The Didactic Impulse: German Expressionism At MoMA

[New York Peasant by Wilfrid:  July 4, 2011]

A busy couple of days in the run up to the holiday weekend.  I attended an event to save the seals (more later); I ran over to Poet's House to survey their annual showcase of poetry books published nationwide; I got to bed at 2.43 am following a cabaret performance at D-Lounge; and I scrambled to MoMA to see "German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse."

Well it closes July 11, so there was no more delaying.

I've been familiar with and moderately partial to expressionism for a very, very long time.  The first thing to say (dear reader, you know it already, but MoMA won't tell you) is that expressionism was not exclusively or even primarily a movement in the fine arts.

Yes, "the graphic impulse" and all that (by which MoMA means there are lots of posters and lithographs - just as there would be in a show about Toulouse Lautrecq).  But expressionism - unlike cubism, say, or fauvism - was a general tendency in European modernism, beginning around the turn of the century and being swept aside in the years leading up to the Second World War.  Its base, after all, had always been in Germany and Austria, and it could only be anathema to fascism - to thirties communism, in large part, too.

I had hoped MoMA would display an interesting curatorial angle.  Indeed, following the imaginative, large-scale, multi-media installations devoted to Dalí and Dada I thought MoMA might take advantage of its space to present the many facets of expressionism.  Imagine being surrounded by its harsh, jagged images while M or Das Kabinet des Dr Caligari or M showed on an overhead screen with brief orchestral interventions by Berg as the soundtrack.

But no, graphics it is, so paintings, drawings, woodcuts, newspapers, magazines.  The story is presented in linear fashion.  First the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups developing aggressively colored portraits and landscapes (Kandinsky on his way to abstraction).  Then a nod to Schiele and Kokoschka in Austria.  The full flowering under the Weimar Republic.  Then the horrific pictorial analysis by Grosz, Dix and Beckmann of a society in decay, in collapse and at war.

Thus summed up, what a miserable experience expressionism was.  Announced as a utopian project in the arts, using powerful color and line to manifest extreme human emotion - including previously suppressed states of being (it owes plenty to Freud), but finishing up as a savage record of dissipation and mutilation.  Germany hated itself in the 1920s - and not without reason - and we all know what happened next.

Many, many familiar images accompany this straightforward account and I had a sense that I was repeating several visits to the Neue Galerie which has explored some of themes here in smaller, more focused shows.  I reviewed that gallery's presentation of Kirchner's street scenes. Here they are again, and well worth seeing.  The N.G. features plenty of Schiele and Kokoschka - there are slim pickings here.  Strindberg doesn't show up in the MoMA exhibit at all (no, he's not German; but nor was Kandinsky): you can see his strangely gnyaecological landscapes uptown.

Good to see a number of works by Max Pechstein - easily overlooked in this company.  Emil Nolde's series of lithographs entitled "Young Couple" has a sly elegance.  There's Beckmann's startling deposition from the cross.  I finally realized why Christ looks so irredeemably dead in the painting.  In Caravaggio's entombment, the corpse has such lolling weight the viewer finds it impossible to imagine life returning to it.  In Beckmann's painting the cadaver is absolutely stiff.  Rigid.  It's a shocking work.

There's no fun to be had reviewing the visual diaries of famine, corruption and death which haunt the final galleries of the show.  Käthe Kollwitz's woodcuts remain utterly harrowing (I would like to have seen more of Schmidt-Rotluff's: they have a monolithic, mythical grandeur).  The only glimpse of a more expansive future lies in early signs of Beckmann's artistic evolution.  Unlike most of the painters represented here, he survived expressionism and far exceeded it.

A somewhat educational show if you haven't done expressionism 101 - but no revelations.  And to succeed more fully in its pedagogical purpose, it should at least tell viewers about German cinema of that period, the poetry of Trakl and Benn, the cabaret-theater of Wedekind, the plays of Toller and Kaiser and Berg's operatic adaptations of Wedekind and Woyzeck. 

Here's the page.