Tracing the Underground Stream

By ROBERT HUGHES

"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 1905 to 1985.

The usual view of German modernism, which prevailed until quite recently, tells a very different story. It depicts young outsiders who are rapturously expressive in their rebellion against painterly norms before World War I and bitterly sardonic in their attacks on society after it. These artists rehearse the last phase of the exaltations and terrors of German romanticism. They are seen, by all but a tiny minority of Germans, as mad, bad and dangerous to know: frantic orphans of the fatherland, nut eaters, Nietzscheans, stargazers, communards, Spartacists, reciting overloud yeas to nature and nays to society. Among them are Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Franz Marc, Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, George Grosz and Otto Dix.

The sense of culture they try to construct withers in the red glare of National Socialism. After 1933 their story becomes a lugubrious tale of giants in exile (Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckmann), of ruined hope, lopped lives and rampant state philistinism. By 1945 there is no life left in the expressionist impulse, at least in Germany; it can only be reborn in America as abstraction, and then re-exported to exhausted Europe. By 1955 figurative expressionism is a dodo--shot by Hitler, eaten by art history, its bones a museum specimen. Thus spake, until lately, the scenario.

But real events have a way of belying scenarios, and in the past few years the most striking and heavily publicized trend in German art has been back to the very kind of painting that obsessed the German avant-garde before 1914: fervent, ejaculatory, based on the human figure and full of pretensions toward expressive plangency and "primitive" directness. There has been a like revival of the kind of acrid satire and political chronicling that occupied the German Dadaists and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters in the '20s. The image stream of German expressionism went underground, but not even Nazism could dry it up. It is the deep, continuous current of German modernism; it picks up different names, en route through the century; and here it is again, manifested in the work of painters like Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and, above all, its titular river-god, Joseph Beuys.

; How 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 works as good as Aerial Acrobats, 1928--a Goya-like capricho rendered with grandly menacing stolidity--a visitor might not grasp why Beckmann could be considered the greatest German artist of the 20th century.

On the other hand, some painters emerge with a strength rarely acknowledged in England or America. Lovis Corinth's Ecce Homo, 1925, was painted in the last year of his life, as he was fighting semiparalysis from a stroke; yet the blunt, stabbing paint marks and the drawing that break from high academic certitude into the quavers of a loaded brush--not to mention the conception of Christ's humiliation before the Jews in contemporary dress, with a German officer as Roman centurion--are grittily eloquent.

All the major figures in prewar expressionism--Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff --are here at full stretch, with works that have rarely or never been seen outside Germany. It would be hard, for instance, to find a better epitome of the expressionist vision of relationships between humans and nature than Kirchner's Striding into the Sea, 1912, with its naked lovers swept up in a kind of decorative pantheism, at one with the flouncing breakers and sharply writhing sand dunes of the Baltic shore.

In sum, no 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 what he said. German painting sought to be moralizing and prophetic. Sometimes the sense of % prophecy is actual. An extraordinary set of images by Ludwig Meidner, an artist little known outside Germany, depicts the horrors of 20th century war and especially, as in Apocalyptic City, the bombardment of civilian populations. Meidner did them in 1913, a year before the Great War broke out.

The exhibition gives plenty of scope to the artists of the Brucke and Blaue 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 blimp of a politician with a steaming headful of excrement, and a militarist with a swastika tiepin and ectoplastic dreams of conquest in his skull--has a Brechtian violence that is beyond the scope of most modern cartooning.

So far, so good. But how does Part II, post-1945, measure up to Part I, pre- 1933? Regrettably, not very well. Its beginnings include some striking and even distinguished paintings, notably Wols' scratched, muffled lumps of inert matter, pathetic as the scribblings on the wall of some mental dungeon, and some of Gunther Ueker's nail reliefs from the early '60s. But it is hard to raise much enthusiasm for Richard Oelze's spectral streetscapes or even late Max Ernst, let alone the sensitive but essentially academic abstractions by Willi Baumeister or Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Such things seem included as tunings-up for what the organizers of the exhibition evidently consider their orchestral climax, the reappearance of the expressionist mainstream in the '70s.

At this point, the show plunges off into the badlands of promotion. It contains things one is glad to see--the antic, sardonic imagination of Sigmar Polke, for instance, which has been reprocessed by squads of younger artists from David Salle to Jiri Dokoupil; or the blunt, strong images of Eugen Schonebeck, who abruptly gave up painting at the age of 30, in 1966. There is also a powerful group of sculptures by Beuys. But the artists who get the most play are those industrial-scale bores of the international art market, Baselitz, with his upside-down figures, and A.R. Penck, with his dull pseudoprimitive graffiti, along with such earnest but relatively plodding talents as K.H. Hodicke and Markus Lupertz.

The curious thing is that though such painters are present by the acre, the one incontestably major figure of that generation, Anselm Kiefer, has only three paintings in the show, none among his best. Why this should be so is a mystery; but it is hard not to suspect that art-market pressures have been playing on the curators, since nearly all the recent artists in the show except Kiefer and Gerhard Richter (also ill-represented, and only with early work) are in the stable of one German dealer, Michael Werner.

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 is an attempt to address the older, mythic imagery of German romanticism, which the Nazis appropriated and corrupted. Unless we grasp the ways in which Hitler's culture took over a large part of the inherited content of expressionism--its obsession with the mystical, the vast, the unconsciously collective and the charismatic, and its magnification of an inbuilt weakness for kitschy spirituality into a noxious rhetoric of state power--we will not fully understand its grip on the minds of Germans in the '30s.

But there was no chance that the West German government, which backed this show, would agree to send souvenirs of a bitter past to England; and even less that its various corporate underwriters would want their coffee, cars and airliners associated with Nazi imagery. So those flaxen-haired Madchens, village scenes and straining athletes are fated to crouch in the basement of art history, invested with a diabolic aura that in the light of common day would shrivel. They may be sodden kitsch, but to claim they are not a significant part of German cultural history is wishful thinking.