crucifixion (1921)

Albert Birkle - The Hermit (1921)

Lea Grundig - Into the Abyss (1943)

Lea Grundig became a member of the German Communist Party in 1926 and was, ethnically though not religiously, Jewish (she'd upset her father by marrying out of the Jewish community in 1928). By 1933 the Nazis had made membership of any other political party except their own illegal. Her work was banned, she was arrested twice, found guilty of high treason, and served four months in prison. On serving her sentence she emigrated to a refugee camp in Slovakia before moving as an exile to a British internment camp in Palestine. 

On her release in 1948 she continued with both her art and her Communist activities, visiting China, Cuba, and Cambodia. But the needless horror of war never left her and often informed her dark and unsettling images. Into the Abyss would have been painted during her time interned in Palestine and it shows the world, and its people, descending into a hell of their own making. It seemed an apt way to end the exhibition and, for me, an apt way of ending my first blog of 2019. A year in which, if we're not both vigilant and active, we will see our own world take one more fateful step in the same direction. It's up to us to do what we can to make sure that does not happen.

"Today I no longer hate people indiscriminately. Today I hate their bad institutions and those who defend these institutions" - George Grosz.