Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...German Art in the 20th Century," the huge show of some 300 works by 52 artists that has been the talk of London since it opened at the Royal Academy in October, has a clear agenda. It wants to prove something, and that something is continuity, from...
...persuasively does "German Art in the 20th Century" support this argument? As conceived by Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, the first part of the show--painting and sculpture between 1905 and 1933--makes a brilliant case. (It especially needed to be made in London, which has not had a major survey of German expressionism since 1938.) Admittedly, there are some weak patches at the beginning. For some reason, the curators did not include any of the triptychs that were Beckmann's crowning achievement as a pictorial fabulist; and so, despite the presence of two or three...
...museum has ever mounted a better anthology of early German modernism. One sees all the parts of the expressionist project of inoculating the 20th century against its own creeping materialism, an aim that cast itself, in large ecstatic terms, as the liberation of the repressed self from the bonds of history and convention. The idea that painting could do this was one of the reigning ideals of early modern art; today it is hardly more than sales talk. But when Max Beckmann declared that he wanted his paintings to "accuse God of everything he has done wrong," he meant just...
...Reiter groups (there is a particularly fine sequence of early Kandinskys); but it is strong on artists who belonged to neither, such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose war-induced suicide in 1919 at the age of 38 truncated what might have been one of the great sculptural oeuvres of the 20th century. The best coup is to have reunited the two completed parts of Grosz's blistering anti-establishment triptych of 1926, Eclipse of the Sun and Pillars of Society. The latter, with its beer-hall vision of the coming new order--a servile journalist wearing a chamber pot, a flabby...
Finally, there is the problem of the missing Nazi years. It is a fixed belief in most circles that officially accepted Nazi art was so bad that it cannot be disinterred and looked at. The trouble is that Nazi art was, to put it mildly, both German and 20th century, and its complete absence from this exhibition leaves the kind of hole one would expect a huge radioactive hot potato to make when dropped. It is the concealed background against which the achievements of Beuys and Kiefer have to be seen, since a large part of their work...