"The Good Soldier Schweik." Illustration of the soldier Joseph Schweik by Czech artist Josef Lada. 1923.

A rare presentation of Robert Kurka’s opera, The Good Soldier Schweik, was offered to audiences in Southern California by the Long Beach Opera at the Center Theater in Long Beach on Jan. 23, 2010, and at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica on Jan. 30, 2010. Based on the 1923 antiwar novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, the opera is scarcely known in the United States and has been infrequently performed since it first premiered in 1958.

I attended the performance in Santa Monica, California and offer this article as a review, but I also wish to familiarize readers with the history of the Schweik tale since it was first published eighty-seven-years ago.

The confluence of talents, historic events, and political lessons embodied in Schweik is nothing less than astounding. While Hašek’s story took place during the First World War – “the War to end all Wars” – the work has continued to resonate throughout the decades. It is especially pertinent now that President Obama is fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

I commend Andreas Mitisek, the artistic and general director of the Long Beach Opera company, for staging a boldly anti-militarist production during a time of war. In the Long Beach Opera’s program guide for Schweik, Mitisek states: “The story of Schweik has lost none of its original bite and sarcasm. Seeing it today, you get the sense that we’ve learned some things about war – but not a lot.” It is regrettable that after all the effort the company put into mounting Kurka’s Schweik, only two performances were given. The work deserves a longer run, and hopefully the Long Beach Opera’s efforts will give rise to renewed interest in Kurka’s magnum opus.

Mark Bringelson (left: playing Sergeant Vanek) and Mathew DiBattista (playing Joseph Schweik), perform in the Long Beach Opera production of "The Good Soldier Schweik" on Jan. 30, 2010. Photo by Mark Vallen ©

Of Czech descent, Robert Kurka (1921-1957) was born just outside of Chicago, Illinois. Mostly self-taught when it came to music composition, he nevertheless had a burgeoning career in the field due to his extraordinary talent.

After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951 and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952, he made up his mind that same year to compose an opera based on Hašek’s antiwar novel. Why exactly he chose to do so is unknown, but whatever the reason for his decision he picked an inopportune moment in history for his endeavor. The United States began fighting the Korean War on June 25, 1950, a bloody conflict that would end in stalemate on July 17, 1953. It should go without saying that the powers that be in the U.S. were in no mood for pacifist messages in art, not only that, but American society was in the throes of the frenzied anticommunism of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Set in that context, Kurka’s resolve to write an antiwar opera can be considered an act of defiance.

As work proceeded on his opera Kurka was stricken with leukemia. He continued to labor at his composition, fashioning a brilliant modernist fusion of folk, jazz, and classical idioms. His score was created for a small orchestra without strings, focusing exclusively on percussion, brass, and wind instruments in order to produce a sound evocative of marching rhythms and martial music. The opera shared much with the theatrical works of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht – especially with their magnificent proletarian opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Kurka developed a musical language that described the absurdity of war as expressed in Hašek’s original antiwar novel, and he was just able to finish the opera when he died of his illness on December 12, 1957, ten days before his 36th birthday. Only months after Kurka’s tragic death, The Good Soldier Schweik premiered at the New York City Opera in April 1958.

In Act II – Scene 1 of the opera, a member of the ruling class, the Baroness Von Botzenheim, visits a military field hospital to "comfort" soldiers on their way to be slaughtered at the front. Bringing gifts of sausages and candies, she sings: "Brave soldiers, going off to war, day and night, night and day. While you fight, we will pray. God knows what you’re fighting for." Mezzo-soprano Peabody Southwell played the Baroness in the Long Beach Opera production of "The Good Soldier Schweik" on Jan. 30, 2010. Photo by Mark Vallen ©

Following the overture of The Good Soldier Schweik, the opera’s prologue commences with the appearance of “A Gentleman of the Kingdom of Bohemia,” a dandy in a bowler hat who proclaims that “Great times call for great men.” He continues his narrative by telling the audience that “modest, unrecognized heroes without Napoleon’s glory” exist, men and women who are “Greater than Alexander the Great.” He speaks of “a common man, the kind it’s easy to like,” introducing “a very plain fellow called Schweik.” With the opera’s egalitarian tone set, the black comedy farce unfolds.

Kurka had picked Abel Meeropol (1903-1986) to write the libretto for his opera, and Meeropol produced a witty and sometimes devastating libretto. He was Jewish and a teacher in New York City, but he was also a skilled writer of poems and songs. Troubled that anti-semitism would prevent his advancement in the field of writing, he published his works under the pseudonym of “Lewis Allan.” Meeropol had a second reason for using a nom de plume; he was a member of the American Communist Party. In 1937 he wrote the words and music to a hauntingly poetic song he titled Strange Fruit, a work that protested the lynching of African-Americans in the Southern United States. By 1939 the Blues singer Billie Holiday recorded the song, and her record reached No. 16 on the American music charts. Strange Fruit is still considered to be a signature work for Holiday.

In 1941 Meeropol was made to appear before the anti-communist Rapp-Coudert Committee (1940-1942), a precursor to the anti-communist campaigns waged in the 1950s by Joe McCarthy and HUAC. Headed by Senators Herbert Rapp and Frederic Coudert, the committee conducted “investigations” into the presence of communists in the public schools of New York. As a result of the witch hunt, dozens of teachers were dismissed and had their reputations ruined. Meeropol was questioned as to whether or not the American Communist Party ordered him to write Strange Fruit, but he escaped further badgering from the committee when he answered that the party had nothing to do with the writing of the song.

In 1950 the U.S. government charged Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with attempting to pass nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. The couple were tried and convicted of the charges and sentenced to death. During this period, anti-communism in the U.S. reached a fever pitch, and it must be noted that Kurka was working on his opera in the middle of all of this. On June 19, 1953, the Rosenbergs were executed by electric chair, leaving their little boys Michael and Robert orphaned. Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne would adopt the boys. In a March 2009 interview with Robert Meeropol, Guardian journalist Joanna Moorhead wrote: “It seems hard for us to understand, but the paranoia of the McCarthy era was such that many people – even family members – were terrified of being connected with the Rosenberg children, and many people who might have cared for them were too afraid to do so. After he and his wife had adopted the boys, says Meeropol, Abel didn’t get any work as a writer throughout most of the 1950s. ‘I can’t say he was blacklisted, but it definitely looks as though he was at least greylisted.’” There is little doubt that U.S. authorities kept an eye on Abel Meeropol, and that Kurka fell under suspicion for working with him.

Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek as a member of the Soviet Red Army in 1920. Hašek was attached to the political department of the 5th army, where he worked on the Red Army newspaper.

To fully appreciate Kurka’s opera it is necessary to have some understanding of author Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923) and his satiric novel, The Good Soldier Schweik (also spelled Schwejk or Švejk), one of the greatest antiwar books of all time. In the story Hašek detailed the life and times of his fictional character, the rotund and mild-mannered Joseph Schweik, who is inducted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to fight against the Allied Powers in World War I (1914-1918). An enthusiastic patriot, Schweik is also a lumbering idiot who, in his zealotry to carry out the orders of his superiors, succeeds only in creating havoc. But one is never certain if Schweik’s ineptness reveals his true nature or if it is clever posturing as a means of self-preservation. Whatever the case, his foul-ups keep him from reaching the war’s blood-spattered frontline, until the story’s ending, when he finally arrives at the front but disappears without a trace while on patrol.

