BLUE COUNTRY – By Tony Zaza, The Roving Eye

One thing is certain about the flowering of German Expressionism: the blossoms lacked joyous exuberance.

BLUE COUNTRY

By Tony Zaza, The Roving Eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One thing is certain about the flowering of German Expressionism: the blossoms lacked joyous exuberance. From 1907 until 1926, when Europe was engulfed by the more fearful currents of Dada and Surrealism, the movement, dominated by painting and sculpture characterized by garish color combinations, figures fraught with angst, a penchant for masculine moroseness, and imagery that reflects a desire to escape, is steeped in the blues.

Caught up in the alienating mechanization that came with industrialization, the Baltic regions and Bavaria, and the remains of Prussia and Saar, the Weimar State, artists sought comfort in a return to natural subjects in exotic places. Seated Female Nude, Moritzburg 1910 by Max Pechstein is emblematic of this surge toward the romantic and the idyllic. World War I soon crushed that sentiment and by 1921, Gloomy Day by George Grosz, crystallizes the deep sadness and disenchantment with the social order.

This exquisite show inhabited presents 37 exemplary works provides a startling overview of the winds of change in painting of the period, a creative environment in which lyrical eroticism evolves toward the joyless ‘new objectivity’ (neue Sachlichkeit). The shift from erogenous zone to cityscape with depiction of bland metropolitan life, fragmentation and social decay also brought with it heightened expressionism, frantic shape and color combinations, cynical poetry. Everything is a metaphors for a broken-hearted nation.

It is much too simplistic to assign the nature of the imagery in this show to meditations on environment and history. Removed from their social context, the work of Dix, Grosz, Kirchner, Schlichter, Nolde, and Beckmann or Schmidt-Rottluff, exhibit primitive egocentricities, wet dreams and typical male preoccupations with mythic possession. Arcadia and Metropolis: Masterworks of German Expressionism from the National Galerie Berlin now at the Neue Galerie through June 7 affords ample opportunity to ponder the causes and effects.