Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

17/06/2005

"Hottentots in tails"

The turbulent history of "Die Brücke" in Germany. By Christian Saehrendt

Germany is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the "Die Brücke", but previous regimes saw little to be proud of in this group of Expressionist artists. While defenders of Expressionism claimed it represented the essence of an ethno-national German art, the National Socialists outlawed it as "degenerate". The East German regime condemmed it as a "late-bourgeois symptom of decay", while in the Federal Republic, Brücke works adorned the German chancellery. Historian Christian Saehrendt explains the tubulent history of the Brücke's reception in Germany.

blaErnst Ludwig Kirchner, Die Strasse © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer
Critics' attacks can be harsh. "Hottentots in tails" is what they called the young artists of the Brücke Expressionist group, seeing lunacy, deceit, and primativism in their paintings. The beginning of the 20th century saw a swift succession of avant-gardes denouncing the bourgeois understanding of art that expected painters to produce solid, academic and technically brilliant works. On the one hand, the avant-gardists were looking to provoke in a spectacular way, on the other hand they were seeking recognition. To this end, the young Expressionistic painters allied themselves with the art historians, declaring Expressionism the "German national style" whose roots could be traced back to the Gothic period.

The concept of "national style" entered art history around 1900. Renowned art historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer attempted to explain formal phenomena by means of "racially" conditioned basic psychic constants. The artist was no longer judged against the unattainable benchmark of antique or Renaissance art, but rather seen to be expressing the "artistic will" of an ethnic group. Worringer, for example, traced a direct line of tradition from the ornamental art of the Ostragoths through late Gothic art to the Expressionists, seeing common ground in the angular, chaotic, organic forms - a sort of labyrinth linearity. Worringer saw the "excited, feverish, twitching of the Nordic lineament," as the expression of the "charged inner life of the Nordic man". This psychic disposition is marked by darkness, strife, escapism and demoniacal possession.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Artistin - Marzella © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-KettererErnst Ludwig Kirchner, Artistin - Marzella © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer
The early works of the Brücke group were interpreted as the return of Germanic Gothic art: the strong linearity, the nervous style, the proportional overlap. An entire school of art historians adopted the idea of a Germanic national style. Many artists also took up the idea, seeing their work as a continuation of late Medieval tradition: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner emphatically invoked the lineage of aknowledged national greats like Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer.

Expressionist art was bought in vast quantities by German museums in the Weimar Republic. The Brücke artists, led by Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, became the best-known artistic personalities. Pechstein played the role of model social democratic artist, and Nolde of grumpy adversary to the prince of painters Max Liebermann. Edwin Redslob, when he was appointed artistic secretary of the Weimar Republic, chose modern artists to design the national emblems and coats of arms that were meant to give the new republic a fresh face. He commissioned Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to design a new eagle for the republic, and in 1926 he took the moody Kirschner to meet the new Chancellor Hans Luther.

But at the same time, agitation from the extreme Right was mounting against modern art. As in the Kaiserreich, the majority of the population favoured pleasant-looking naturalism. The National Socialists latched on to populist resentment and accused museums of wasting taxpayers' money on modern art. While for the intellectual elite, the new avant-garde Expressionism was already outmoded, it still hadn't found acceptance among the masses. Museum directors like Max Sauerlandt of the Kunstgewerbe Museum in Hamburg and Ludwig Justi, director of the National Gallery in Berlin, tried to break down this twofold isolation by celebrating Expressionism as a thoroughly German national style. In his desperation, for example, Chemnitz museum director Friedrich Schreiber-Weigand contemplated presenting the National Socialists with a memoir on Expressionism as "true German" art. Writing at times under pseudonyms, others tried to gain acceptance for modern art in right-wing nationalist papers and magazines. Justi, for example, wrote an article on "Germanness in art" in the Hugenberg illustrated magazine Die Woche in 1932.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Eine Künstlergruppe © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-KettererErnst Ludwig Kirchner, Eine Künstlergruppe © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer
In the summer of 1933, the supporters of German Expressionism, by this time a heterogeneous coalition of museum employees, gallery owners, Nazi Party members and artists, saw the salvation for the Brücke group under the Nazis in calling it "Nordic Expressionism". Sauerlandt now interpreted the Brücke movement in a folkish way, defending it against attacks by Alfred Rosenberg as being "by no means negro art". When Justi was dismissed, Alois Schardt, a theoretician of "Nordic Expressionism", was appointed head of the National Gallery. But Hitler soon decided otherwise, identifying Expressionist art with the hated Weimar Republic. The stigmatisation of Expressionism as "degenerate" ensued.

