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.
Review by GAIL S. MYHRE
July 22, 2009
At their best, museum exhibitions present a novel way of looking at the art shown and shed new light on specific periods or genres. Of course, this is relatively rare. Many special installations today, designed to appeal to a wide audience, showcase art with which the viewer is already comfortable.
In the catalogue for Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, a landmark exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (November 14, 2006-February 19, 2007), we have a wonderful synthesis of the familiar and the new. For the first time in recent history, the assemblage of portraits in the style of Verism, a branch of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), forces us to examine these images as a separate entity within the movement and provides us with a fresh interpretation of how certain artists viewed the people around them.
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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 |
We're already familiar with Verism's artistic idiom. Our cultural consciousness includes an image of Weimar Germany, one crackling with sexual tension, decadence and doom.
The catalogue's portraits penetrate beyond a surface view by exposing two main types of model: the social outcast used and discarded by society; and the bourgeois businessman who was Weimar Germany's beneficiary and its victim. The irony here is that at bottom, both types are the same. These people were all twisted by unbearable social pressures. Even the self-portraits are decadent and dislikable. This was Verism's purpose. Its artists painted their subjects hyper-realistically to the point of distortion, laying bare a certain psychological reality.
Coupled with social and political disaffection, the results are scathing. Verism's application to perfectly ordinary-looking people renders them beyond recognition. This is true of Otto Dix's works in particular. The portrait of Dr. Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann (1890-1945) is expanded by the artist into an unrecognizable bloat, while in his painting Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann (1920), the Dresden psychiatrist (1865-1948) is pale and drawn, with eyes that shine with anxious ill-health.
Similarly, actual disfigurement, whether physical or psychological, is exaggerated. In Dix's painting Skat Players (1920), three World War I veterans are rendered in grotesque detail. They possess neither a full complement of arms and legs nor an unmarked face. In The Eclipse of the Sun (1926) by George Grosz, the German president Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) growls floridly with bared teeth while a piggish industrialist whispers direction into his ear.
Even the most true-to-life portrayals display moral degeneracy. In the iconic cover image for this catalogue, Christian Schad's oil Count St. Genois d'Anneaucourt (1927), elegant in evening clothes, stands before two figures in sheer gowns. They eye each other as if rivals for his attention, one a severe and mannish woman, the other a transvestite.
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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 |
The Verists did not spare themselves critical disapproval. In his Self-Portrait (1927), Schad sits on a rumpled bed with a naked woman. They are completely indifferent to each other, the artist scowling at the viewer while the heavy-lidded woman gazes away. A narcissus flower, the symbol of the true basis of their relationship, hangs between them in the background. A Self-Portrait by Max Beckmann (1884-1950) places him in a nightclub, holding a glass of champagne. Its perspective is badly skewed; only the champagne is upright and unaffected. In this disordered setting, Beckmann touches his shoulder languidly and sneers.
As might be expected from the subject matter, most of these artists were acutely political. Dix served as a gunner during World War I. He produced a "cartoon" self-portrait, How I Looked as a Soldier (1924), that portrays himself as a lowering brute with machine gun. Grosz was a staunch Communist. His loathing of corrupt politicians and profiteers is seen clearly in Gray Day (1921), where he quite deliberately places a wall between the fat cross-eyed bureaucrat and the crippled veteran who walks unnoticed behind him.
Unsurprisingly, the only figures treated by the Verists with sympathy are the down-and-out, the 
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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 |
working class stiffs. Otto Dix's The Poet Iwar von Lücken (1926) depicts its subject, an impoverished baron, as gangling and mild in muted tones. In Rudolf Schlichter's portrait of the prostitute Margot (1924), the model, garbed in simple, no-nonsense clothing, might be any of the thousands of respectable working ladies living in Berlin at the time; only her heavy eyelids and the professional callousness of her features hint at her profession.
Of this society it has been asked, "How could they have done nothing?" The answer shouts from every picture in this exhibition's catalogue. These people did nothing because they felt helpless in the face of completely inimical historical forces. And in the end, this attitude proved essentially correct, as their society first imploded, and then exploded, setting the world afire. In the ensuing conflagration of World War II, many of these artists' works were banned as "degenerate", and in fact several of Dix's and Grosz's works were exhibited at the "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.
In bringing Verist portraiture together in a single museum presentation for the first time, this exhibition catalogue encourages us to see the human face of this extravagant, short-lived culture. We can look at the artists and their work with the advantage of hindsight and criticize. But we are forced also to understand, and ultimately to admire, their terrible clarity of vision.