When I was a teenager in the late 1960’s, I found an art book in my local library titled, Ecco Homo (”Behold the Man”). As my first real introduction to German Expressionist art, it was an encounter that profoundly altered my life. Ecco Homo was a portfolio of prints created by artist, George Grosz, in 1923. That same year, German authorities confiscated the artist’s prints and fined him for “offending public morals”. The state had already gone after Grosz in 1920 for his print portfolio, Gott mit Uns (”God is with Us”), which mocked and denigrated German soldiers and their officers. The unrepentant artist released another print portfolio in 1928 titled, Hintergrund (”Background”). In addition to insulting the militarists, the prints took aim at ultra-conservative clerics, directly linking the German church with militarism. Grosz was arrested and put on trial for blasphemy - and the court decided that one of the offending prints, Christ With a Gas Mask, would be destroyed. Of course, history vindicated George Grosz, who correctly identified and portrayed the forces that would plunge Germany into the nightmare years of fascism.

As a budding artist I was profoundly influenced by Grosz, and I remain in awe of him to this day. Being in Los Angeles, it’s unlikely I’ll be attending the exhibit of his works at the Heckscher Museum of Art in New York City, but perhaps my writing about the show will inspire people on the east coast to attend. George Grosz: Selections from the Permanent Collection, now on view at the museum until August 14th, 2005, includes Grosz’s, Sonnenfinsternis (”Eclipse of the Sun”). Painted in 1926, the work is a denunciation of the forces of war. Headless bureaucrats sit at a table where a bloated Caesar-like general presides - his bloody sword placed on the table next to a crucifix painted in the German national colors. A rich industrialist with weapons of war tucked under his arm, leans forward to whisper into the commandant’s ear. Under the table we can see a prison cell, where a prisoner peers out at the spectacle. The sun is depicted in silhouette, hanging in the upper left corner of the painting and literally eclipsed by a dollar sign. Here’s what Grosz said about his painting, “Since the politicians seem to have lost their heads, the army and capitalists are dictating what is to be done. The people, symbolized by the blinkered ass… simply eat what is put before them.” I saw this very painting some years ago at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA). I was admiring the work with a group of strangers, when one of them said out loud to no one in particular, “My god… this could have been painted about today’s world!”

What I learned from Grosz could best be summed up in his own words, “For me art is not a matter of aesthetics… no musical scribbling to be responded to or fathomed only be a sensitive educated few. Drawing once more must subordinate itself to a social purpose.” Grosz taught me that great art had to encompass more than just technical prowess - it also had to embrace moral responsibility and political awareness. In 1913 he wrote to a friend, “There can be no doubt that my drawings were some of the strongest public statements against a certain German brutality. Today they are truer than ever - one day, in a more ‘humane’ period, one will exhibit them as one does now with Goya’s pictures.” While we don’t yet live in the ‘humane’ period Grosz worked towards, we can still at least appreciate the artist’s extraordinary vision. The Heckscher Museum of Art is located at 2 Prime Avenue, Huntington NY, 11743-7702. Visit their website, at: www.heckscher.org

At sixteen I became aware of those artists who lived and worked throughout Germany’s dreadful years of war and fascism. German Expressionist artists like George Grosz, Conrad Felixmüller, Gert Wollheim, and Max Pechstein had enormous influence upon me - not so much for how they painted… but what they painted. They were unafraid to tell the truth about their society, and with paint, pencil and print, they excoriated the forces of greed and militarism that eventually plunged the world into chaos. Few had as much sway over me as Otto Dix, a man I consider one of the last century’s greatest painters.

Falsely remembered simply as a radical expressionist who abandoned all rules of perspective and palette, Dix was actually a classical painter in the guise of a modernist. Some of his great realist canvases hearken back to German old masters like Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grunwald and Albrecht Dürer. I regard myself as fortunate to have viewed some of Dix’s paintings while traveling in Germany, and lucky to have caught a rare exhibit of his antiwar etchings, Der Krieg (The War), while in New York some years ago. I’m delighted to be able to inform readers of this web log that Dix’s astonishing antiwar etchings, and those of fellow Expressionist Max Beckmann, are now on exhibit in New York once again.

WAR/HELL: Master Prints by Otto Dix and Max Beckmann is a mesmerizing collection of etchings and lithographs now showing through September, 2005, at the Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art in New York City. Dix and Beckman depicted war stripped of its bombastic false patriotism, heroism and glory, and instead presented an accurate, grueling and mind-numbing look at the barbarism of modern warfare. Der Krieg, Dix’s suite of 50 black and white etchings, are first hand recollections of having fought on the frontlines of World War 1 for four years. His uncompromisingly realistic and visceral depictions of war are the stuff of nightmares.

The artist portrayed soldiers eating rations in muddy trenches filled with rotting corpses; moonlit minefields and bomb blasted landscapes; combatants horribly maimed or torn to shreds; army men driven insane and left shivering on the battlefield - splattered by the remains of those blown up next to them. Beckman’s Die Holle (The Hell), is a wartime suite of a dozen lithographs he created in 1919, showing Germany’s downward spiral. Like Dix, Beckman was also a serviceman in World War 1, but served as a medical orderly.

His artworks are filled with shattered veterans without limbs or hope returning home to a country wracked by poverty; ultra-jingoistic reactionaries singing patriotic songs; the super wealthy flaunting the riches they gained through war profiteering; and right-wing thugs preparing to mold Germany into a new society of blood and iron.

