GERMANY AND A BIT OF HISTORY

This exhibition is about tradition and periods. What had pushed me to go and see it in the first place, was this picture which has been seen all over Paris. Johan Henirich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751-1829) - whom I had of course never heard of. I was pretty sure that the painting was of Goethe but what fascinated me was that his hat didn’t seem to be on his head - or far too large and  his left leg under the coat didn’t seem to belong to him either. When I saw the painting I felt the same and yet it is a very striking and compelling image of Goethe. A great thinker and philisopher of course, but where was he? A traveller going where? Or could it be that the picture identifies him as a traveller in thinking and it really doesn’t matter where he is?

Tischbein - Goethe dans la campagne romaine 1787
The exhibition at the Louvre is  called Germany - From Friedrich to Beckmann carries over 200 works dating from 1800-1939. As you may gather it was the last period which interested me the most. This was a period in Germany history when it was difficult to establish a political unity even if the concept of a united Europe was gaining hold. Germany needed to establish the underlying unity of all Germans from Bavaria to the Baltic and from the Rhineland to Prussia. We know what happened.
The Nazi period was dramatic for any artist who was not classic or traditional and those who weren’t became what are known as «the degenerates».(1939) Yet as there was so much propoganda about them, perhaps they became known faster than the regime intended.
I don’t find the early art particulary romantic. Caspar Dvid Friedrich (1774-1840) I quite like but even these two paintings seem to have a lonliness and emptiness about them.
The Tree of Crows -Caspar David Friedrich, 1822

Friedrich - Women at sunrise 1818

Then there is the 1st world war with George Grosz (1893-1959) who already shows the horror. In Love-Sick,(1916) an autoportrait, telling us who he  with his coloured lips and make-up but death seems to be everywhere. In Suicide he is dreading being enlisted for a second time . Art becomes a survival kit but what a survival.....
 
George Grosz - Suicide 1916


George Grosz - Lovesick 1916


Otto Dix 1939 - Bodensee and rainbow




Otto Dix tries to follow the regime but look at this for 1939. I prefer Dix as he is or as he became. 





I think this  one is Beckmann (1884-1950). I found it and know it but am now not sure of the painter? I suppose many women turned to prostitution at the time - to survive. It makes me shudder if I think about it. This next one of Beckmann shows just how destructive man can me. Symbols accumulate willingly - an image where a man is stripped clean by women in the body of birds. There is nothing romantic about this. Men have become animals. 
Beckmann Bird's Hell - 1938
I like all of these artists but perhaps it is a little easier to view their work out of a war context.

Commentaires

Michael Keane a dit…
George Gross, Max Beckmann, and Egon Schiele always conjure up for me that bizarre and sometimes grotesque period between the wars in Germany. They exert a morbid fascination like newsreels of Hitler. I do particularly admire Schiele's work, the Weimer Republic’s equivalent to Toulouse-Lautrec.
9/4/13 07:40
Anonyme a dit…
The one you're not sure of is not Beckmann, but Christian Schad, though I also saw it identified as a Dix recently :-)
9/6/14 05:12
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