The Brücke group was quickly rehabilitated in the postwar years, although the attempt to stylise the anti-Semitic Emile Nolde as a resistance figure continues to astonish. Werner Haftmann, a well-known West German art historian, celebrated Nolde, the artist of inner emigration, as an "existential antifascist. Even more than those who were racially persecuted, he refused political strictures and intensified his own work." From this West German perspective, individual refusal is worth more than the organised resistance of the politically persecuted. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein became professors at West Berlin's Hochschule der Künste, although they did not exert a great influence on the next generation of artists. The Zeitgeist had turned towards abstract art. Although the Brücke artists became the stars of West German art, hardly anyone talked about Expressionism as a German national style. Above all Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were now celebrated as creative individualists.

In the divided Germany, there was a paradoxical response to Expressionism. While in the West, the Brücke artists were being celebrated as historic greats, worthy of state recognition but having no influence on the younger generation of artists, in the East, although officially condemned, artists and students of art considered them to be important models in figurative art. For many artists in East Germany, Expressionism has remained an important point of reference. Some, like Rene Graetz, referred to the national style thesis, which generated sharp contradictions between party functionaries, who had been stigmatising Expressionism as a "late-bourgeois sign of decay" since 1948. Major party figures, such as Culture Minister Klaus Gysi daydreamed in the decades to follow of an "independent, socialist culture-nation" which would have no common roots with the Federal Republic - German Expressionism as a shared cultural legacy was out of the question.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-KettererErnst Ludwig Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer
In the Federal Republic between 1960 and 1980, a Nolde cult developed. Siegfried Lenz celebrated him as a stoic resistance-fighter in his novel "Deutschstunde" (The German Lesson). Nolde exhibitions drew huge crowds, his works were heavy-weights on the art market. The positions of leading West German politicians are to be understood in this context. In 1975, when the chancellor's office in Bonn was to be decorated, Helmut Schmidt opted for the Expressionists as a counterbalance to the "savings bank architecture of this functional building" as he put it. Schmidt's office was decorated with Noldes; works by Schmidt-Rottluff and Heckel were hung in other rooms. In speeches and interviews, Schmidt stood squarely behind the national tradition of Expressionism which had been illegitimately interrupted during the Third Reich by the Nazis. "For me, Nolde is the absolute crown. Nolde and then Kirchner." His successor Helmut Kohl followed this line and had Brücke works hanging in the chancellery. With the capital's move to Berlin, the artistic decoration of the building changed.

Helmut Schmidt was a guest of the Brücke Museum in Berlin, German President Karl Carstens visited the major Kirchner Exhibition in the National Gallery in 1979. Even the Bild newspaper rejoiced: "The whole world's envious of us for this exhibition!" - a rare alliance between high culture and the tabloids. German President Richard von Weizsäcker, also an avid fan of the Brücke, visited Kirchner's grave in Davos during a trip to Switzerland, and laid a wreath there in an official state ceremony. Although it's hard to imagine speaking of official art policy in a pluralistic democracy, leading representatives of the federal republic expressed something akin to a "state affinity" to Brücke art; or perhaps better put, the taste of those in high office tended towards the Brücke.

In the past few decades, there has been a new trend in this "iconology of power": chairmen, managers and politicians are having themselves photographed in front of large, mainly abstract paintings to demonstrate their modernity, openness, and courage to support artistic dissidence. In this sense, art works have taken the place of corporate logos and national coats of arms. With the choice of Brücke art as a means of cultural self-representation, Schmidt and Weizsäcker opted for moderate modernity, which has drawn a large consensus since 1945. Thus the concept of a state art, which failed in the Weimar Republic in 1933, was implemented in the Federal Republic. This is most obvious in a visit to the new chancellery: Kirchner's painting "Sonntag der Bergbauern" (The mountain farmer's Sunday) dominates the cabinet room.

"'Brücke' und Berlin. 100 Jahre Expressionismus" is in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin until Aug 28.

*

This article originally appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 15, 2005.

Christian Saehrendt is a historian at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has just published "'Die Brücke' zwischen Staatskunst und Verfemung" (Frank Steiner Verlag), a historical investigation of the political reception of the Brücke.
Translation: jab, nb.