A colorful character, as a young man Hašek was an anarchist militant before he became completely engrossed in his writing. At the outbreak of WWI the wild bohemian, writer, and radical anarchist found himself inducted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and sent to the frontline trenches to fight against the Allied Powers; it is not hard to see that The Good Soldier story was to some degree autobiographical. While he had already invented his Schweik character and had previously written stories about him, it was during the travails of war that Hašek began to “flesh out” the character; transforming him into a good-natured buffoon that became a menace to the forces of militarism.

In 1915 Hašek was captured by the Russians and placed in a prisoner of war camp before his captors decided to employ him as a propagandist. When the Russian monarchy and its army collapsed with the 1917 Soviet revolution, Hašek joined the Bolsheviks, becoming a political commissar in the Red Army. Hašek’s allegiance to communism proved as tenuous as his loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after some years of living in the Soviet Union he returned to Prague in 1920, throwing himself in earnest into the completion of his Schweik novel.

Heavy drinking and ill-health overtook Hašek, who struggled to finish his masterwork. He became so sick that he stopped writing altogether, dictating to assistants the final chapters of Schweik from his sickbed. He died of tuberculosis on January 3, 1923, at the age of 40; it was said that he had completed some 1,500 literary works during his lifetime – but alas Schweik would not be one of them. Hašek had planned on Schweik running six volumes in length, but he had only created three volumes when he died (a forth was published posthumously). His old friend Josef Lada created marvelous illustrations for all the volumes, and it is his artworks that defined the bumbling good soldier. Years after his death Hašek came to be accepted as one of the most important of all Czech writers, and The Good Soldier Schweik – having been translated into 60 languages – is still the most well known work of fiction by a Czech author.

Stage design for Piscator’s 1928 stage play production of "The Good Soldier Schweik," showing backdrop projected images by George Grosz.

I first learned of Hašek’s masterpiece years ago through my studies of the German Expressionist movement of the late 1920s. Because of its disdain for militarism the Schweik novel was appreciated by broad sectors of the German public, who had been impoverished and exhausted by WWI. The intelligentsia embraced the story for its pacifism and defiance of conservative social order. In 1928 Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), the German Marxist director and producer of political theater during the years of the Weimar Republic, developed a landmark stage play adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik that he presented at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin.

Drawing by George Grosz for "Hintergrund: 17 Zeichnungen zur Aufführung des Schwejk in der Piscator-Bühne" (Background: 17 designs for the performance of the Schweik in the Piscator stage). Published in 1928 by the Malik-Verlag Berlin publishing house, this portfolio contains reproductions of 17 drawings created by Grosz as stage background images for the stage play, "The Good Soldier Schweik." This particular image was the portfolio’s title page.

Piscator commissioned prominent playwright Hans Reimann (1889-1969) to write the play’s script, and Bertolt Brecht assisted in writing the adaptation. Edmund Meisel (1894-1930) who just three years earlier had scored the music for Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, was commissioned to compose the music. The character of Schweik was played by the famed actor Max Pallenberg. Artist George Grosz created the stage backgrounds for the play, making hundreds of pen and ink drawings for the production. His drawings were made into an animated film that was back-projected onto the stage to coincide with the play’s action – a groundbreaking theatrical technique common to Piscator’s productions. The Long Beach Opera utilized Piscator’s idea of projected images, but its choice of images was much less effective.

"Schweik: The Actor Max Pallenberg." George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1927. Grosz created this portrait of the play’s leading man as Schweik. This drawing was plate no. 1 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio, and was titled, "Beg to report, Sir, I am an idiot."

Piscator’s theories concerning what he called “epic theater” transformed the stage presenting Schweik into a motorized “arena for battling ideas,” in fact mechanized treadmills moved actors about on stage – in one scene allowing actors dressed as soldiers to march off to war without actually moving.

The intent behind Piscator’s theatrical work was to prevent audiences from losing themselves in the illusion of theater, instead making them focus on socio-political ideas. The young Bertolt Brecht would be inspired by Piscator’s ideas, making them his own.

The Schweik production included projected still photographs on the stage and auditorium walls – news headlines and text, as well as projections of motion picture films (Grosz’s animation, footage of war, and the like).

The projections were combined with other theatrical devices: audio recordings and electronic sounds, actors emerging from the audience, and giant military maps as stage scenery. Grosz wrote the following regarding his role in the Piscator production:

“It is a fact that here Erwin has created a great new area for the graphic artists to work in, a veritable graphic arena, more tempting for graphic artists of today than all that stuffy aesthetic business or the hawking around of drawings in bibliophile editions for educated nobs. Here’s a chance for our often quoted latter-day Daumiers to paint their gloomy prophecies on the walls. What a medium, though, for the artist who wants to speak to the masses, purely and simply.

Naturally a new area requires new techniques, a new clear and concise language of graphic style – certainly a great opportunity for teaching discipline to the muddleheaded and confused! And there’s nothing to be achieved with your careless impressionist brush, either. The line must be cinematographic – clear, simple, but not too thin, because of over-exposure; furthermore it must be hard, something like the drawings and woodcuts in Gothic block books, or the massive stone carvings on the pyramids.”

"Kein schoner Tod." (Not a Nice Way of Dying). George Grosz. Black chalk. 1927. Plate no. 12 in the Hintergrund portfolio, this drawing also appeared in another portfolio of prints by Grosz titled, Die Gezeichneten (The Designated). In that portfolio the print had the title of "Mir ist der Krieg wie eine Badekur bekommen" (The War Did Me a Lot of Good, Like a Spa).

Grosz’s projected drawings helped to move the drama along by emphasizing aspects of the Schweik tale, but the artworks also transcended the story, becoming universal in their condemnation of war and its causes. The audience could see that Grosz was criticizing the renewed warlike direction of Germany’s ruling class, and if his projected images were not unsettling enough, Grosz would up the ante by publishing a number of the drawings in book form.

He collaborated with Wieland Herzfelde (founder of the Malik-Verlag Berlin publishing house and also the brother of well-known artist John Heartfield), in issuing a portfolio of reproductions titled, Background: 17 designs for the performance of the Schweik in the Piscator stage. The publication of the book caused a major uproar; what had been ephemeral projections could now be held in the hands of increasingly powerful critics.

Three drawings from the portfolio, Shut up and soldier on!, Bow to the Authorities, and The pouring out of the Holy Spirit, led to a right-wing campaign against Grosz and Herzfelde that resulted in the authorities charging the two with blasphemy and placing them on trial in 1928; it turned out to be one of the longest running and closely watched blasphemy trials in history.

The essence of Grosz’s drawing, The pouring out of the Holy Spirit, would be preserved by Meeropol in his libretto for Kurka’s opera in Act II, Scene Two, “Okay, let’s pray!”. In attempting to explain his Shut up and soldier on! drawing to a judge, Grosz said the following:

“This drawing was created as a cover on the book about Schweik. In one of the chapters there’s the following scene – I’ll give you the gist, because I can’t remember it exactly. Well, there are these two soldiers lying on a bed in a cell, I think, and they’re telling each other stories about their war experiences. They grumble about the war. One says to the other something like: Well, shut up and soldier on. As I read this account the drawing took shape in my imagination. I imagined that Christ might come now… They would grab him, hand him a gas mask, put him into army boots, in short, they wouldn’t understand him at all.” [Taken from notes of the blasphemy trial, published in Das Tagebuch, 1928].

