The 1918–19 German Revolution is too often overlooked in the history books that chronicle social breakdowns in the Weimar Republic. Fortunately, “The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy”gives the revolution its due as a trigger for the frenetic energy German artists later captured at the height of 1920s Weimar culture. The exhibition, on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., through May 27, is nothing short of a triumph.
Following the German monarchy’s dissolution and communism’s defeat during the revolution, mass culture, radical politics, hyperinflation, and unemployment collided in the 1920s to breed misery and resentment—but also a new creativity—among the German population.
Works dating from before and during World War I, the revolution, and the initial years of the Weimar Republic feature heavily. Color is sparse in the exhibition, befitting an art movement that focuses on the grim reality of an imploded nation. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner figures most prominently, with other well-known names including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz represented too.
Kirchner’s Two Bathers on the Fehmarn Coast (1912) uses thin ink strokes on paper. Visitors would be forgiven for mistaking the medium for a thick pen or thin marker. The piece’s quality looks like a painter’s preparatory sketch—a study of humanity that does not intend to be a final result. Max Pechstein’s Nude Figure (1920) shows a contemplative, full-figured woman reclining in an inquisitive pose. Pechstein plays with depth tactfully, employing squiggles in the background that redirect the observer’s gaze to the woman’s enigmatic thoughts. Sitting on an object resembling a small step, the subject could be resting in front of a body of water or a horizon with clouds drifting upward. That ambiguity complements the mystery of her thoughts well.
Lovers (Young Family) (1918) shows Dix’s flirtation with monochrome. Here, he deploys black ink, pen, and brush on brown paper, which is the only source of color. The work depicts an aghast toddler flanked by vaguely discernible adult faces among a crowded field of abstracted shapes.
The most dynamic work in the exhibition is a lithograph of Max Beckmann’s John, Revelation, Chapter 8, Verse 2 (1941–42), printed in the German book Apokalypse. The New Testament verse references the seven angels who announce with their trumpets the commencement of the end-times; Beckmann depicts the scene accordingly with vibrant reds, blues, purples, and yellows. Though this is a scene presaging destruction, it looks forward to a redeemed future, too. Perhaps Beckmann believed the destruction to which he was witness would give way to a higher art, one built on the ashes of the Old World.
Periodization in “The Anxious Eye”feels more fluid than discrete, which is to the exhibition’s benefit. The curationis just as focused on style and continuity as it is on cultural history. The final room displays works created well after World War II in the German Expressionist tradition. Two woodcuts, George Baselitz’s Man Reading (1982) and Leonard Baskin’s Hydrogen Man (1954), stand out. Both invoke the sometimes-maligned human figures of early twentieth-century German prints, often accused of caricaturizing their subjects. The inclusion of mid- and late-twentieth-century art contributes to the sweeping effect of the entire presentation.
Christian Rohlfs’s 1918 woodcut The Prisoner is exemplary of the German Expressionists’ mixing of dark, angular lines and buckled shapes to produce grotesque imagery of their contemporary society. These efforts are haunting, piercing, and vivid. Rohlfs’s prisoner is a singular figure clutching his bars, resigned to despair. Elsewhere, an impression of past and impending doom emanates from prints depicting crowds suffering anonymously from the alienation of mass society.
Kirchner creates a foreboding sky in Old Market in Dresden with a Fair (1910). Supernatural destruction seems in store for the indiscernible figures haphazardly gathering below in the town square. Ruinous premonitions appear even stronger in Georg Grosz’s Attack (1915). Created during the carnage of World War I, Attack shows a throng of people running from a mysterious blast in an urban environment. Heavy artillery and divine wrath are both plausible sources for the blast; the order of things is interrupted, city life thrown into chaos.
Military defeat in the Great War broke Germany and created contradictions that oscillated between the extremes of destruction and creativity. Disjointed and intimate with breakdown, the artists and their works presented in “The Anxious Eye” capture the full breadth of those contradictions. In total, “The Anxious Eye”compellingly conveys the anxiety, disorientation, and loss that plagued the German people living in the erratic era.