If it all sounds terribly familiar, it should. Dix and Beckman not only succeeded in exposing the ugly realities of war in a way that hadn’t been done since Goya’s print series, The Disasters of War - they also effectively created artworks that stepped outside of their timeframe and place of national origin. The prints in WAR/HELL have uncanny resonance in today’s world, and they more accurately reflect what is going on in Iraq than do all of the sanitized and bloodless corporate “news” media reports put together.

This is the first time the entire antiwar print editions from these two dynamic modernist artists have been shown together. The exhibit runs until Sept. 26th, 2005. The Neue Galerie New York is located at 1048 Fifth Avenue. New York, NY 10028 (on the corner of 86th street - adjacent to New York’s Central Park). Phone: 212-628-6200. Visit them on the web, at: http://www.neuegalerie.org

For those in Southern California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is currently showing 70 German Expressionist posters dating from the 1920’s and 1930’s. The exhibit, titled War, Revolution, Protest, presents a range of poster works extolling political action as well as promoting theaters, cabarets, and the newly-founded film industry. The exhibition comes from LACMA’s Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, which possesses one of the greatest German Expressionist collections in the world. Obviously this is a must see show for any fan of the bold and confrontational art from that period, but students of history and design will also get a lot out of this important exhibit. If you can attend you may also want to view the concurrently running, Rauschenberg: Posters, a collection of over 100 mass printed works from American artist, Robert Rauschenberg. The prints on display date from the 1960’s to the present, and some are surprisingly political in nature. His silk-screen, Signs, is a montage of iconographic images from the late 60’s. Images of the slain John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy; Martin Luther King Jr. resting in his coffin; anti-Vietnam war protestors; scenes of the riots that burned US cities; rock singer Janis Joplin (who would die of a drug overdose), all mixing to become a potent sign of the times. Upon its release, Rauschenberg said the work was “conceived to remind us of the love, terror, violence of the last ten years. Danger lies in forgetting.” While a great many seem to have indeed forgotten… War, Revolution, Protest and Rauschenberg: Posters gives us all an opportunity to remember. Now running, both exhibits close June 12, 2005. For more information: www.lacma.org

Bourgeois art circles are buzzing with the news that the pickled shark by artist Damien Hirst has been sold to an unnamed American collector for around 12 million dollars. Suspended in a vat of formaldehyde and titled, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the marinated 14-foot shark launched Hirst’s lucrative art career in 1992. Now one of the richest and most famous of the postmodernist charlatans (artiste), Hirst laughs all the way to the bank.

I’m reminded of The ThreePenny Opera, the musical theater production by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. That tale featured the anti-hero, Macheath, an efficient and cold blooded thug who fancied himself a businessman. In the play’s most famous song, The Ballad of Mack the Knife, the notorious crimes of Macheath are evoked:

“See the shark has teeth like razors, all can read his open face. And Macheath has got a knife, but not in such an obvious place. See the shark, how red his fins are, as he slashes at his prey. Mac the Knife wears white kid gloves which give the minimum away.”

Yes, Brecht’s play moralized on the havoc of a world controlled by money, a yarn still applicable… even when applied to the depredations of the art world.

German Expressionist artists like Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, George Grosz, and Max Pechstein had a profound influence on me over the years. In 1918 Pechstein wrote, “Art will no longer be considered, as it has been in the past, an interesting and genteel occupation for the sons of wealthy loafers. On the contrary, the sons of common people must be given the opportunity, through the crafts, to become artists. Art is no game, but a duty to the people! It is a matter of public concern.” Such eloquence still resonates in the present, especially for those of us concerned with making art a part of everyone’s daily experience. In 1920, Pechstein wrote his Creative Credo, communicating the ecstasy and frenzy of artistic creation:

“Work! Ecstasy! Smash your brains! Chew, stuff yourself, gulp it down, mix it around! The bliss of giving birth! The crack of the brush, best of all as it stabs the canvas. Tubes of color squeezed dry. And the body? It doesn’t matter. Health? Make yourself healthy! Sickness doesn’t exist! Only work and I’ll say that again - only blessed work! Paint! Dive into colors, roll around in tones… in the slush of chaos! Chew the broken off mouthpiece of your pipe, press your naked feet into the earth. Crayon and pen pierce sharply into the brain, they stab into every corner, furiously they press into the whiteness. Black laughs like the devil on paper, grins in bizarre lines, comforts in velvety planes, excites and caresses. The storm roars - sand blows about - the sun shatters to pieces - and nevertheless, the gentle curve of the horizon quietly embraces everything.

Beaten down, exhausted, just a worm, collapse into your bed. A deep sleep will make you forget your defeat. A new day! A new struggle! Ecstasy again! One day after the other, a sparkling, constantly changing chain of days. One experience after the other. That damned brain! What is it that churns and twitches and jumps in there? Hah! Tear your head off. Then we’ll scrape it out and scratch it out. Get rid of every little bit. Sand! Water! Scrub it clean. There now!! Almost as good as new… an unused skull. Night! Night! No stars, pitch black. Without desire! Tomorrow is another day.”

In 1937 the Nazis would prohibit Pechstein from creating or exhibiting. They removed his artworks from museums and instead included them in their infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition. Pechstein survived the reign of fascism and continued to work as an artist in West Berlin until his death in 1955. Read more about Max Pechstein and the German Expressionists.