"Maul halten und weiter dienen." (Shut up and soldier on!) George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1928. Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde (brother of John Heartfield) were accused and tried on blasphemy charges for this drawing, which originally served as a backdrop image in the play, "The Good Soldier Schweik," but was later published in the "Hintergrund" portfolio.

After numerous trials and retrials, Grosz and Hezfelde were acquitted in 1931, but the Schweik drawings and their printing plates were confiscated by the court and destroyed. The social forces of the burgeoning Nazi movement had scored a major victory. When Hitler came to power two years later, The Good Soldier Schweik became one of the many thousands of books destroyed during the massive public book-burnings organized by the Nazi party on May 10, 1933. Hašek’s book was burned because it was considered “pacifist literature,” but books by “Marxists,” “liberals,” “Jews,” and anyone considered to be “un-German” were thrown onto the bonfires as well. Books by Piscator, Brecht, Grosz, and Herzfelde were also added to what the Nazis called the “funeral pyre of the intellect.”

"Die Obrigkeit." (The Authorities). George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1927. This print had the subtitle of: "Seid untertan der Obrigkeit" (Bow to the Authorities). Plate no. 2 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio. Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde were tried for blasphemy because of this drawing.

To escape Nazi persecution Grosz would flee to the U.S. in 1932. Herzfelde went underground soon after, finally escaping to Prague in 1933. Working on a film in the Soviet Union in 1933, Piscator found himself in exile when Hitler came to power. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin and by 1936 he move to France, finally emigrating to the U.S. in 1939.

Piscator was invited to found a Dramatic Workshop at New York’s The New School, where his students included Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Tony Curtis, Shelley Winters, and many others. Ironically, the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism drove Piscator from America. His associate and fellow exile in the U.S., Bertolt Brecht, was hauled up before HUAC on October 30, 1947, and harshly interrogated regarding his political sympathies. The next day Brecht left the U.S. for Europe. Piscator did not wait to receive his subpoena, he returned to West Germany in 1951 to avoid the witch-hunts.

"Ausschuttung des heiligen Geistes." (The pouring out of the Holy Spirit). George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1928. Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde were tried for blasphemy because of this drawing. Plate no. 9 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio.

Piscator’s technical ideas regarding the staging of the Schweik play clearly have had an influence on theatre and opera over the decades. His concepts like projected backdrops, stage hands incorporated into the action as they shuffled props on and off stage, and actors performing in the aisles amongst the audience, were incorporated into the Long Beach Opera production. However, Piscator meant to provoke his audience into taking sides against war and those who profit from it, while the Long Beach Opera placed its emphasis on entertainment.

Given the profundity of Kurka’s material it would be impossible not to impart some level of political insight, and such moments were plentiful in the Long Beach Opera production. In Act I – Scene Four, Schweik finds himself in a cell at police headquarters after having been arrested for allegedly speaking against the Emperor. Many others are also in the jail for the very same offense, and all are worried about being brutalized and tortured at the hands of the police. Schweik, assuring his fellow jailbirds that things are not so bad, sings:

“I once read in a book where it said, you had to dance on red-hot iron and drink molten lead. You were shot or hanged, burned or slaughtered, and as a special event, drawn and quartered. They split you open or chopped your head, you might be innocent but you were also dead. There’s no quartering here or things of that kind, it’s improved for our benefit I’m glad to find. We’ve got a mattress, a table, a seat, they bring us soup and water and bread to eat, the slop pot is right there under your nose, a lot of progress is what it shows.”

"Der Lebensbaum." (Tree of Life). George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1927. Executed men hang from a tree made of the "§" symbol used to denote German legal articles. No. 4 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio.

As with a number of scenes in the opera, the action in Scene Four transcends the period setting of 1914, in fact it is hard not to think of the present when hearing about the “progress” made in the handling of prisoners held by certain governments. Surely waterboarding is an improvement over being drawn and quartered – yes, a lot of progress is what it shows!

The ending scenes of the Long Beach Opera production could hardly have concluded on a more profound note. In Act II – Scene Seven, the character of Schweik at last finds himself at the front. On the stage backdrop a gigantic image is projected, a terrible scene of utter desolation; shattered and blackened skeletal trees and bomb craters cast in blue light. From behind the stage backdrop the orchestra begins the somber music for the song, “Wait for the ragged soldiers.” Groups of wounded troops walk onto the stage – collapsing, exhausted, dying, as they sing their foreboding song:

“Wait for the ragged soldiers, watch for the ragged men with their sunken faces, holding their blood-red wounds with their hands. No sound of drums when they come, no trumpets blow when they come, no flags at the gate. Wait for the ragged soldiers. Wait…wait and watch for the ragged, watch for the tired men marching slowly homeward. Men… homeward. (….) Coat sleeves armless, legless, sightless. Angry, angry, angry men, angry men. No sound of drums when they come, No!”

Act II – Scene 7. Joseph Schweik and Sergeant Vanek at the bomb blasted battle front. A group of wounded soldiers trudge by, collapsing one by one into muddy trenches as they sing: "Wait for the ragged soldiers." Photo of the Jan. 30, 2010, Long Beach Opera production of "The Good Soldier Schweik" taken by Mark Vallen ©

Patrolling the battlefield, Schweik and Sergeant Vanek enter the scene carrying their guns; here the production has been updated to good effect.

Rather than carrying WWI era bolt action rifles, the two soldiers are armed with modern automatic assault rifles, reminders that the sentiments of this opera are not rooted in the past, but relevant and applicable to the world as it is today.

Lost in the landscape of mangled barbed-wire and stinking corpses, Schweik and Vanek argue over which direction to take. Vanek insists that his military map indicates a right turn, Schweik shrugs and says, “Maps are sometimes wrong.” The two cannot agree on how to advance, so they part, going separate ways.

Schweik watches the Sergeant disappear into the blackened wasteland of destruction, waves goodbye, and lays down his gun. As the character of Schweik begins to walk off stage, he sings: “I’ll take a quiet road where forget-me-nots grow, along a clear stream where soft breezes blow. I’ll take it easy for the rest of the day and pick some meadow flowers on the way. I’ll take a quiet road and I’ll lie in the sun, for birds and butterflies, I won’t need my gun.” His song over, Schweik vanishes.

In the opera’s epilogue the gentleman of Bohemia returns, stepping out of the darkness and into a spotlight to find Schweik’s abandoned gun. The gentleman sings the opera’s final words: “Schweik, Schweik, where did he go? He just disappeared and that’s all we know. Some say they saw him at a much later day, sipping a drink at a little café. And others will swear he was seen on the street, and lost in the crowd before they could meet. Schweik, Schweik, the Good Soldier Schweik, the kind of fellow that fellow men like. In one place or other he’s sure to be found. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s somewhere around.”

[ More information on Robert Kurka’s opera, The Good Soldier Schweik: Song lyrics and a synopsis of the opera’s storyline, can be found on the Cedille Records website in .pdf format. An excellent recording of the opera performed by the Chicago Opera Theater and released by Cedille Records can be purchased from Amazon, where you can also hear song excerpts. An English language edition of Jaroslav Hašek’s Schweik novel, with illustrations by Josef Lada can also be purchased on Amazon.]

