German Expressionism Lives

By ROBERT HUGHES

A resurgence of powerful images by five exemplary figures

Neoexpressionism, New Figuration, heftige Malerei--whatever the name may be--German figurative painting is at present the most hotly disputed stock on the Big Board of art. The arguments about it are going to go on for quite a while, partly because few generalizations hold across a field of painters whose work varies so wildly in meaning and quality. What can be said of raucous ephemerids like Rainer Petting that will also apply to deeper men like Anselm Kiefer? The Germans, understandably, have extolled all of it because the resurgence of expressionist figuration offers a way out of the cul-de-sac in which German painting and sculpture found themselves after 1945. Hitler had trashed the avantgarde, driving modernism into exile or up the chimney. For a quarter of a century after that, German artists wore the virtuous American uniform of abstract art, as proof of their denazification. Now they breathe easier among their inherited imagery. At the same time, although there have been many dealers' shows of recent German art in America, museums have been slow to react to it. Consequently the exhibition that opened in June at the St. Louis Art Museum, and will go to New York City's PS. 1, a gallery housed in a former public school, in September, is of great interest: it is the first systematic museum show of this material in America. Art Historian Jack Cowart, who assembled it, wisely refrained from trying to cover everyone. Instead, he chose five "exemplary" figures, the most influential and (although his catalogue essay waffles on this point) the aesthetically superior ones: Georg Baselitz, Joerg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Luepertz and A.R. Penck.

Baselitz's art is the least "real" of the five: thick, ropy painting that takes a stand among images of the physical world but ends up looking quite unconcerned with them. He paints bathers, bottles or trees upside down, without offering a moment's access of feeling to this body, this vessel, this plant. His art is all generalization. Baselitz, 45, calls his subjects motifs, and that is what a motif is--a repeatable module on which an act of painting can be displayed. You take a motif and rough it up; then you take another motif and rough that up in much the same way: a potentially infinite series. It is not surprising that for all its bombinating diction (like a sentence wholly composed of capital letters and exclamation points), his work suffers from the monotony that plagued late abstract expressionism in the U.S. The shock value of painting things upside down wears off with use. It begins as an arbitrary gimmick, meant to convey Baselitz's sense of the world's insecurity; it ends as a reassuring convention, directing one's gaze to the abstract qualities of the painting. Certainly, no one could say Baselitz lacks pictorial flair. When he is in full cry, slathering the surface with that thick and turbid pigment, now layered in grit and now applied with a kind of skidding creaminess, he achieves a fluency of rhetoric that does much to animate the more standardized conventions of his work. His sculpture is another matter. Nothing, not even the passionate exhortations of the Greens, could make you feel sorrier for a tree than the sight of Baselitz's wooden totems, hacked and mauled with a chain saw.

A.R. Penck, 43, is a lesser painter and sculptor than Baselitz, but he is a more curious figure. Credit where credit is due: his huge early pictographs like Standard, 1971, have an undeniable, simple power, even a degree of mystery. One realizes where a New York graffiti artist like the fulsomely promoted Keith Haring, 25--the Peter Max of the subways--filched his ideas, a decade later. Penck's paintings consist of stick figures and linear signs, enacting parodies of myth, ritual and archaic language. They draw on a wide range of sources, from algebra to Dipylon vases, from set theory and scribbles on the Berlin Wall to American Indian petroglyphs. Like a lot of earlier modernist art, they quote the "primitive" forms out of all cultural context, stubbornly, like someone repeating a misunderstood spell.

Penck's obsessive loquacity and mock-ritual imagery are apt to cause inflation. "He is like the North Pole," rhapsodizes Curator Cowart, "that place which attracts the navigational magnetic compass from afar but repels and disorients it when approached." The more modest truth, for those with unwiggled needles, is that Penck's imagery is often so obscure that he seems to feel no special responsibility to the system he deploys. A lot of the paintings are mumbo jumbo, and their formal attributes can be remarkably trite--cliche figure-ground reversals, careless scrawly drawing.

The last time Markus Luepertz, 42, exhibited in New York, at the Marian Goodman Gallery in 1982, he showed what appeared to be lumbering versions of late cubism. His room in St. Louis represents a great advance. He likes to call his images dithyrambs--a word meaning, in ancient Greek, wild ecstatic chants in honor of Dionysus. Actually, what his work suggests is less the stamp of maenadic sandals than the methodical plod of a German art teacher, but never mind: here he comes across as an unexpectedly lyrical colorist, and a huge triptych, Cupid and Psyche, 1978-79, glows with erotic energy dispite its academic-cubist drawing. Orpheusin Hell, 1982, wears with panache its borrowings from '30s Picasso and Masson, and the demon figure in the darkness (at which Orpheus stares in profile, his red goatee making him look like an 1870s piano teacher) has some of the totemic character that early Pollocks used to draw from those same sources.

The wild card among the five is Joerg Immendorff, 38. Immendorff is entirely a political artist but not an ideologically fixated one. Sometimes his work looks as though the Spartacist side of George Grosz had been run up to mural size, retaining its slangy agitprop bitterness but shedding some of its simpler moral allegiances. Sometimes it looks like a Stalinist version of Robert Crumb, all muggy sex and yelling mouths. It is high-impact stuff, theatrical, aesthetically slapdash and jammed with In jokes. Immendorff s big theme is the partition of Germany between two opposed, but to him equally absurd, ideological systems. His image for this is the Cafe Deutschland--Germany as a lurid nocturnal cabaret full of political and sexual grotesques, often with the artist asleep like some frowsty saint in the middle of an apocalypse, dreaming it all. Variations on this include the motif of Unctuous Friends, 1982--a squishy hammer and sickle, part cushion and part iceberg, lying flat on the ground. In it, like mammoths half sunk in slush, are a Russian officer and Chairman Mao. In this way, Immendorff rescues politics from the lardy stereotypes of official socialist realism, but he is still less a painter than a supercharged cartoonist, and it is difficult to imagine these paintings outliving the immediate political environment that they lampoon.

The truly outstanding artist here is Anselm Kiefer, 38. On his own, he justifies the hoo-ha over the new German painting and is the one authentic tragedian of his generation. Kiefer, who studied with Josef Beuys at Duesseldorf, carries on Beuys' work: the recovery and contemplation of German myths of nature and culture that had been reduced to rubble by Nazi appropriation.

Who, 20 years ago, would have dared to make art out of the imagery of primeval-forest fears, out of Nibelungen and Meistersinger, Speer-style classical tombs, dark landscapes and charismatic leaders? Yet this is precisely what Kiefer has done, and the effect of his work is not a voyeuristic gloating over the hellish pseudometaphysical uses to which such emblems were put in the '30s and '40s, but rather a complicated tissue of reflection and atonement, laced with numerous levels of irony.

His series of Monuments to the Unknown Painter--huge Nazi-classical halls with square "Doric" columns, a palette rising on a plinth in the center--are marvelous commentaries both on the "aesthetic" character of Hitlerian politics and on the mass inflation of art-world reputations 40 years later. But to see Kiefer at full stretch, one must consult the landscapes--those vast, charred, ashen, muddy surfaces, gouged and rutted and strewn with (literal) straw, that evoke both the aftermath of a catastrophic war and the ordinary stubble and leaden light of north German moorland in early winter. In Landscape with Wing, 1981, a strange emblem is combined with, or hovers over, this wasteland: a wing made of battered strips of gray lead instead of feathers, its visual and symbolic lightness contested by the heaviness of the metal, lying there as if discarded. It is the relic of Daedalus, or of Promethean hope, a mute and telling image, sober, contradictory and overwhelmingly sad.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.