Modern in the Dark

Last week Munich saw the first comprehensive show of new German art since the war. Held in Hitler's onetime headquarters, the massive FUehrerbauhaus, it contained not a single blond Balder, buxom BrUennhilde or veiled Valhalla of the sort Hitler had liked to see. There were few still lifes or portraits either, and surprisingly few bitter or tragic pictures such as George Grosz and Kathe Kollwitz had made between wars. Instead of all that, the best young German painters were doing abstractions, by the acre.

The exhibition was sponsored by an Independence, Mo. art patron and good friend of Harry Truman named Blevins Davis, who had been impressed by contemporary German painting while on a tour last summer. Confined to artists under 40, it offered top prizes of $1,000 and $700, plus trips to the U.S., Rome and Paris, drew 3,600 entries. A ten-man inter national jury had hung only 175 of the canvases submitted, but prune as they would, they could not rid the show of its generally sterile atmosphere.

By driving such fine artists as Grosz, Josef Albers, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann from the country, by persecuting the few moderns who remained, and by turning their students into soldiers, Hitler had crushed Germany's art tradition. Still cut off from the art of other nations, her new painters were going modern in the dark, groping and hoping for success.

In such confused company, even such a faintly authoritative canvas as 24-year-old Max Imdahl's third-prize Man of Sorrow came as a shock. Imdahl would rather write novels, he says, "but I'm so much at a loss for words that I find even simple conversation painful. I want to compose songs, but how to do so is beyond me. So I paint." His Man was a flat, featureless, lemon-yellow figure with a broken-looking neck, suspended against a pitch-black background. It could well symbolize the state of art in Germany.

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