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From the Trenches to the Street:
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
The years 1914-1918 saw the loss of Europe's innocence, swiftly and horribly, in the form of a pan-European conflict that swept the nations with unprecedented levels of destruction, misery and loss of life. This was World War I, which brought not only the advent of modern technological warfare including the first use of chemical weapons, but warfare on a vast and undreamed-of scale, nightmarish landscapes of trenches and barbed wire, bodies crushed and buried in earth pulped by a hail of shells. From the Trenches to the Street: Art from Germany, 1910s-1920s focuses on German artists' response to the war itself and to the social and psychological aftermath in Germany in the decades that followed. Images of initial approval and the romance of battle swiftly gave way to sharp criticism, then to an obsessive focus on the extremes of social inequities after the war. Only a decade later did artists illustrate images of the war directly. From pompous generals and starving soldiers to a dead men in the trenches, the paintings and prints of From the Trenches are by turn critical, caustic, and grimly cathartic. August 1914 saw Germany's entry into the new war. Many Germans welcomed the conflict as a force for positive social change, and enthusiasm for the war was further encouraged by the popular press. Select works highlight images drawn from popular periodicals, including satire, sentimentality, and propagandistic images meant to inflame. A 1914 edition of Simplicissimus, the satirical German weekly, put the war on its cover as a burlesque of two marionettes, dangled about on a paper globe in mock battle with sword, shield and crested helmets, their strings manipulated by a grinning Pan figure with horns and hooves. A selection from the April 1915 issue of Jugend, another popular periodical, idealized the war with a sentimental image of three young soldiers in a trench, one keeping watch, the others sharing a moment of comradely music-making to the tune of a harmonica: all hearty, all jolly, all good fun in defending the country. Equally detached from reality were the propagandistic pictures introduced by Jugend, the inflammatory sting of such images as In Russia and In East Prussia illustrating purported outrage to nobly fallen German soldiers, an attempt to keep fervor high and justify Germany's participation in the war. At the same time, heroic images of the Kaiser lauded him as Germany's aristocratic leader. Only a few of such images are included, but they serve well enough as exemplary of the idealized bias of the popular press and the illusions of war it sought to maintain. War's realities were far starker; but such starkness was left to the conscience of individual artists to capture. Both during and after the war, artists focused on the the human cost of unbearable personal tensions, grotesque social inequities, the demoralized faces around them. They found release in a variety of expressions. Some illustrated the suffering of the individual, personalizing the effects of the war. Erich Heckel's sympathetic portrait A Hospital Attendant (The Hospital Attendant Hotzen) (woodcut: 1916) shows the effects of war reaching even to non-combat staff. The woodcut is carved with a brutal touch, raw, almost hacked. The face is scored with jagged, agonized lines, the veined hands carved likewise from ragged forms; all writhes around the still point of the centered pupils, trapped in a gaze of mingled disbelief and despair. Other artists stepped back, framing a more indirect criticism of Germany's participation in the war. Otto Wirsching's ten-print portfolio Vom Totentanz draws on the totentanz or danse macabre, an ancient motif of the end that comes to all men: Death, personified as a living skeleton. Wirsching's combination of satire, grimness and low humor are an adept modern rendition of the ancient theme, and these ten diminutive prints, each barely four inches square, are one of the highlights of the exhibition. On the title page of Vom Totentanz, Death is a tattered rogue of a general, peg-legged but undefeated, pointing his rod at an instructive chart showing the many useful ways a man may die. In The Gravedigger (plate 7) the skeletal form all but sweats at his shovel, digging a trench for the beastly youngster wailing in the middle distance. Wirsching's The Refugees (plate 8) parodies the Biblical image of The Flight Into Egypt and exemplifies the artist's skill in tight composition. Lights and darks, thrusts of action and restrained chaos are carved out in even strokes, filling every portion with elegantly controlled detail. Death in a loose greatcoat leads the patient donkey. They are in step together in the driving rain, the matching diagonals of their raised legs unifying them in their toil. On the donkey's back, a plump matron cradles her sleeping child. In the upper left and right hand corners, tiny scenes of catastrophe add a sense of foreboding: looters sacking a burning house, a tree struck by lightning. In other plates, a spy and a sniper, a vacationer and a stay-behind burgher gazing complacently from his museum window add to the cadre of modern personalities coming within Death's grasp. Where medieval depictions bubble with inhuman glee, Wirsching's Death has a world-weary modernness, a sense of grim duty, even, at times, a peasant-like resentfulness at having to work so long and so hard. All are testament to the suppleness of Wirsching's woodcut technique and his command of an air of grim humor. The war's end in 1918 ushered Germany into the era of the Weimar Republic, a democratic government formed to replace the broken rule of the Kaiser. Germany had been severely burdened with reparations for its role in instigating the war. Now its recovery was slow, its social fabric strained. Artists engaged in criticism of the aftereffects of the war, their vision unsparing, and often deeply unsettling. One expects war to be hell; but the vicissitudes of post-war 'peace' in this exhibition cast unfavorable light on some of the cruelest realities of human nature. Rich capitalists had grown richer. Maimed and impoverished soldiers and the war they symbolized, were precisely what the pleasure-seeking Weimar inhabitants wished to forget. The art of George Grosz features some of the most pointedly