"O joyful, o blessed, miracle-bringing time." - John Heartfield. Photomontage. 1935.

Hark the Herald Angels Sing!
Machine Gun Clatter!
Bomb Blast!
Poison Gas!

The anti-militarist Christmas message from John Heartfield shown at left was published on December 26, 1935, in the German magazine, Arbeiter-Illustriete Zeitung (AIZ, or “Worker’s Illustrated Paper”).

The title of the photomontage, O du fröhliche, O du selige, gnadenbringende Zeit (O joyful, o blessed, miracle-bringing time), was taken from one of Germany’s most popular Christmas carols.

Heartfield made a number of photomontage works that touched upon Christmas and how its message of peace was being subverted by the forces of war and fascism.

For instance, in the 1934 Christmas edition of AIZ, the artist published his photomontage, O Tannenbaum im deutschen Raum, wie krumm sind deine Äste! (O Christmas tree in German soil, how bent are thy branches). The artwork depicted a Christmas tree with its branches twisted into the shape of a swastika.

The cover of the 1933 Christmas issue of AIZ featured a photograph of an American battleship with the headline, “And Peace on Earth!” When opening the magazine the reader would see a Heartfield photomontage on the first page - its message read, “Peace on Earth? No peace on earth, as long as the poor become poorer!” Heartfield’s artwork depicted hungry Germans peering into an upscale shop window that was bursting with Christmas merchandise they could not afford.

Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now, is a splendid exhibition of woodcut and linoleum prints now showing until Feb. 8, 2009, at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. On display are 100 diverse and quite extraordinary prints from the likes of Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Käthe Kollwitz, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joseph Beuys, and many others too numerous to mention.

Divided into four thematic sections, the first presents the emergence of modern printmaking in the 1870’s, the second shows how artists used the grain of the wood to enhance their compositions, the third is devoted to prints in the arena of social activism, and the final section presents sacred and religious iconography. While I could easily wax poetic on the prints included under each theme, in this article I will focus on the prints categorized under social activism, or as the Hammer defined them - prints that are “The Voice Of The Activist”.

Without a doubt, the core of the exhibit is comprised of two monumental woodcut prints from Cuba; The Pseudo-Republic and the Revolution by Carmelo Gonzalez Iglesias, and Latin America, Unite! by Luis Peñalever Collazo - who was a student of Iglesias. In contemplating the intricate woodcut prints one is left dumbfounded by the fact that they were designed to be used as street posters!

Iglesias and Collazo are beyond reproach when it comes to superlative draftsmanship, clear narrative, and technical virtuosity. Their prints make today’s vaunted “street-art” seem feeble in comparison. Unfortunately the Hammer would not allow photography in the gallery, and the museum has not made available any decent reproductions of these extraordinary prints. The few image details I present here are woefully inadequate in conveying the beauty and power of these Cuban woodcuts.

Both Pseudo-Republic and Unite! were created in 1960, just a year after the triumph of the revolution against the U.S. backed regime of General Fulgencio Batista. Since the majority of the mural-like prints were wheat-pasted on city walls in Cuba, not many copies survived intact. However, in 1961 Che Guevara gave a set of the prints to a young foreign student in Cuba, Maurice Zeitlin (now a UCLA professor), and the gift to Zeitlin currently hangs in the Hammer exhibit. Printed from seven different woodblocks, Pseudo-Republic measures 51 by 169 inches, and like puzzle pieces, when the separate prints are brought together properly - they become one cohesive narrative. Unite! is somewhat smaller at 33 7/8 by 87 1/2 inches, but no less effective. It too was printed from several carved woodblocks.

The exhibit has a small but weighty collection of graphics produced by the Mexican collective - El Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP - Popular Graphic Arts Workshop). Included in this grouping is a beautiful linoleum cut by African American artist, Elizabeth Catlett, who worked with the TGP when she moved to and settled in Mexico in 1946. The print on display is titled Sharecropper, and only a few black and white proofs were made by Catlett in 1952. In 1968-70 the artist would pull an edition of 60 full color prints - but it is one of the stunning black and white proofs that is on view at the Hammer. Another of the TGP associated artists shown in Gouge is Leopoldo Méndez, who surely was one of Mexico’s most impressive socially conscious printmakers. I was first introduced to his works during the 1970’s, when his fiery prints were enthusiastically circulated in Chicano arts and activist circles in the U.S. In the near future I will be writing extensively about Méndez on this web log, but for now, all that is necessary to say is that his print at the Hammer show, The Heritage of Juarez - is a marvel to behold.

Gouge also presents three woodcuts by David Alfaro Siqueiros from his 13 Grabados series. In 1930 the artist spent 6 months in a Mexican prison for having participated in a May Day demonstration. While incarcerated he created 13 grabados (engravings), cut from scrap wood, and upon his release he printed a small edition of proofs. It would not be until he came to Los Angeles as a political refugee in 1932 that he would print his woodcuts as a full portfolio in an edition of 100. In tribute to the great Mexican printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, the prints were made on colored tissue - and three of these made their way into the Gouge exhibit. Stylistically the works are blunt, almost abstract, and not surprisingly they deal with issues of state repression and violence.

In addition, Gouge has on view an impressive collection of prints from the German Expressionists. Woodcuts by Erich Heckel, Emile Nolde, Christian Rohlfs, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Lovis Corinth, and Käthe Kollwitz - all provide consummate examples of the Expressionist school I so unwaveringly admire. But it is two woodcuts created by Conrad Felixmüller in 1921 that I find especially delightful - if for no other reason than the artist is so little known in the U.S. and rarely if at all exhibited. Felixmüller’s Factory Worker (Invalid) and Mine Engineer, are sympathetic portraits of working men, a common theme for the artist. Stylistically the brusque angular portraits explode with dynamic swirls of energy and agitated lines, while revealing considerable empathy for the men he portrayed.

The Gouge exhibition is not without its weaknesses. The contemporary prints, relying heavily on gimmickry, by and large convey little more than the detached hollowness one associates with postmodernism. The limitations of these new works, deficient in both originality and anything significant to say, is made all the more apparent when they are compared to the older works in the exhibit. Another drawback to the show is that it lacks an exhibit catalog. I could write volumes on the tour de force works of the Cuban artists alone. Given the fact that outside of Cuba virtually nothing is known about these particular artworks or the artists that produced them, it is indeed unfortunate that the Hammer has not published even a diminutive catalog. Despite these failings Gouge is a blockbuster show not to be missed.

Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now - at the Hammer Museum from November 9, 2008 through February 8, 2009. On Feb. 4, 2009, exhibit curators will hold a 12:30 lunchtime talk concerning Luis Peñalever Collazo and his woodcut, Latin America, Unite!

Some years ago, while visiting the German city of Cologne, I discovered the works of the Cologne Progressive Artists Group (Gruppe Progressiver Künstler Köln), a bloc of artists that represented the radical outer fringe of the Expressionist movement of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Fortunately for enthusiasts of art from the Weimar years the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, has mounted an exhibition titled Progressive Cologne: 1920-33, Seiwert - Hoerle - Arntz. Running from March 15 to June 15, 2008, the exhibit is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog book, Painting as a Weapon - a definitive text on the Progressives that is sure to please both historians and aficionados of German Expressionism.

