Upending the New German Chic

By ROBERT HUGHES

Neoexpressionism enters the flophouse of late modernity

The art market used to need movements, isms, to kick it along--to make art seem to be going somewhere, so that by collecting it one rode the train of history. Not any more. Today nationality is enough. Dealers who made fortunes in the '60s and '70s stuffing American art down European throats are now selling Europeans to Americans; beneath all the excited talk of how American cultural imperialism has at last been rejected, and how national artists in Germany or Italy dominate the cultural horizon, the same mechanisms of the market grind imperturbably on. Last year it was young Italian artists--Cucchi, Chia, Clemente; this year, Germans.

The current mode is "neo-expressionism." It has become the designer jeans of the art industry. Thus one tends to bring mingled curiosity and skepticism to the shows by German painters that have filled half a dozen Manhattan galleries in recent weeks. The neoexpressionists are presented as missionary confreres: burning with social idealism and certified angst, robed in rough paint (crudity equals sincerity) and the turgid hyperbole of German critics. Their work is meant to evoke the fervor and spiritual elevation of German art in the '20s--Nolde, Beckmann, Kirchner, Macke. If only it could! What we get, it turns out, is more art about art about art, another small room in the mirror-lined flophouse of late modernity. This sort of idealist regression seems either contrived or inept, and sometimes both. It mimics deep feeling, but in an oblique and often perfunctory way.

The best of the Germans is probably A.R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler), who was on show at the Sonnabend Gallery. An East German emigre to the West, he does mock-archaeological images blown up to "American" size. On a flat ground, flat pictographs: Ariadne holding her thread, Theseus as a stick figure with spear, a Minotaur. This primitivism is meant to suggest a heroic Aegean prehistory, a lost age when sibyls muttered in every cleft, and any scratch or spiral meant something. But Penck's images are mere quotation suffused with graphic charm; they are little more than the husks of myth, the ornamental posing as the archetypal. Of course, one could say much the same about some of Paul Klee's output--to name but one of the modern primitivizers to whom Penck is now compared--but there is a portentousness in Penck's graffiti that rarely surfaced in Klee.

Anyway, why should one care about this schematic myth-wagging inside an art gallery when its limitations would be obvious anywhere else? The difference between archaic or tribal art and new art that feigns an archaic or tribal look is that the former was once dense with social meaning, whereas the latter, being deracinated and arbitrary, has little or none. But romanticizing the primitive, along with the instinctive and the natural, was central to expressionism in the '20s, and must be revived along with its look.

At the Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Georg Baselitz's paintings are on view. Baselitz does churned, splashy paintings a la Nolde of traditional subjects--bicyclists, bathers, folk eating or drinking--and then hangs them upside down. A bottle dangles from a table; a sunbather, glued to the sand at the top of the canvas, stares down into the sky. This monotonous gimmick has, for some inscrutable reason, made Baselitz into a star of the German art world. He is a hammy and forceful draftsman, and not without occasional merit as a colorist; there is quite a punch to the way he can send an array of blue-green blobs (bicycle wheels, it turns out) across the yellow surface of The Girls from Olmo, 1981.

By upending his paintings, Baselitz probably wants to give them a fillip of insecurity that will push them beyond the normal level of expressionist doubt. But they are so roughly drawn that the illusion fails to hold. His message is muffled by the means--a common problem with the new Germans, as one can see in the work of Markus Lupertz (at the Marian Goodman Gallery). His paintings are generally pastiches of cubist still life, rendered in a gummy array of brush strokes that enforce a gratuitous confusion on the surface.

With younger artists, the level seems to fall quite steeply away from these modest accomplishments. Two of them are showing in SoHo: Rainer Petting at the Mary Boone Gallery, and Salome (whose real name is Wolfgang Cilarz) at Annina Nosei. Salome does thin sloppy parodies of Ingres's Turkish Bath, featuring men instead of women: yard after yard of dummy-pink flesh, bald heads and sweet smiles. The model is apparently Action Man, the macho doll, with his uniform off. Zero out of ten for pictorial construction, maybe two for color, and zero again for drawing; rubbish like this is so campy and perfunctory as to be, in a sense, beyond criticism.

If Rainer Fetting's work looks marginally better than this, it is only because he looks more sinister; his male nudes, instead of prancing lightly about, glower at one another or look meaningfully at a medieval broadax propped in the corner; their feet are enormous, like seals' flippers. His color, unlike Salome's rose candy, has a portentously fulgid air--carmine, viridian, black. The melodrama of all this would be obvious in the context of heterosexual imagery. Because Fetting's main subject is homosexual encounter, his work acquires a false glaze of "radical" appetite and emotion. In fact, its eloquence is fustian. There is deeper feeling in two square inches of a Beckmann.

All this aggro-and-bother, the relentless fortissimo of neoexpressionism, points in one direction only: the past. It is mere style, intended to mask a deeper anxiety--that painting itself may be running down to silence, because it opposes nothing. What does this expressionist revival stand for? Perhaps little more than painting's ability to multiply salable relics of the artist's self. And that, however one interprets the game, was not what the Germans had in mind three generations ago.

--By Robert Hughes

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