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…
I wrote the following review in 2006 after seeing the exhibit Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. 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…
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…
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…
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 as an artist. Ecco Homo was a portfolio of prints created by artist, George Grosz, in 1923. That…
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,…
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…
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…