The exhibition focuses on three core members of the Cologne Progressives, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Heinrich Hoerle, and Gerd Arntz, with the exhibit presenting over fifty paintings and ninety prints by the artists. The Progressives were interested in the creation of a formal proletarian aesthetic, an innovative art of and for the working class. While the Cologne Progressives were in part inspired by the Soviet Constructivists, they did not adopt the severe geometric abstractions of their Soviet counterparts. Stirred by the aesthetics of “primitive” tribal art and the iconography of early Christian images, the Progressives never fully abandoned figurative realism. Instead they stripped what they perceived to be superfluous details from their paintings, prints and drawings, de-emphasizing individual features of the people in their artworks, leaving the minimalist figures to convey some instructive narrative. From 1929 to 1933, the group published a theoretical journal titled A bis Z (A to Z), where the writings and artworks of Progressive circle members and their associates were published.

The photographer August Sander was attracted to the Progressive circle, aligning himself with the group in the early 1920s. His photos were often published in A bis Z, and his method of photographing his subjects according to their place in society’s hierarchy - revealing social tensions and class relations - was in harmony with the Progressive’s political and aesthetic outlook. Sander ended up photographing most members of the Progressive group, as with this portrait of painter Gottfried Brockmann now in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Interestingly enough, at the time of this writing, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is presenting August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century - a selection of 130 photos taken by Sander during the Weimar years, an exhibit that runs until September 14, 2008.

The Progressives held two major views that set them apart from the larger Expressionist school. They rejected the notion of art in service to politics; only because they viewed the type of art they were creating as political action in and of itself - from their perspective their art was the revolution, or at least a vital component of it. Secondly, they commonly depicted people as generic symbols. By reducing and standardizing the human form, and by dressing their minimalist figures in garments worn either by oligarchs or workers, the Progressives intended to show how class divisions were imposed upon humanity. One of the Progressives who excelled in this type of didactic minimalism was Gerd Arntz, whose works would come to influence international design to this very day.

Gerd Arntz collaborated with the Marxist Viennese social scientist Otto Neurath on creating what they called the International System of Typographic Picture Education, or Isotype. The idea was to provide the working class with a universal visual language of symbols and pictograms that would assist them in understanding complex ideas concerning politics, economics, industry, and society in general. Neurath hired Arntz as a designer for the Isotype project in 1928, and over the years the artist designed some 4000 pictograms. While Isotype was based upon a radical political vision, the very concept for the pictographic road signs and other governmental pictograms we see everywhere today can be traced back directly to the collaborative work of Neurath and Arntz.

The Progressive’s drive to develop a new visual language was cut short by the rise of the Nazis, who branded them as “degenerate” and prohibited them from producing or exhibiting their works. Franz W. Seiwert died in Cologne in 1933 of radiation burns he suffered as a child - just before the Nazis undoubtedly would have come for him. Gerd Arntz was forced into exile in 1934 as Nazi repression against the arts increased, fleeing to the Netherlands where he would live and work until he died in 1988. In 1936 Heinrich Hoerle died in Cologne of tuberculosis, which had previously killed his father, sister, and first wife, Angelika. August Sanders never left Germany. In 1936 the Nazis seized and destroyed the printing plates for his photo book, Face of our Time, forbidding him to exhibit or publish. When his Cologne studio was destroyed in a 1944 Allied Forces bombing raid, thousands of his negatives were obliterated. Sander died in Cologne in 1964. Today, 4,500 original prints and some 11,000 original glass negatives are housed in the August Sander Archive in Cologne, Germany, the largest collection of his work in the world.

The opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, is a razor-edged critique of capitalism, and considered by many to be the greatest collaboration between music composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht. On March 4th, 2007, well over 3,000 people packed the Los Angeles Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to see the seventh and final performance of the L.A. Opera’s English-language production of, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Augsteig und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny). It may come as a big surprise to some people that I’m a fervent opera enthusiast, but I was one of those in attendance, and that very performance was filmed for broadcast by PBS.

Now, millions of Americans will finally be able to see the remarkable opera when PBS Great Performances broadcasts it nationally. Its televised premiere begins on Monday, Dec. 17, 2007, when it’s shown on New York’s WNET-TV, at 9:00 p.m., and again on Friday, December 21, at 12:30 a.m. Angelenos can see Mahagonny when L.A.’s KCET-TV broadcasts the opera on Saturday, Dec. 22, at 10 p.m. Check your local PBS listings for the broadcast time in your area. The L.A. Opera production is also now available as a high-definition DVD release.

Mahagonny is far from being a traditional opera. It tells the story of Mahagonny (pronounced “Mah-ha-GO-knee”), an imaginary American city founded by three criminals on the run, where everything has been commodified, the only real crime is to be poor, and a lifestyle of over-consumption and never-ending vice is unhindered by ethics or morality. Sound familiar? Two of the city’s denizens, a prostitute named Jenny Smith, and a lumberjack named Jim Macintyre, fall in love; but when Jim runs out of cash and can’t pay his bar bill, the boss and co-founder of the corrupt city, Leocadia Begbick, has him arrested. Tried in a kangaroo court organized by the shady and the crooked, Jim is found guilty of having no money - and then summarily executed.

Interestingly enough, Mahagonny has received nothing but praise and enthusiastic acclaim from the corporate press, but with stellar performances by a talented cast how could it be otherwise. Leocadia Begbick is played by Tony Award winner Patti LuPone, Jenny Smith the prostitute is played by Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, and lumberjack Jim is played by tenor Anthony Dean Griffey. The L.A. Opera company’s Music Director, James Conlon, conducted the company’s superb orchestra, delivering Weill’s opus with precision and enthusiasm. John Doyle’s direction and inventive stage production not only updated the parable, making it perfectly believable as a contemporary moralistic tale, he also managed to retain Brecht’s radical ideas concerning theater as a vehicle for social change.

It was in 1927 that Weill and Brecht decided to work on an opera together. Brecht had been writing satirical poems in the early 20’s about a mythical city he called Mahagonny, a debauched metropolis obsessed with money and sordid pleasures. Mockingly compiled as a pseudo-devotional book of prayers and hymns titled Domestic Breviary, Brecht’s poems served as the basis for Weill’s Mahagonny-Songspiel, ten poems set to music that would later be integrated into the full opera for which Brecht wrote the libretto. When the opera was still in its rehearsal stage, Weill commented; “The work we intend to produce is not going to make use of contemporary material that will be out of date in a year’s time but sets out to present our age in a definitive form. Its influence will thus extend far beyond the moment in which it is written.” That Mahagonny continues to ring true to a contemporary audience - nearly 80 years after its premiere, is a tribute to the artistic vision and political clarity possessed by Weill and Brecht.

At the opera’s Leipzig premiere in March 1930, Nazi hoodlums initiated protests and threatened violence against the production. The singer Lotte Lenya, who was Weill’s wife and would later play the part of Jenny in the 1931 Berlin production of Mahagonny, attended the Leipzig opening and had this to say about the Nazi assault: “The performance was well underway before I was startled out of my absorption by the electric tension around us, something strange and ugly; by the last scene the riot had spread to the stage. Only after the arrival of the police could the theater finally be emptied.” The police ended up canceling the second performance. Fascist intimidation continued during the opera’s 1931 run in Berlin, and it would increase until the opera was finally banned outright by the Nazis in 1933 - the year Weill and Brecht fled Germany.

