by John Updike
One ascends to the third floor by means of a back stairs that, though of white marble, is distinctly unornamented. On this floor, where the illusion of a comfortable town house is left behind, the problems of the museum and its mission more plainly emerge. This is not comfortable art; it is fuller of programmatic intentions than of harmonious resolution. The German monarchy Bismarck had hammered together around Prussia had Berlin as a political capital but was still a land of regions, with no cultural equivalent of London, Paris, or Vienna. The floor’s four rooms are divided among four labels: Die Brücke, founded in Dresden in 1905; the Blaue Reiter group, formed in Munich in 1911; Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a term coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, to title a 1925 exhibit of “post-Expressionist” paintings of a relatively naturalistic, conservative style; and the Bauhaus, the art-and-design school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in the Thuringian city of Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller lived and died and the pre-Hitlerian republic was founded. The Bauhaus, though ostensibly a school for architecture and the practical arts, with painting and sculpture marginal concerns, yet hired instructors in art theory who included such artists as Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Lyonel Feininger, and László Moholy-Nagy; indeed, American museumgoers will encounter the most names familiar to them in this section, the front room, which also holds steely furniture and household items designed by Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld.
Gerstl, Portrait of a Man on the Lawn, 1907. Oil on canvas. (Photo Credit Ill.27)
The three-dimensional artifacts are models of clean, witty design; the paintings on the third floor sound a chronic note of protest, anguish, scorn, and unhealth. The usual Expressionist nude, as rendered by Ernst Kirchner or Erich Heckel, is yellow and angular; the customary landscape—see August Macke’s Strollers at the Lake II (1912) or Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Landscape with House and Trees (1910)—presents a strident crush of discordant colors taken less from nature than from the palette of overthrown inhibition. The violent colors of Kandinsky and Franz Marc are yet subdued, or sublimated, by a certain vision of the primitive village, with its gentle, almost speaking animals, but there is, in the work of Kirchner, Heckel, Macke, Schmidt-Rottluff, not to mention Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and Otto Dix, no lack of illustration for the dicta of Oskar Pfister’s groundbreaking Expressionism in Art of 1922:
The expressionist artist cannot be merely deduced out of a protest against the artistic or cultural milieu.… Expressionism is a “cry of distress,” like a stream of lava forcing itself forward prompted by the soul’s misery and a ravenous hunger for life.… The chaos of the picture betrays the confusion of the expressionist himself, the brutal color and outlines the brutality of his character.
An enigmatic, caustic mood pervades even a Beckmann still life (called, with presumed irony, Sunrise, 1929) and Kurt Schwitters’s abstract collages; as no less an authority than Joseph Goebbels, who was within the decade to lead the Nazi assault on “degenerate art,” wrote in his 1929 novel, Michael, “We are all Expressionists today.… The Expressionist builds in himself a new world. His secret and his power is this ardor.” Within the German-speaking world, the predominantly Protestant north was the province of proper ardor, an emotional fury that considered itself masculine. Reviewing a 1916 Berlin show of Viennese art, the critic Karl Scheffler complained that Viennese painting was “utterly feminine … charming but not creative” and claimed it “lacked the spirit of Protestantism. That is to say: the readiness to go into depth.” The notion of a barbarian vigor that scorns feminine niceties and seeks a depth beyond the rational can be found in Expressionism and Nazism both. We go, let’s admit it, to exhibits of pre-1940 German art in a mood of diagnosis, looking for symptoms of the plague to come. Even in the next century we ask ourselves how a nation of such advanced civilization came to consign itself, with all its military and industrial might, to a government of thugs and criminal cranks and rabid anti-Semites.
A dissatisfaction with the status quo underlies revolutions both political and artistic; Pamela Kort’s survey, in the compendious catalogue, of American attitudes toward Expressionism, asserts, “Though not politically radical, pre–World War I Expressionists were united by their disdain for the bourgeois culture and imperial politics of Wilhelminian Germany.” After the war, there was the Weimar Republic, ruinous inflation, and the taste of defeat. German art from 1890 to 1940 differs from French art of the same period in its refusal to rest content with visual expression—an exploration of appearances that takes its passion from the process. The subjects of Cézanne’s portraits, and Modigliani’s, and van Gogh’s, have little psychological presence compared with—all in this exhibit—Otto Dix’s sly, awry, slump-shouldered Jewish lawyer (Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Fritz Glaser, 1921), or Dix’s shopworn, chalky-faced nudes (1926, 1930), or with George Grosz’s Portrait of John Förste, Man with Glass Eye (1926), glaring into a book with enough force to make the wormy vein at his temple pop, or with Max Beckmann’s truculent self-portraits (1923, 1938), or Paul Klee’s broken, baleful self-portrait of 1909. These human figures are less objects taking the light than souls in torment; they have the Gothic inwardness of medieval statuary. Northern Europe had its own art tradition, graphic and linear, gaunt and at times gruesome, and visitors to the Neue Galerie expecting the epicurean modernism of the School of Paris will have their sensibilities abraded. The French strategies of refreshed representation take on a new violence from, it seems, the German painters’ seething psyches. The Fauves laid on color in boldly vibrant streaks, but there is a world of difference between some gaudy Derain boats moored in the water and the assaultively unnatural colors and brutal brush attack of Heckel’s Bathers in a Pond (1908). Monet’s haystacks evoked, as the day’s hours changed, some prickly, counterintuitive patches of paint, but nothing like the gory impasto of Emil Nolde’s Sunset (1909). Cubism in the hands of Picasso and Braque was a golden-brown walk around a table and a jug; for George Grosz its diagonal chopped perspective became a scaffolding for caricatural images of whores, fat-necked politicians, monocled mustached Junkers, and a welter of other human symptoms of something rotten in Deutschland—Panorama (Down with Liebknecht) (1919). The answer to question (a), whether Fifth Avenue needs another museum, may depend on how much willful ugliness the public wants to pay ten dollars for (seniors and students only seven).
Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Front of Red Curtain, 1923. Oil on canvas. (Photo Credit Ill.28)
The posh bulk of the museum’s catalogue offers to cushion the shock; it comes to six hundred pages exactly—fifty-three essays more or less, many translated from the German. Ronald Lauder’s preface recounts how, one night in 1968 (a rather expressionist year, come to think of it), he asked Sabarsky if there were any Schiele collectors in America: “He said he knew of two. With that I answered, ‘You should also count me and my brother.’ He looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘I already counted both of you.’ ” The several collections the museum can draw upon—its own, plus those of Sabarsky and the Lauder family—are choice, but, as the Getty Museum shows, late-starting museums, however well endowed, have a hard game of catch-up to play; celebrity art not already locked into public collections bears prices that bar extensive acquisition. Paul Klee, who was Swiss by birth and in his final residence, and was marginally Expressionist in temperament, is the one painter in this show who ranks with beloved modernist superstars like Matisse, de Chirico, and Picasso; he is effectively but sparsely represented, compared with the Klees one has seen on the walls of MoMA and, indeed, in the German wing of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, a collection begun in 1902 and for decades separately housed in the Busch-Reisinger Museum of Germanic Culture. Klee, who produced over ten thousand of his modest-sized works, is represented at 1048 Fifth Avenue by paintings, two in oil and three in watercolor and gouache, which hint at the tireless wit of his experimentation. Two are still lifes on a black ground, the larger o
f which (Gay Repast / Colorful Meal, 1928) holds objects disparate enough to qualify Klee, in the opinion of the critic and gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim, as “the real creator of Surrealism.” But the multiplicity of Klee’s visual devices suggests a cerebral source somewhat higher than the fluid subconscious dear to Surrealism: not a flooded basement but a dry playroom whence spill puns, doodles, and philosophical jokes. His inventiveness in making marks on paper spins a giant comic footnote to reality. There almost always is in Klee a certain radiance, and the once-and-done air of musical improvisation. In Mystical Ceramic (in the Manner of a Still Life) (1925) he uses a knitwork of dry marks as if with a sponge; in Yellow House (1915) envelopelike rectangles of watercolor; in On the Lawn (1923) ink lines into wet watercolor furrily limn his frolicking, staring bathing beauties.
More surreal in feeling, though thoroughly representational, like a more explicit Balthus, are Christian Schad’s two young masturbating women, with their gleaming eyes lost in a middle distance that includes the uneasy viewer; it is this image, presumably, along with a masturbating nude of Klimt’s, that bars children under twelve, as a stern sign downstairs announces, from attending the show at all. The basically representational Neue Sachlichkeit section includes Schad; Dix’s two remorseless portraits of puckered, sagging, anxious nudes; George Grosz in a variety of styles, including a dishevelled apartment (Couple in Interior, 1915) in feeling like a George Bellows, only more pornographic in its squalor; and three sizable Beckmann oils, of which the two self-portraits linger in the mind’s eye longer than most anything else in the exhibit. Among the Neue Galerie’s other bright spots should be listed the Kandinskys, though the later abstraction Black Form (1923) seems cartoonlike, and Lovis Corinth’s windswept still life Fruit Bowls (1923) and pencilled self-portrait (1921).
The Beckmanns (Self-Portrait in Front of Red Curtain, 1923; Self-Portrait with Horn, 1938) are separated by fifteen years. By the time of the latter, Beckmann was already on his way to Amsterdam, where he survived the war before heading to the United States in 1947. From the smooth, blocky style of the earlier work he had evolved the flickering black outlines and poster-sharp colors of his mature style; but the man is the same, round-headed, unsmiling, and determinedly there, a study in Dasein, a distinctly German man whose costumes—tuxedo, red scarf, lit cigar, bowler hat tipped back in the one; in the other a V-necked jersey of red and black stripes, clownish to go with the curved horn he is holding—suggest a potential for mischief and battle, a dangerous density of energy. He will not, his posture implies, go away. So much for (a); as to (b), we shall see.
Beyond Real
MAX ERNST: A Retrospective, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 7–July 10, 2005.
GHOST SHIPS: A Surrealist Love Triangle, by Robert McNab. 266 pp. Yale University Press, 2004.
