Valhalla Revamped

Even after the turn of the century, most German art still looked like stage sets commissioned by Wagner. Idealized landscapes, preferably misty, thronged with the gods of Greece, Valhalla toughs and Bacchic satyrs like some sort of mythological beaux-arts ball. It took a few artists of more personal vision to make German art modern.

At first Lovis Corinth did not look as if he would be one of them. He went to study art in Paris when impression ism was already a decade old. Rather than join this movement, Corinth be came a star pupil of the arch-academic Nudesmith William Bouguereau.

Stroke of Genius. There was, however, something about Lovis (so known because he spelled his name, Louis, with the Roman form of u) that never was readily tamed. He was a beefy bon vivant who invariably kept two jugs of wine by his elbow during dinner. His lust for life got him the reputation of being Germany's Van Gogh, but the real sources of Corinth's robust energy were the ruddy-cheeked oils of Rubens, Hals and Rembrandt. An exhaustive retrospective that opens this week at Manhattan's Gallery of Modern Art (see opposite page] and a graphics show at the Allan Frumkin Gallery reveal how -- having apparently concluded that Germans make bad French impressionists -- Corinth went on to smash the Wagnerian mold.

Returning to Germany, Corinth scandalized Munich with his sensual image ry. He painted slaughterhouse scenes, leering nymphs and popeyed Grafs with equal candor and caricature. He happily moved to Berlin to join the impressionist Secessionists, an art society that scorned the academy. Then in 1911, a near-fatal stroke reminded him of the dark side of delight.

Skeleton in the Alphabet. Possibly be cause of the partial paralysis, Corinth's brushstroke took on a slashing angularity, his colors a staccato spectrum. He studied his own face in 50 oils and 60 etchings; none bear the mark of flat tery, and many show a skeleton looking over his shoulder. His moodiness could only be broken by his wife, Charlotte Berend, a painter 22 years younger than he, and he replied by painting her 81 times.

Until his death in 1925, Corinth worked night and day. He opposed the new German move toward expressionism, but his lustiness and his awareness of death gave his art a touch of personal agony that overwhelmed the visible world he painted. "True art," he wrote, "is to depict unreality." And his brusquely applied colors readied the public for the subsequent makers of German expressionism, such as Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka. In awe, one expressionist, Ernst Kirchner, admitted of Corinth: "At first he was mediocrity. At the end, truly great."

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