Brecht understood theatre not just as a form of entertainment, but as a vehicle that could help workers understand and analyze their political situation, he felt theatrical performances should appeal to reason and not simply give way to sentimentality. In the 1957 book, Brecht on Theater, the playwright described his theory of “alienation effect” theatre as being that “which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor - and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer.” The original Brecht production of Mahagonny, as with his other plays, utilized various contrivances to prevent viewers from being lulled into a theatrical fantasy. Stage settings were deliberately sparse and flooded with harsh lights, with no attempt to hide stage lighting equipment. Slogans and explanatory text were projected upon stage walls, and actors carried placards onstage bearing political messages. With outbursts of songs whose lyrics drove home his political points, Brecht would use music itself to interrupt stage action.

By the closing scenes of the L.A. Opera production, if you haven’t already recognized that we are all living in Mahagonny, the opera offers a reflection of our commodity spectacle society that is so searing you’re likely never to forget it. It’s here that the brilliance of John Doyle’s direction becomes apparent. As the lumberjack Jim MacIntyre is put on trial for the crime of having no legal tender, the stage is transformed into something evocative of a set for a television game show. Paparazzi and court reporters roam the stage with hand-held video cameras, projecting the court proceedings onto a giant flat screen monitor suspended from the ceiling. As Jim is sentenced to die and we see his face larger than life on that huge flat screen, it’s as if the ghost of Brecht has come back to scold us for being so easily distracted by the frivolous media spectacle that daily blinds and misleads us.

The updated finale of the L.A. production preserves Brecht’s intention of theatre provoking an audience to thought and action. Jimmy MacIntyre has been executed, and as the people abandon the deteriorating and collapsing city of Mahagonny in droves, an oversized electronic ticker-tape machine suspended over the stage flashes its digital red letter message - For the Freedom of the Rich - For Property - For Theft. Forsaking the sinful city, a long line of black-suited men carrying briefcases shuffles grimly by, and out of their midst comes the prostitute Jenny. She’s carrying all that she has left of her lost love Jim, an American flag that has been presented to her, smartly tucked and folded into a tri-cornered shape, the type of flag presented at US military funerals. The obvious reference to America’s war dead in Iraq is chilling. Jenny holds the folded flag up towards the audience - and the stage goes dark.

Sometimes an artist’s efforts to endure an indifferent society seems an unbearable, uphill battle. When on occasion I’m feeling disheartened, I find solace by reading about what other artists have had to put up with in the course of their careers. Such reading usually provides me with enough consolation to shake off my negative mind-set and enthusiastically return to my painting.

One evening while hitting the books to elude a squall of dejection, I happened upon the reproduction of a painting I had never seen before. Titled, Night of the Black Moon, the mysterious work commanded my immediate attention, as it seemed a visual representation of everything I had recently been feeling. An unsettling image that matched my melancholia, Karl Hofer’s Black Moon nevertheless quite inexplicably gave me feelings of optimism.

Hofer (1878-1955) was a leading expressionist painter in Germany, but he was never affiliated with any of the expressionist groups or circles like Die Brücke (The Bridge), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), or the Novembergruppe (November Group). In 1921 Hofer became an art professor at the Kunstschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg, but the growing rightwing movement in the country considered expressionism to be “un-German.” After the Nazis seized power they officially banned Hofer’s works and sacked him from his teaching position. Eventually Hofer’s paintings were included in the Nazi’s infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst (”Degenerate Art”) exhibit held in Munich. Incredibly the artist was never sent to a concentration camp or press-ganged into military service like so many of his contemporaries. Forbidden by the authorities to paint or exhibit, Hofer continued to reside in Berlin - living a shadow existence but somehow surviving.

One can only imagine Hofer in his Berlin studio painting Night of the Black Moon during the unhappy days of 1944. He created this masterwork surreptitiously under the most terrifying conditions. Berlin would finally be liberated in April of 1945 by Soviet and Allied troops, but most of the city would be left in utter ruin. It is miraculous that Hofer survived it all. After the war he would continue painting in his West Berlin studio until his passing in 1955 - and what a legacy he left for us all! Luckily an excellent German language art book on the life and work of Karl Hofer is available on Amazon books. You can see a small overview of the artist’s works at the German language website, Galerie Karl Hofer.

If there was ever an exhibition of historic artworks with more resonance in today’s world, I’m sure it couldn’t beat Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920’s at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rarely seen artworks by German Expressionist artists from the 20’s are on loan to the Met, and the works document German society stumbling along between World Wars I and II as it takes the long fall into the open pit of fascism. The show is nothing short of explosive, and viewers will no doubt be made uneasy by the echoes the artworks have in our own troubled times.

Glitter and Doom presents more than 100 paintings and drawings by ten artists, some of which are not at all well known outside of Germany. I’m eternally grateful that on my numerous sojourns to Germany over the years, I’ve become familiar with some of these lesser known but no less brilliant artists. Without hestitation I credit the German Expressionists as a major influence upon my own work, and it’s no exageration to say that without their bold and courageous examples - I wouldn’t be the artist I am today. Those exhibited in Glitter and Doom include: Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Rudolf Schlichter, Karl Hubbuch, Ludwig Meidner, Georg Scholz, Gert H. Wollheim, and Christian Schad. The exhibit is heavily weighted in favor of Beckman and Dix, but I’m sure no one will complain. Beckman is represented by 17 works, and the Met is touting that with more than 50 Dix works on display, Glitter and Doom will be “the first major presentation of the artist’s work in the United States.” That alone should be reason enough for anyone to catch a flight to New York.

One of my favorite paintings by Dix will be on view, Portrait of Anita Berber, however it’s an unknown but recently discovered painting by Dix that is sure to steal the show. Lady with Mink and Veil was found in 1993 in the estate of its German owner, and the painting has never been on public display or reproduced in books. Dix’s poor unfortunate subject is an old war widow who has turned to prostitution in order to survive. She wears a green hat and a shabby fur, her baggy slip revealing blotchy pale skin and breasts that sag. Her heavily made-up face and mouth full of broken teeth are masked by a blue veil. Her large deformed face is like a nightmare, a blurry distortion of reality that can’t be washed from memory. Remarkably, Dix dipped an actual veil in blue paint, gently pressing the lace onto the painting in order to leave its imprint.

As much as I love Otto Dix, I’m thrilled that an American audience will also be seeing the startling works of other important artists like those of Ludwig Meidner. Starting in 1912, a full two years before the outbreak of World War I, Meidner began a series of extraordinary paintings that were extreme departures from his usual style. Prophetic works, Meidner’s Apocalyptic Landscapes depicted the earth cracking open and the skies torn asunder, with cities crashing and burning as people fled in panic stricken terror. Two years before his death in 1966 at the age of 82, Meidner wrote On the Summer of the Apocalyptic Landscapes, a recollection of the fevered work sessions that resulted in the creation of his most famous canvases.

