Christian Schad, "Sonja", 1928, oil on canvas. Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg, ARS, New York, 2024.
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Modern Art and Politics - Oskar Nerlinger, "The Early Train' on view at the Kimbell Art Museum's new exhibit Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945. (Photo by Courtney Dabney)
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Modern Art and Politics - Horst Strempel, "Night over Germany" 1945–1946. Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin
Source:The Kimbell Art Museum unveils its newest exhibit on Sunday, March 30 ― Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945 is a collection of masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It joins other new exhibits in Fort Worth’s Museum District this Spring.
Trapped between two devastating world wars and the political climate of the day, emerging artists responded in the only way they knew how ― bursting forth with experimental styles ranging from expressionism to cubism, and from abstraction to surrealism, and shining a spotlight on the horrors and oppression they witnessed all around them.
“In the first half of the twentieth century, Germany experienced the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the revolution that followed, the liberal Weimar Republic, the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II,” The Kimbell says. “Modern art played an important role in the discourse of the period, while politics influenced the arts.”
“This exhibition brings together more than seventy paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie, the distinguished modern art museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. It traces the German experience in the visual arts over four decades.”
Kimbell Director Eric M. Lee says that this is one of the largest exhibits of its kind. “It explores a tumultuous time in European history, when Modern Art played an important role in politics,” he says.
You’ll enter the exhibit into a room filled with expressionism, with its rough brush strokes and an almost antagonistic response to realism. The skin tones in several of these works took on a sickly greenish tinge, hinting at the death and destruction of the age that saw two world wars and millions dead in their wake. The political turmoil of the age tossed German citizens and these artists in its wake.
It became known as “degenerate art” by the rising socialist regime ― anything oppositional to the regime was labeled “degenerate”. Some of these very works were displayed in a 1931 exhibition in Germany of the same name ― “degenerate art”. Artists and art dealers wore their opposition as a badge of pride, and many paid a high price for it.
“Beginning with the Expressionist reaction and opposition to the conservative artistic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the exhibition includes works by such figures as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Otto Mueller, and Max Pechstein,” the Kimbell says.
The next artistic movement became known as New Objectivity, which was not realism, but a way of looking at modern life with a dispassionate eye. There is something slightly strange or uneasy about the proportions, angles, and even a touch of surrealist styling that began to creep in.
Following WWI, the restructuring and literal rebuilding of German society, the Bauhaus architectural movement took off, led by Walter Gropius. Its clean, modern, utilitarian ideals influenced the artists of the period, including Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. Abstraction was in vogue, and a focus on stacked shapes and forms reflects the reshaping of society. These years and the creativity that was spawned during the 1920s provided a brief respite before war would once again grip Germany.
“Painters and sculptors including Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Käthe Kollwitz, and George Grosz issued strident challenges to society; their voices would be silenced under the Nazis,” the Kimbell notes. “And response to Hitler’s repression of modern art and political opposition came from Max Beckmann, Karl Hofer, and Horst Strempel.”
Industrial themes and heavy, cubist forms begin to take shape in art and architecture ― forms that will be driven to their extreme, and expressed by the heavy, concrete, brutalism of post-WWII architecture.
Politics and both world wars bracket the exhibition. Tragedy, helplessness, and desperation abound in many of the artworks.
“Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945, organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, concludes with an epilogue that examines the ambiguous aftermath of World War II,” the Kimbell explains.
One of the major works in Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945 is Horst Strempel’s response in the wake of WWII, titled Night over Germany. The darkest chapter ever written in German history still lingers in many ways.
Strempel’s altar piece does not feature Christ, nor saints, nor apostles, but rather the despair of post-war humanity searching for meaning and reaching towards heaven for comfort. It was created in 1945-46 in the wake of the horrific reality of the Nazi holocaust, that many Germans and the rest of the world were just coming to grips with. The atrocities of the Nazi regime had been largely hidden from view, or intentionally ignored.
Night over Germany depicts the terror of a Jewish family in hiding during the Nazi holocaust. Barbed wire, concentration camp scenes, depict gray figures with bare feet, and numbers tattooed on their wrists.
The experiment of National Socialism had become a horrific reality in Germany. What began as a socialist revolution that promised working-class Germans a fresh start and an equal say in their government quickly morphed into a dictatorship, like all other socialist revolutions in modern history ― Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, to name a few.
The socialist dream had led instead to the reign of terror by a newly installed dictator and his newly installed ruling class, just like Stalin, Mao, Castro, the Kim dynasty, and Maduro who slaughtered millions to maintain their power. Millions were dead in Germany due to the war itself, or they had been exterminated by the Nazi’s ― most notably the Jews, but also other religious and political opposition to the regime, along with many targeted minorities including gays and those with disabilities.
Several artworks that are now a part of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin were held for decades in East Germany’s Nationalgalerie before the reunification of the divided country. For Germany, the specter of war remained top of mind long after it ended. It was a constant reminder, right on their doorstep, with divided families, and its divided capital of Berlin until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The lingering shadows of war and the holocaust remain pervasive even today. The provenance of artworks that were stolen from Jewish families, intentionally disappeared by the regime (often resurfacing in ambiguous circumstances), or artworks that were sold under duress as owners were fleeing the Nazi’s are still being researched, and repatriated to their rightful owners, or the remaining families of those who perished.
Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945 is on view at the Kimbell Art Museum from March 30 through June 2. The exhibit is both thought-provoking and timely as sabers continue to rattle around the globe.
