Living the mad square:

German modernism visits Australia

By Dr. Bindy Kampmark

The Mad Square – where there is an eclectic gathering: the dull, monochrome establishment marked by men in silver beards, dressed in black, all approaching the Art Academy; and the challenging rearguard of artistic freedom – Germany’s modernist artists, with their revolutionary paintings. This is art as arsenal, as a weapons inventory.

They are fighting the conservatives, the killjoys, the grotesque humourless wowsers who shall determine what we see and who sees it. And that is the message of Felix Nussbaum’s Der tolle Platz (1931) and the paintings assembled in the collection entitled ‘The mad square: modernity in German art, 1910-1937.’ Few art exhibitions visiting Melbourne this year will come close to this one.

The period was one of the richest in terms of modern creative impulses – cataclysmic wars, the onset of modernism, brilliant forms of living and entertainment, journeys into the inner life, and then, movements to snuff that life out. It was terrifying, and it was brilliant. It was nonsensical (literally Dada); it featured Constructivism, the New Objectivity, Bauhaus genius and Expressionism. The period following World War I was marked by a communist surge, and a certain foreboding – would Bolshevism claim Germany as it had Russia, or would the ultra-nationalists prevail? Battles on the streets were waged between the forces of the Right and the Left.

Today’s political messages are obtuse, but Max Pechstein’s cover for An die Laterne (1919) of the German Socialist Party (SPD) is unmistakable. Opponents can only be dealt with in one way: stringing them up to the lamp.

Beauty

If life at times seems ugly in these depictions, it is. Beauty, after all, is a paused ugliness. There is license, vice and death. There are sex crimes, the violence of the pleasure-seeking metropolis. George Grosz’s Suicide (1916) features good deal of death, colour and a bare breasted woman. As Albert Camus ponders, suicide is really the only philosophical problem worth contending with. By 1916, Europe was not merely flirting with suicide but committing it.

Ugliness and darkness cavort in an array of fabulous formations and turns. The results are spectacular, a true revolt, explained Peter Gay in his fine work Weimar Culture, of the sons against their fathers, the sons who created Bauhaus art, trashed tonal music with the twelve tone schema and forged expressionism, against the fathers who brought the country war and murderous nationalism.

The marginal citizens, such as those acrobats who feature in Max Beckmann’s rich The trapeze (1923), are the ones who matter. Rather than taking life, they celebrate it.

Daughters of revolt

The exhibition doesn’t let us forget the daughters of revolt either – Hannah Höch’s Dada collages of emancipation feature lithe sophistication – feminine but free. As ever, Höch herself was far from free, a victim of abuse at the hands of her fellow Dadaist Raoul Hausmann. Freedom can always be vanquished at a moment’s notice.

Portraits are also elegant whilst being mocking. That edge is evident in such portrayals as Otto Dix’s portrait of the dancer Tamara Danischewski (1933).

The composition, with its suggestively impish face, conjures up shades of Lucas Cranach, but it brims with naughtiness – even Slavic naughtiness, as opposed to the then favoured form of Teutonic beauty. Others, such as the portrait of Dr. Paul Ferdinand Schmidt (1921) are even gangrenous in hue, the skin a glowing sulphuric green.

Towards the end of the exhibition, there are art works mocking Nazism and its irrepressible rise (to mock is not necessarily to resist, let alone understand). John Heartfield’s Adolf the Superman (1932) ridicules Hitler as a gold swallower who ‘spouts rubbish’. The rubbish, however, worked its magic in the manner of a sorcerer. The artists were none the wiser.

Nazis

There is an advertisement reminding visitors that the Nazis gathered together, in the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich launched in July 1937, one of the finest collections of modernist art the world had seen. This was not meant as a positive achievement– these were the ‘decadents’, the reprobates of the art world, and they intended it to be so, a series of pieces depicting an illness that needed to be expunged. In the strong words of Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reich Culture Chamber, ‘What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent.’

In the end, a provocation. Is Nazism merely the perfection of a particular type of fetish, a perversion that allows the sexual proclivities of a paunchy, crater faced Storm trooper such as Ernst Röhm roam freely while proclaiming ‘family values’? There, God is banished in favour of providence.

The religious symbols are those of the kitchen, blood and soil, and the war drums are the musical instruments that guide the nation’s harmony to national sacrifice. Death is the ultimate deliverance, and the cult of death finds itself in the Fuhrer’s command to immolate an entire nation. That is what fathers are ultimately good for – visiting a reactionary past upon their children.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

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