“That was a summer unlike any other, in a brooding, lowering metropolis of Berlin, high up on the sixth floor of a modest apartment house in Friedenau. That angry vicious, summer began in the spring of 1912; it was a strange and doom-laden time for me as none other ever was. I was very poor but not at all unhappy. I was charged with energy, full of mighty plans; I had faith in a magnificent future. I had made a home for myself under the blistering hot slate roof; in a cheap studio with an iron bedstead, a chair, a mirror, and a number of bones that served as tables and closets, and on one of which there wobbled a spirit burner with a pot of lentils, white beans, or potatoes simmered. Food was a minor matter, and I did not crave it, but sail cloth, bought cheap in the Wertheim department store, seemed the most valuable thing there was. I was in love with that canvas, which I stretched and grounded myself, and went so far as to kiss it with trembling lips before painting those ominous landscapes.

By the end of May the heat was getting hard to bear. But I was going to hold out. I was damned stubborn. What I lacked in skill I made up in boldness and insolence; I did not paint from life, but what my imagination told me to paint. Dripping with sweat, even when I throw off clothes, it was so hard - oh, how hard it seemed to me to get down on canvas what I wanted to say. Still, I sweated, stamped and slaved long afternoons away until evening fell, that kindly Friedenau evening that was not kindly at all up in my little cell, but a time to sweat and to groan and to refuse to shake off the burden of toil, even for a few hours. Bathed in sweat, I felt like a heavy-jowled hound careering along in a wild chase, mile after mile to find his master – represented in my case by a finished oil painting replete with apocalyptic doom. I feared those visions, although the finished products gave me a strange, warm feeling of satisfaction, a slightly satanic joy.”

Military service in World War I made Ludwig Meidner a confirmed pacifist. In 1919 he wrote the broadside An alle Künstler, Dichter, Musiker (To all Artists, Poets, and Musicians), a tract that exhorted artists to become socialists and work for the common good. Like his fellow expressionists, he became a target for the Nazis and his works were banned in 1933. Being Jewish he fled the country that same year and did not return until 1953. Aside from painting his amazing Apocalyptic Landscapes series, Meidner also managed to paint numerous portraits of artists from Germany’s expressionist circle. One such painting was his wonderful likeness of Conrad Felixmüller (shown above), an artist barely known in the U.S., but a leading member of the expressionist movement and a painter I hold in the highest regard. The one drawback to the Glitter and Doom exhibit is that it does not include the works of the exemplarary Felixmüller.

Conrad Felixmüller proved himself capable of creating the most sensitive figurative realist paintings, but he also became a main proponent of the most extreme expressionist vision. His skewed perspectives and distorted forms were set ablaze by a glowing palette of scorching primary colors. While focusing on the debauched and degraded state of affairs Germany found itself in, artists like Dix and Grosz often made portraits of people that mirrored that corruption. Repulsive and unsightly creatures littered their canvases, to the point that some have wrongly concluded such depictions were essentially anti-humanist in nature. “Ugly” had became an aesthetic device to expose the true nature of bourgeois society, and as an artistic response to the growing monstrosity of fascism, it was an angry and honest reply. Yet something about Felixmüller’s art set him apart from his contemporaries, he never lapsed into creating pictures that could be construed as misanthropic or anti-humanist. Even during the darkest days when all appeared lost, his portraits of working people were full of quite dignity. Felixmüller obviously had an unshakable belief in humanity.

Glitter and Doom runs at the Met until February 19th, 2007. For more information, view the Met’s website.

That LA artists have not made a bigger deal over the exhibition of works by John Heartfield currently at the Getty Museum is a perfect example of the cool indifference and political disengagement plaguing the artistic community. Few artists from the past have as much resonance in these troubling times, and Heartfield’s brilliant images continue to speak with a clarity of mind possessed when first produced - which was during the rise of fascism in Germany. Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, is one of the most important exhibitions recently mounted in Los Angeles; it not only illuminates the past, it points a way to the future for artists who want to address real world issues through their art.

Like many German artists of his time, Heartfield was a militant anti-fascist and a communist, but his artwork was also revolutionary when it came to technique and aesthetics. He was one of the very first to explore photomontage as a new means of artistic expression, and some of his sparing designs - stripped down to only a few iconic images combined with text - made him the predecessor of today’s minimalist and postmodernist artists. The likes of Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Heartfield, along with aficionados and students of contemporary art - who would do well to study the life and works of the great German master. If you are not able to view the Getty exhibit, the next best thing would be to acquire the comprehensive book, John Heartfield: AIZ/VI 1930-38, a magnificent collection of the hundreds of works he created for the leftist magazine, Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers Illustrated News), also known as AIZ.

Leah Ollman wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times on the Heartfield exhibit that appeared in the paper’s Calendar section on March 6, 2006. Ollman’s generally positive review was titled Blinding sarcasm - but Heartfield’s work was anything but blinding, rather, he gifted the masses a lucid vision. Accompanying Ollman’s review was a reproduction of Heartfield’s trenchant Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf - a word of warning never truer than today. How ironic that the LA Times placed Heartfield’s illustration next to the headline Ghostly Gowns, Dreamy Dresses, a heading about Paris Fashion Week - blind and deaf indeed.

I first discovered Heartfield’s work when I was only 16-years-old, and to say his art had a profound impact upon me would be an understatement. Save for the nihilistic works produced by Germany’s dadaists, I had never before seen anything like Heartfield’s photomontages. If dada was the shell shocked babbling of artists confronting the unmitigated horror of modern warfare and a world gone insane - Heartfield’s art was the counterbalance - a precision surgical tool that would identify and cut at the causes of war and fascism. To my young eyes, some of Heartfield’s images were quite easy to understand, but others held their meaning from me since they dealt with unfamiliar events and individuals. Being inquisitive, I eventually peeled back those layers of history, and marveled at how honestly and directly the artist delivered his message. One can only imagine the deep impact his images had upon the German people.

To understand just how radical a democratic stance the artist took, one must begin with his name. In 1916, to protest against the anti-foreigner and anti-British hysteria promulgated by German nationalists and right-wingers, the artist changed his name from Helmut Herzfeld to John Heartfield - which was an extremely “unpatriotic” thing to do at the time. A comparable gesture today would be for an American artist to adopt an Arab name. Needless to say, Heartfield’s courageous stance made him a high profile target, and his unrelenting lampooning of the madmen who seized control of his homeland caused them to seek his death. He escaped the clutches of the fascists by going into exile, but never ceased creating the artworks that so infuriated them. Heartfield eventually returned to his country in 1950, where he died in 1968.

Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage runs until June 25th, 2006. You can read more about the Heartfield exhibit at the Getty website, or click here for info on admission, hours, directions, and parking to the museum.

With all the madness swirling around driving everybody insane, you’d think more artists would have something to say about our present situation. While I wait for them to catch up, I’ll be creating my own riotous responses on canvas. In the meantime, here’s a quote to whet your appetites; “The heaviest burden of all is the pressure of the war and the increasing superficialty. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival. I feel as though the outcome is in the air and everything is topsy-turvy. Swollen, I stagger to work, but all my work is in vain and the mediocre is tearing everything down in it’s onslaught. I’m now like the whores I used to paint. Washed out, gone next time. All the same, I keep on trying to get some order in my thoughts and to create a picture of the age out of the confusion - which is after all my function.” No, the words are not mine, though they could have been. They were written by German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1916.

