The Anguish of the Northerners

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Chicago, a powerful show of German expressionism

One of the dogmas of modern art is that Paris, between 1870 and 1939, was the cultural center of Europe and the world: the fount of norms, clearinghouse of ideas and Vatican of newness. Yet around the turn of the century, the supremacy of Paris did not seem quite so clear-cut. "If I had a son who wanted to be a painter," a 16-year-old student wrote in 1897, "I would not keep him in Spain for a moment, and do not imagine I would send him to Paris . . . but to Munich . . . as it is a city where painting is studied seriously without regard to a fixed idea of any sort such as pointillism and all the rest."

The writer was Pablo Picasso. If his sentiment seems odd (for someone who was to spend most of his life in France), we must blame the predominantly Francophile readings of art history for that. The real map of modernist culture in early 20th century Europe was not that of a capital surrounded by aesthetic provinces. It was more like a confederation: a scatter of nodes and local centers, engaged with one another and enjoying a persistent osmosis of ideas across the frontiers--Moscow, Berlin, Stockholm, Munich. Weimar, Barcelona, Vienna. Paris was uniquely hospitable to the avantgarde. But it had no monopoly on newness. The exhibition of 164 paintings and graphics that opened last week at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art is a sharp reminder of that fact. Organized under the title "German and Austrian Expressionism: Art in a Turbulent Era" by Art Historian Peter Selz, it does real justice to a neglected area.

Rudely stated, German expressionism was the house style of radical figurative art in Northern Europe between about 1905 and 1930. But as Selz rightly insists in his catalogue essay, it was less a style than a cluster of attitudes. The major expressionist painters--Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Max Pechstein, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Lyonel Feininger--did have formal traits in common. Harsh, dissonant color that blared fitfully from an unrefined surface; jagged shapes, broken-bottle cubism, an appetite for the primitive in drawing; masklike faces, Gothic poses, extreme jumps of tone between limelight and gloom: the sum of these was not so much a style as a "look." For expressionism was largely an ethical matter, a display of exemplary anguish. It was one of the last convulsions of northern romanticism; and like all romantic painting, it was essentially an art of subject matter. The expressionist attitude lay at the opposite pole of experience from the sensuous, Cartesian quality of French art. At the time Kirchner painted his self-portrait in conscript's uniform, France had also experienced--from the other side of the trenches--the horrors of total war. But nothing by a major French painter in those traumatic years resembled Kirchner's paroxysm of self-pity--the haggard artist displaying the raw (but fictional) stump of his amputated painting hand becomes, as the nude in the background makes clear, an allegory of castration as well as loneliness and fright.

Such paintings are grounded in a Gothic past. In general, expressionism preferred the art of the Nordic Middle Ages, with their unrelenting insistence on the "four last things"--death, judgment, heaven and hell--to any Mediterranean tradition. Egon Schiele's knobbly waifs, all etiolated limbs and pinched flesh, are the lineal descendants of the fallen Eves in Gothic art. The expressionist body is a scrag of mutton with big extremities, very unlike the prosperous Renaissance nudes that, however mutated, survived in Picasso and Matisse. Expressionism was an art of confession, directed against the impermeable crust of a deeply formalized society. It had few political ambitions--as German Dada did--but it did carry a strong current of social idealism. This did not show itself so much in Utopian schemes as in a vague aspiration toward spiritual improvement, salvation through sensitivity, the obverse of which was the weird consumptive eroticism of Schiele. If Schiele was the Cranach of the movement, Beckmann was its Goya: a maker of thickly constructed and disturbing fables in which the collective fantasies of postwar malaise were summed up.

The influence of cubism was pervasive.

No intelligent artist in Northern Europe, after the work of Picasso and Braque became internationally known, could sidestep it. But the expressionists were not fundamentally interested in the neutral subjects of cubism: the quotidian landscape of cafe table, brown guitar, pipe, bottle and chair. Franz Marc, who died in the trenches at 36, turned to the cubist vocabulary of facets, prisms and sliding rays to express his pantheistic view of nature, the Eden of happy animals: "We will no longer paint the forest or the horse as they please us or appear to us, but as they really are, as the forest or the horse feel themselves--their absolute being--which lives behind the appearance which we see." Feininger, an American who emigrated to Germany in 1887, managed to blend cubism with the sublime landscapes of northern romanticism. In an early work, Side Wheeler at the Landing, 1912, the style acquires the instability of a house of glass cards; every facet of the paddle steamer, trailing its smoke as it backs away from the wharf up the tilted plane of sea, seems both brittle and charged with energy.

The expressionists' common enemy was the official style of the salons--to them an emblem of repression. But there was a degree of irony in the way that German colonialism (which none of the liberals of the Berlin studios approved of) helped the artists find their language.

Without the Kaiser's empire, Nolde might not have seen the African carvings he parodied in Masks, 1911; three years later, bubbling with fantasies about noble savages, he went to Melanesia with a German expedition, and his ideas of the racial purity of primitive societies led him to an early membership in the Nazi Party. (The relationship between Nazism and expressionist painting was, as Selz discreetly suggests, a good deal less antagonistic than is usually supposed.) But if the cult of the primitive was one aspect of expressionism, the scrutiny of the far less familiar recesses of the psyche was another. Kokoschka's painting of the avant-garde architect Adolf Loos is one of the few great modern portraits:

the confident mask of decorum--the sitter composing himself as he wants others to see him--dissolves and falls inward.

Every loop of paint and spidery vermilion furrow in Loos' face speaks of undisguised anxiety. Kokoschka's early portraits of Viennese writers and fellow artists make up as remarkable a gallery of types as Nadar's photographs of French cultural stars some 50 years before. In effect, they are to doubt and obsession what Titian's portraits were to the Venetian sense of power and wholeness. It is hard to imagine the face of Freudian man with out early Kokoschka, almost as hard to imagine his body and mind without the rest of expressionist imagery to help give them form.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.