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

When soft power fails the acid test

Wednesday 14 March, 2012

Western museums are opening their halls for huge state exhibitions in collaboration with non-democratic regimes. The British Museum is currently hosting an exhibition on the Hajj which is funded by Saudi Arabia and reflects the royal family's position on the ritual. Should an institution dedicated to secular learning accommodate such religiously doctrinaire exhibitions? Yes, says Malise Ruthven in the New York Review of Books blog, who evidently believes in the conciliatory effects of such cultural politics. Tagesspiegel author Nicola Kuhn sees the new "Roads of Arabia" exhibition in Berlin's Pergamon Museum more critically. Image © National Museum, Riyadh
read more

Art in circles

Wednesday 7 March, 2012

TeaserPicFrankfurt's Städelmuseum has just opened its new subterranean contemporary art extension, the culmination of a radical overhaul of the building and its collections. Hans-Joachim Müller ventures down below the surreal domed lawn and is left to meander through a refreshingly idiosyncratic retrospective that turns its back on received ideas about the progress of art. (Image:exterior view of Städel extension by Norbert Miguletz)
read more

Hokusai and the quest for perfection

Tuesday 20 September, 2011

The Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin is currently hosting Germany's first major retrospective of the legendary Japanese artist Hokusai, featuring over 430 exhibits, many of which have never left Japan before. It is hard to believe that such incredible diversity could stem from the hand of just one artist, but it is the product of a lifetime's dedication. By Katrin Wittneven. Image: "Onikojima Yataro and Saihoin Akabozu"© Katsushika Hokusai Museum of Art
read more

Who's afraid of Ai Weiwei?

Tuesday 12 April 2011

German museum director Martin Roth, who has just organised the exhibition "The Art of Enlightenment" in Beijing, belittles the attention focused on Ai Weiwei. His response to the arrest of the Chinese artist is alarming and clearly shows how marketing takes precedence over ethics in the world of culture. A commentary by Rüdiger Schaper.
read more

Protected by pictures

Friday 6 November, 2009

TeaserPicAi Weiwei - the modest megalomaniac, the relaxed rebel. Hanno Rauterberg met China's most interviewed man in the cellar of Munich's Haus der Kunst, where the artist was preparing to turn the place into a battlefield.
read more

The aesthetics of notation

Monday 4 May, 2009

TeaserPicAn exhibition in ZKM Karlsruhe explores the enormous range of artistic processes that exist between the moment of conception and finished work. By Kathrin Peters
Image: Dieter Appelt "Partitur" © 2009 ZKM
read more

Inflated phrases

Wednesday 28 May, 2008

When matter leads to immateriality and transcends the actuality of the object, we are reading a text about art. Notes on the crisis of criticism by Christian Demand
read more

Coincidence and illumination

Wednesday 19 September, 2007

Cologne Cathedral looks back at a long and eventful history. The inauguration of Gerhard Richter's stained glass window for the South Transept adds a new chapter, bright with 72-colour, frame-breaking abstraction. By Petra Kipphoff
read more

Poison in the air

Thursday 19 July, 2007

Now, as the last eye witnesses are dying out, totalitarianism is tempting a new generation to warm their hands in its fire. From Bernd Eichinger, Jonathan Meese and now Tom Cruise, is there no letting go of the Führer? By Georg Diez
read more

Summer of political art

Thursday 21 June, 2007

Both the Venice Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel have taken the dark side of modernity as their theme. Looking at how the two mega-exhibitons do battle, Hanno Rauterberg prefers Kassel's investigation of evil to Venice's concession to it. (Untitled, from the series Spring-Sow-Plum-Scene, 1996, mask 6, 2003. © Aoki Ryoko)
read more

Art on the cutting edge?

Thursday 14 June, 2007

Is today's art no more than the fashion of the day? Are there only niches in art, each with its own cutting edge? Brigitte Werneburg asks what contemporariness means in a world where the lines are blurred between fashionable art and artistic fashion.
read more

Art to the rescue

Wednesday 6 June, 2007

In a disused dockyard in Rostock, the "Art goes Heiligendamm" initiative has put the final touches to its G8 intervention. The preferred topic among the artworks is borders and overcoming them. Aside from that they deal anything that's good: information, documentation, irony, utopia, anti-consumerism. By Irene Grüter
read more

The unofficial documenta list

Thursday 3 May, 2007

Probable, silent, public, inofficial - there are many categories of participant in this year's documenta. What's lacking are the official ones. Because the exhibition organisers are keeping tight-lipped about what artists have been invited, we are left to guess, speculate, hope and dismay. By Ludwig Seyfarth
read more

Wurm holes everywhere

Wednesday 11 April 2007

Dada is back. Erwin Wurm is the great grandson of the Surrealists. The hilarity and hidden meanings of his stagings and sculptures unsettle and get under your skin. To coincide with a major retrospective in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen, Werner Spies visited the artist in his studio in Vienna.
read more

Smiles permitted, grins less welcome

Thursday 29 March, 2007

The art of glimmer and of deception. Seminal works show the roots and origins of the Op Art movement in an exhibition at Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle. The dynamic of black and white fields meets snuffling electric motors. And a bachelor machine makes jokes and winks. By Ulf Erdmann Ziegler
read more