caustic images of this period. Grosz's satires involve the disparity between high and low -- between a rich, bloated individual, whether wartime capitalist or arrogant Prussian general, and the mean, starveling veteran who gave his all for his country, now kissing his superior's jackboot, or half trodden-on in his slumped begging pose by wealthy shoppers. Officer and Match Seller (1921) is a characteristic example, executed in Grosz's cartoon-like style, which generalized the criticism by presenting it in a farcical manner. More directly grim is the imagery of Sidewalk Cafe (brush and ink on paper: 1923-4), where just beyond the low barrier of the beer garden where the well-fed businessman enjoys a cigarette and a glass of champagne, a starving beggar, barefoot and corpselike, sprawls on the hard paving stones. Grosz is abundantly represented in this exhibition, including several of his large-scale prints from the series God With Us: Political Portfolio (1919), in which the images were so controversial at the time of its release that it was banned. While Grosz vented his bitter spleen, other artists captured imagery of the all-consuming despair, hopelessness and social alienation of this desolate period. Albert Birkle's Street Scene (charcoal on paper: 1922-3) is noteworthy among them, the faces showing every nuance, from the careless youth to the deep hopelessness of those without the cunning or connections to thrive in the postwar environment. Gerta Overbeck's Courtyard (oil on canvas: 1931) is a scene of mute loss, a depressed, ragged, empty farmyard in which an older man and woman work alone. Passage (ink on paper: 1930) by Edward Brown holds a Munch-like paranoia in the compressed curves of its subway station, evoking the tensions underlying daily life. All in all, vigilant as the Weimar artists were, it could also be argued that they focused too unsparingly, criticized too thoroughly, the dissatisfactions and problems they saw around them. They left no room for hope or rebuilding, and stirred up a national dissatisfaction that ultimately, again too eager for change and escape, paved the way for the dominating influence of the Third Reich. But that was yet to come. In the meantime, it took ten years' distance from the war's beginning for artists to illustrate it directly. Some now sought catharsis in memorialization of the grimmest realities. For Otto Dix, who had served through the war on both fronts, it came in the form of his etching series War (1924). Forty-seven prints from War are featured, representing approximately half the series. In War, Dix presents a macabre documentary of the gruesomeness of the trenches. Dix's death is far from a dance; Death has come and gone, and all that remains is its aftermath, the maiming and decay that rides in its trail. The corpse of a horse, belly swollen fantastically and all but bursting. Barren landscapes, pounded into a pulp of earth and flesh. Gibbets of barbed wire with fragments of men still on them. An earth embankment, queasy with decaying bodies. The brute remains of that which once was human, guts spilling onto the ground, grass and mould growing from the idiot heads. Dix's attention to detail is intense, obsessive, a personal exorcism of the sights carried within him. Where artists such as Kathe Kollwitz or Ernst Barlach (briefly represented here) present the heavy fold and sway of the lineaments of grief, Dix is an obsessive journalist of war's remains, recording the smallest of details that spare no element of the grotesque scene he is presenting. Titles such as Death By Gas (Templeux-La-Fosse, August 1916), Horse Cadaver, Wire Entanglement In Front of the Trench, and Shot to Pieces give an idea of the unsparing graphic content of the prints. As with Goya's print series The Disasters of War (1810s), Dix's War represents a first -- an eyewitness account of horrors, previously unillustrated. For those who had never been on the front, War would bring the macabre realities to life in a way more personal and more forceful than any verbal account. It continues to do so today. The final section of From the Trenches posits a return to non-war subjects in the form of oil paintings. Entitled "Reclaiming the Individual", it consists of portraits in oil by a variety of artists. For many reasons this inclusion seems incongruous: it incorporates the first few non-Germans (with the exception of Paul Klee, earlier in the exhibition), and the oil painting stands out as a strong difference in an exhibition composed primarily of prints. But most of all is its pronounced change of subject, which comes off more as an attempt to close the exhibition on a cheerful note than a logical next step for the German artists. Its thesis, that as the Weimar period "experienced economic and political stability" artists expressed their "longing for stabilization" by entering a new era of portraiture devoted to working-class individuals, is unconvincing. The impulse that drove so many artists to catharsis in illustrating the war would seem to have surged more forcefully into the distortions of German Expressionism than into a traditional type of portraiture. And as history bears out, the climax of the Weimar Republic was not stability, but dictatorship. the establishment in 1933 of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and Germany's entry into that which those who fought in the War to End All Wars hoped to prevent: World War II. More germane to the exhibition as a whole are two self-portraits, From The Trenches could easily have ended on Otto Dix's grim tour-de-force. It is a dark note, but a forceful one, one that brings home the forbidding realities with a jolt like a rifle shot: War is hell. Men die. Society's fabric is torn, and forgetfulness cannot be pulled on like a new shirt. For the Germans, romance, sentimentality, and heroism proved short-lived in the face of the destructive realities of World War I and its aftermath. Ascendant instead were images of scathing, perhaps even too-brutal truthfulness and censure. The print portfolio Vom Totentanz by Otto Wirsching, and selections from Otto Dix's portfolio War included here are particularly recommended as worth a special trip. From the Trenches to the Street: Art from Germany, 1910s-1920s is on exhibit through March 18, 2007. --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. |
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