The Tate Modern in London currently has on display an exhibit called Degenerate Art, a small showing of German Expressionist paintings that runs until October 30th, 2005. The name of the Tate show comes from the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit mounted by the Nazis in 1937. Heralding the Nazi regime’s policy towards the arts, that exhibit was the most detestable campaign to have ever been launched against modern art. Jonathan Jones, writing for the U.K. Guardian, had this to say about the Tate show: “It would be great to see a full-scale exhibition. In fact, it would be worth reconstructing the entire Degenerate Art exhibition. The restaging would, I suspect, profoundly alter our view of modern art.”

In 1991, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) came close to a full restaging of Entartete Kunst, and being an ardent fan of German Expressionism, I was the first in line to view LACMA’s Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. I was not disappointed by the comprehensive overview offered by the museum, which included a full scale model of the original Nazi exhibition, along with ephemera from the exhibit like tickets, catalogs, advertisements and other bits of memorabilia. The LACMA show also included rooms devoted to the Nazi view of literature, music and film - but the focus of the exhibit was of course the paintings and sculptures created by those artists the fascists considered “enemies of the German people.” On display were artworks by Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and many other notables who so influenced my own course as an artist. Since the LACMA exhibit is history, and the Tate show is inaccessible to all save those living in London - you might want to visit my Art For A Change web site, where I’ve uploaded images and text concerning the works of Max Pechstein, Otto Dix, August Macke, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Conrad Felixmuller, Max Beckmann and many others.

[ "Self Portrait with Death" - Max Pechstein 1920.
Other Expressionist works available on Art For A Change ]

By 1937 the Nazis had removed more than 20,000 modernist artworks from museums and galleries, bringing them together for Entartete Kunst, a touring exhibit whose sole objective was the scorn and derision of modern art. Artworks were crowded into the Archäologisches Institut in Munich and given hand-scrawled mocking captions. Poorly hung and intentionally displayed with inadequate lighting, the artworks were surrounded by slogans like, Incompetents and Charlatans, An insult to the German heroes of the Great War and Nature as seen by sick minds. The exhibit became one the most successful displays of modern art in history - the first blockbuster art show, with around 3 million people viewing it before its thirteen-city German and Austrian tour was completed in 1941.

[ "By the Water" - Oil painting by
Nazi artist, Ernst Liebermann ]

The Degenerate Art show was actually held in contrast to the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibit), where Nazi-approved realist paintings and sculptures were displayed. Held annually in Munich from 1937 until 1944, historic, idyllic and mythological German subjects were treated in romantic, academic and classical realist styles. Artists like Ernst Liebermann, Sepp Hilz, Ivo Saliger and many others, presented scenes that extolled traditional family values, motherhood, health and work, athleticism, rustic peasant life, faith in leadership and glorification of the military. Such works could be deceptively benign, as is the case with Libermann’s By the Water. Many looking at this painting today would merely see an “apolitical” study of three nudes - yet, it’s an outstanding example of the Nazi celebration of beauty, sexuality and physical culture through classical aesthetics. Nudity in art was never censored by the Nazis, providing it helped to communicate fascist ideology. In part that entailed the idealization and objectification of femininity, while extolling masculine strength and physical superiority.

[ "A Country Venus" - Oil painting by
Nazi artist, Sepp Hilz ]

Sepp Hilz was an academically trained realist painter who came to be known as, Bauernmaler (the painter of peasants). His classical style oil paintings of Bavarian farmers, beautiful village girls, and the rustic lives of simple country folk, were observations of rural life seemingly free of political statement. Hilz was a technically dazzling painter who never created an overtly political artwork, he was a portraitist who concerned himself only with matters of aesthetics when it came to making art. Which begs an interesting question relevant to our own time. If an artist produces nothing but “apolitical” works, is the artist then above politics? Ironically, as a successful proponent of “realism” in painting… realism did not permeate Hilz’s idealized view of the world. His charming and inoffensive paintings concealed the malignant cancer destroying his country. No doubt Hilz opposed modernist artists for depicting the screaming insanities that had become everyday life in Germany. It’s a certainty he loathed the tortured, garish and distorted artworks of the Expressionists, and he most likely applauded their censorship and banning as a “renewal” for art. From 1938 to 1944, Hilz presented no less than twenty-two paintings at the Great German Art Exhibit, with none other than Adolf Hitler purchasing two of them. Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels purchased Bäuerliche Venus (A Country Venus), the painting shown here - which became a wildly popular iconic painting for the German right-wing. Hilz was so favored by the Nazis that Hitler financed the construction of a special studio for the artist in 1939, and in 1943 the painter received the title of Professor from Goebbels.

[ "Judgment of Paris" - Oil painting by
Nazi artist, Ivo Saliger ]

Another favored artist included in the Great German Art Exhibit was Ivo Saliger, whose Judgment of Paris (1939), depicted the Greek myth… but with a twist. Contemporary viewers see Saliger’s canvas as nothing more than an academic painting, an exercise in classical figurative realism - yet the work is an ideological diatribe. Saliger portrayed Paris dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform as he decided upon the most beautiful example of Aryan womanhood. Again, a difficult question arises - that of identifying the ideology inherent in images placed before us. If I had not revealed to you the story behind Saliger’s painting, would you have identified the artwork as implicitly fascist?

Today arguments continue to rage over what defines a work of art, with conservatives attacking modern art with the same vigor, and rhetoric, often used against modernists in 1930’s Germany. Witness the Art Renewal Center (ARC) and their thoroughly reactionary Eurocentric stance, which regards the academic school of late 19th Century European painting as not only the pinnacle of all artistic achievement - but the only way forward for artists today. The ARC champions the academic painter, William Bouguereau, who was the president of the painting section of the Paris Salon in 1881 and an unwavering enemy of the Impressionists. Yes, the ARC is so backward-looking they even reject Impressionism for being too modern! It’s no wonder then that I read in their “letters” section, correspondence praising Ivo Saliger for being a painter “of classical subjects.” I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow the ARC issued a salvo against Degenerate Art. I have more to say about the modern-day Victorians of the Art Renewal Center - but I’ll leave that rant for another day.

I’ve spent much time on this web log criticizing the follies and excesses of postmodern artists, but my critiques should never be confused with the undemocratic voices who clamor for the past. When letting my poison arrows fly against the talentless swindlers in today’s world of art, I’m always wary of being aligned with those who seek to dismiss, control or suppress artistic expression. Every aesthetic vanguard has historically been confronted by the narrow-minded who exclaim, “that isn’t art” or “I could do that.” I’m well aware of the forces that have mounted major attacks against the arts - assaults that have resulted in censorship and the closing of exhibitions. I’m also well-versed in the sad chronicle of regimes who’ve suppressed all forms of independent vision in favor of an insipid and stilted realism. Gesundes Volksempfinden, or “healthy folk sentiment,” became the official criteria for judging artworks under the Nazi regime, and when Hitler said that “anybody who paints and sees a sky green and pastures blue ought to be sterilized”… he meant it. While the world has changed since the Nazis held their Entartete Kunst exhibition, polarizing social dynamics have not. Today a deadly new strain of censorship shadows creativity - and many artists are infected with a self-imposed variant. The only solution is to meet adversity with the same steadfastness displayed by the German Expressionists - whose works after all outlived those of their adversaries.