Art: OUT OF THE RUINS

IN the first half of the 20th century, German art was crushed and twisted by two wars and artistically ignorant totalitarianism. Some of Germany’s artists succumbed to Hitler’s demands, some lost their lives or their minds, many fled to the rest of Europe and the U.S. Today German art is rising out of its ruins, and bringing with it new appreciation of the fact that Germany played a major role in developing what is now the dominant artistic mood: expressionism.

The German resurgence is coming to a peak in the U.S. this fall. In Manhattan this week the Museum of Modern Art will open the largest German modern art show to be seen in the U.S. in more than 25 years—178 paintings, sculptures and prints. Next week Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts will open its “European Masters of Our Time” exhibition, including 44 works by modern Germans. Three handsome and scholarly monographs on German 20th century art are now rolling off the presses.* Significantly, the artists most praised today are without exception the ones banned or exiled by Hitler.

A Green Pear Is a Green Pear. The first movement to make expressionism its own was formed by exuberant architectural students turned artists in Dresden in 1905 who called themselves Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the confident expectation that they would “attract all the revolutionary and surging elements.” With the “audacious idea of renewing German art” the Bridge group—Ernst Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Bleyl and later Max Pechstein—set up their studio in an empty shoe store.

Recalls Heckel: “We had no patience with the impressionists, who saw the pear in the bowl as having a hundred different shades of green. For us it was a green pear—bang—in a red bowl. We wanted to shock the person who looked at the picture. Looking at one of Kirchners women-on-the-street pictures, he should feel an erotic sensation, or repulsion, in any case some strong nervous response. Looking at one of Schmidt-Rottluffs monumental, somber compositions, he was supposed to feel touched, moved, overwhelmed.”

The man who produced the greatest work among the Bridge group was one of them for only a year and a half: Emil Nolde, a grim north German, who came equipped with “tempests of color.” Driven by what he called an “irresistible desire for a representation of the deepest spirituality, religion and fervor,” Nolde turned to the Gospels, in his Christ Among the Children (see color page) created a new and powerful religious art that not only turns its back on the wrung-out humanism of the Renaissance but achieves in its glowing children and astonished disciples a thick religious fervor the equal of Rouault.

Sensing the Mystic. Religion of a far less earthbound frame was also a prime concern of Germany’s Blane Reiter (Blue Rider) group centered at Munich, which strove for what Franz Marc called “sensing the underlying mystical design of the visible world.” But what looked like a new dawn for European art quickly clouded with the rumors of war. Wassily Kandinsky began introducing cannons into his abstractions. Paul Klee’s expressions of his subconscious began to reflect fear. Klee’s Blue Rider painting companion, bean-pole-tall August Macke, painted his somber Farewell, a square filled with blank-faced men, women and children, before marching off to the front, where he was killed immediately. Marc completed his paintings of trapped, wounded animals, and died a soldier’s death at Verdun.

Those whom the war did not kill, it maimed. Kirchner retired to a sanitarium in Switzerland, later committed suicide. George Grosz emerged from a military hospital for the insane with the horrors of trench warfare, which he painted with the richness of Rubens, burned into his memory. In the postwar years of angry anarchy Grosz emerged as the self-styled “propagandada” of the Dada movement’s antiart antics. (Today Grosz, an American citizen, lives on Long Island, N.Y., paints landscapes, nudes, and insect parables that “express the emptiness of man.”) Oskar Kokoschka was shot and bayoneted through the chest on the Russian front, but survived. Seven years after the war he was jaunting about Europe, capturing in London Bridge (opposite), a bird’s-eye view of what he still calls “one of the finest rivers in the world with some of the finest ships and some of the finest bridges.”

The major new figure to arise between the two wars was Max Beckmann, who by endlessly propounding the question “Who am I?” arrived at emblematic pictorial symbols that crowded his canvases to the bursting point, but recovered much of Germany’s lost humanism. The most intense group of artists was at the Bauhaus, where the new center of architecture, with its goal of “art and technology —a new synthesis,” attracted U.S. Painter Lyonel Feininger, Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer and Klee. There Kandinsky combined abstract geometric forms with color in Composition VIII to arrive at a new and colder art that he hoped would have the quality of “burning power in an icy chalice.” The closing of the Bauhaus in May 1933 signaled the beginning of a second long night over Germany.

Strong & Harsh. In the rubble Hitler left, only the hardiest roots of modern art managed to survive. Of the younger generation, the strongest figures combine something of the expressive color of Nolde with the abstract structure handed down by Kandinsky. A leading example is the whiplike abstraction and sweeping, calligraphic symbol of Hans Hartung (TIME, April 1), a German who fought against the Nazis in the French Foreign Legion and is now a French citizen.

Best of the contemporaries is Fritz Winter, 51, who started as a coal miner, attended the Bauhaus where he was Kandinsky’s assistant, served on the Russian front and spent years in a Russian P.W. camp. His expressive Dead Forest (opposite) re-creates the world in terms of imagined structure, much as Klee did with fantasy. It is harsh and foreboding. After Germany’s tortured half-century it would be misreading human nature to expect it to be otherwise.

*German Expressionist Painting, by Peter Selz (University of California, $18.50); German Expressionism and Abstract Art, by Charles L. Kuhn (Harvard University, $8.75); The German Expressionists, by Bernard S. Myers (Praeger, $15).