Not only is Max Ernst the subject of an extensive and eye-challenging retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is winning retrospective publicity as a romantic principal in a shameless, artistically high-powered ménage à trois in the early 1920s, lyrically and speculatively described by the documentary filmmaker Robert McNab in his book Ghost Ships. The known facts are not numerous: Ernst, born in the town of Brühl, Germany—near the Rhine, between Bonn and Cologne—into a large middle-class Catholic family, whose father was a teacher of deaf children and an amateur painter, studied philosophy and abnormal psychology at the University of Bonn. At the age of twenty he decided to become a painter and joined August Macke’s Rhine Expressionist group. In 1919, having served four years in the Kaiser’s Army and risen to the rank of lieutenant, he helped found, with Johannes Theodor Baargeld, the Cologne Dada movement. Increasingly well known in art circles, and acquainted with such prominent German-speaking artists as Paul Klee, Hans Arp, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Otto Dix, he experimented with collage. In 1921 his collages won him a solo show in Paris, but visa trouble in post-war Germany prevented him from attending. The exhibition, organized by André Breton, attracted enthusiasm among the French Surrealists; later that year the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard and his Russian wife, Gala, visited Cologne with the express purpose of meeting Ernst. A photograph was taken during the meeting, showing Max and Luise Ernst with their small son, Jimmy, the two Éluards, and the painter Baargeld. Already a prophetic note of cozy trespass was struck: Gala posed wearing the German Iron Cross, the military decoration which Ernst had won. Éluard, too, four years younger than the thirty-year-old Ernst, had fought (and been severely gassed) in the war. He said, “Max and I were at Verdun together and used to shoot at each other.” According to Robert McNab,
The imaginative and moral sympathy of the two men was immediate. They also felt an instant urge to collaborate, to improvise like jazz musicians, so that Éluard quickly selected eleven collages by Ernst as illustrations for his next book of poems.… He also bought a large canvas, the Elephant of Celebes, that accompanied him to Paris with Gala. These were the first of many collaborations in book form and the first of hundreds of works Éluard purchased from Ernst.
Éluard, whose poetry has weathered better than all but a few creations by the Paris Surrealist group, was unusual among these bohemians in that he had ample money and a job; he worked for his father, a Parisian property developer. More collaborations with Ernst followed, and more trips to Cologne. When Gala and Ernst began to sleep together was not recorded, but a photograph exists, probably from March of 1922, showing Gala standing between the two men, slightly closer to Ernst than to her husband. All are on skis; the photographer may have been Luise Straus-Ernst, who was later to write of “this slippery, scintillating creature with cascading black hair, luminous and vaguely oriental eyes, delicate bones, who, not having succeeded in drawing her husband into an affair with me in order to appropriate Max for herself, finally decided to keep both men, with the loving consent of Éluard.” By the summer of 1922, the affair, and Éluard’s complaisance, were public knowledge. Dominique Bona, in her 1995 biography Gala, describes Gala (in French) as “the benchmark of their friendship, as their means of communication with each other, as their shared wife. They made love to each other in her.”
In August, Ernst left his wife and son in Germany and, travelling illegally on Éluard’s passport, moved in with the Éluards in their home in Saint-Brice, a suburb of Paris. He never lived in Germany again. Luise, whom Max had met in art school before the war and married soon after it, was the daughter of a prosperous Jewish milliner who had disapproved of his son-in-law. Finally divorced from Max in 1926, she became a museum curator until ousted by the Nazis; she joined the resistance, was arrested, and died in Auschwitz. Their son, Jimmy, fondly called Minimax to go with his father’s nickname, Dadamax, became a Surrealist painter in California.
Ernst’s painting thrived in the ménage, but the gentle Éluard showed signs of stress, drinking late in bars and nightclubs and, in McNab’s telling, “falling asleep at his friends’ instead of going home, where Ernst and his wife seemed the resident couple.” Eighteen months after Ernst moved in, Éluard one evening “got up from the bistro table to buy some matches, walked out and vanished from Paris.” He was on his way to the Far East, and at his urging Gala followed four months later, bringing Ernst with her. She auctioned off a sizable part of her husband’s painting collection to buy the steamer tickets.
Only a few photos and brief communications survive from that travelling year of 1924; McNab fills the huge gap by writing, very interestingly, about steamships and their ports of call, about the huge French colony of Indochina, about the call of the Pacific from the eighteenth-century French explorers to the painter Gauguin, the poet Saint-Pol-Roux, and the anti-Eurocentric, culturally relativistic traveller Victor Segalen. Surrealism, McNab argues, began as travel, more or less random, as a trance-inducing escape from the bourgeois Europe that had given the younger generation World War I. In early June 1919, Breton and Philippe Soupault walked all night through Paris, and “at dawn agreed jointly to write something t
o evoke the peculiar state of mind the experience had induced.… At times they wrote for ten hours on end, breaking off for fresh air to roam the streets again in a daze.” Other nocturnal rambles, enhanced by cannabis and cocaine, followed; by 1922, Breton was advising his readers, in a short piece titled “Lâchez tout,” “Drop everything.… Drop your wife, drop your girl-friend.… Park your children in the woods.… Drop your comfortable life.… Take to the road.” It was all about dépaysement, according to McNab: the word