![]() His 1932 painting Youth and Age shows a stereotypical Aryan beauty in a pornographic pose being approached by a skeleton. This Nazi rhetoric – that modern art was morally depraved – was a vicious response to something quite specific and homegrown: the celebration of free and fluid sexualities that takes often shocking forms in Weimar artworks, above all Dix’s pictures of sex and death. ![]() In 1937, the Nazis displayed the modern German art they confiscated, along with works by the likes of Picasso and Matisse, in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. New freedoms create a cut-up chaos of the new in Hannah Höch’s punk photomontages, while Otto Dix’s portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden holding forth in a Berlin cafe with short haircut, monocle and a cigarette between her long bony fingers is a homage to Weimar “decadence”. One has shit for brains, literally, another wears a potty as a helmet, and another wears a swastika tiepin, a prophetic image – as few thought, in 1926, there would be a Chancellor Hitler.Īgainst these scheisskopfs, Grosz and his radical contemporaries revealed the joyous energy of Weimar democracy. While a building blazes in the background, an unholy alliance of stormtroopers and capitalists rant and rave. In Georg Grosz’s 1926 painting The Pillars of Society, the rise of the far right is laid bare. The greatness of German modern art lies in the ways it has recorded, opposed and remembered that age of destruction. There is no denying the nightmare of Germany between 19. ![]() The wildest genius was Bavaria’s own Franz Marc, who painted unforgettably charged visions of red and blue horses in exploding landscapes before being killed, aged 36, at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. They were anything but narrowly nationalist, led as they were by Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky who preached the spiritual depth of the colour blue. ![]() Munich’s Blue Rider group took the symbolist intensity of Munch into a fierce realm of raw colour. He was part of a cosmopolitan golden age. It was here that Marcel Duchamp journeyed from Paris in 1912 to study perspective and plan his meisterwerk, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Photograph: Bridgeman Art/© Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/DACS 2021īy the 1900s, the international appeal of Berlin as an artistic centre was matched by Munich. Stormtroopers and a potty helmet … The Pillars of Society, 1926, by George Grosz. With its blood-red sky, it is a very Wagnerian shriek. The arch-symbolist Edvard Munch spent key years of his career in bohemian 1890s Berlin and originally gave his most famous painting a German title, Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature). His mystic tones can be discerned in the smoky light of Monet’s Impression: Sunrise, and they shaped the late-19th-century symbolist movement, which turned away from exterior reality into poetic distillations of feeling. This has been the German era.Īnd all modern art begins with Wagner. ![]() The reality is that nowhere else has produced as much original, provocative and powerful art as Germany over the last 150 years. And in Britain, laughably, we even try to kid ourselves that Henry Moore and John Piper are modernist greats. Art history tends to get it all wrong, exaggerating the glamour of French art, just as it does with American art. For one thing, this is the greatest modern artistic nation in Europe. Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty Imagesīut Britons who close their minds to Germany are missing so much. Unforgettable visions … Three Horses, 1912, by Franz Marc. ![]()
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