Dialog International

The "Hammering Man" at the Messeturm

On every trip to Frankfurt I've always marveled at the giant -somewhat eerie - Hammering Man figure, always in motion, silently at work building - what? Castles in the air?

Neben dem Messeturm in der Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage steht seit 1991die 21 m hohe Silhouette des "Hammering Man". Von 1971 an arbeitete Borofsky wieder figürlich, 1980 entwickelte er seinen Entwurf des "Hammering Man". Dessen Maße hat Borofsky immer wieder variiert. In der Baseler Kunsthalle präsentierte er 1981 die Figur zum erstenmal mit einer Höhe von sieben Metern. 1982 gab es bei der Documenta 7 in Kassel ein Quartett zu sehen. In seiner archetypischen Bildhaftigkeit erinnert der "Hammering Man" an einen überdimensionierten Scherenschnitt. Mit seiner monotonen Armbewegung, mit der er einen Hammer schwingt, ist er ein Sinnbild des arbeitenden Menschen. Als Symbol steht er für das unaufhaltsame Fortschreiten der Zeit. Durch seine beachtliche Größe ist der "Hammering Man" zu einer Landmark von Frankfurt geworden. Am Fuß der Skulptur befindet sich eine Zahlenreihe, denn Borofsky nummeriert seine Kunstwerke.

The sculptor, Jonathan Borofsky, has replicas of the Hammering Man and equally monumental "Walking Man" monuments in major cities around the world.  I always assumed that an artist of this stature would have his studio in New York, London, or Berlin.  So I was surprised to learn from my local newspaper that Borofsky lives and works just a few miles me on the coast of Maine.  Here he keeps a very low profile:

"Jonathan Borofsky isn’t seeking your attention. He doesn’t care if you recognize his name. And he’s not particularly interested in having his photo taken for this newspaper – or any other. Borofsky, a sculptor from Ogunquit, may be the most famous artist from Maine you’ve never heard of, which is as he likes it. “Maine is my protective zone,” he says. “It’s my safety zone.”

In Frankfurt, 20,000 cars a day whiz by his “Hammering Man.” The drivers and passengers in those cars do not know his name and probably don’t care.

Which is fine with him."

 

Munch and Expressionism at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan

I was in New York City last week and had time to visit the smart Munch and Expressionism exhibit at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue.  The exhibit runs through June 13, 2016 and is well worth a visit.  We all know Munch's work iconic  The Scream which sold for $120 million in 2012.  Less known -to me at least - was Munch's profound influence on German modernist painting.  The original Scream can be seen as the Ur-Expressionist work, which Munch produced more than a decade before the early Expressionist painters came together as Die Brücke in Dresden and Berlin.  Munch himself arrived in Berlin in 1892 and stayed until he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908.  His first solo exhibit in Berlin was noisily shut down by the conservative art establishment, which earned him much free publicity and the admiration of the younger German artists who were seeking the "shock of the new."  From then on, his influence on the Expressionists was profound, and the Neue Galerie has displayed Munch's work along side many of the work's in the museum's remarkable permanent collection to convincingly illustrate the influence. 

But Munch also learned new techniques and modalities from the German artists.  From Emile Nolde he mastered woodcuts, which allowed him to reproduce his work with different color schemes and texture (as shown in the exhibit with The Kiss).

My personal favorite Munch painting displayed at this exhibit is Puberty (1895).  Here a wide-eyed pubescent girl is sitting on the edge of a bed staring with a somewhat frightened or startled gaze at the viewer, her arms folded modestly to cover the pubic area.  The light pours in from the left side of the painting, creating an ominous shadow which symbolizes her awakening sexuality.  The painting brings to mind Frank Wedekind's drama Frühlings Erwachen - written approximately the same time. 

Of course, any Munch exhibit must show The Scream, and the Neue Galerie does not disappoint: there is an entire room devoted to his 1895 pastel version, flanked on the side walls by works by other other artists inspired by Munch's masterpiece.

 

The original frame for this version is inscribed with a poem Munch wrote about the origin of The Scream:

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

The most striking derivative work displayed in the Scream room is Erich Heckel's 1917 woodcut Mann in der Ebene (Selbstbildnis). Here the pulsating lines emanating from the head of the artist as he contemplates the horrors of war echo Munch's blood-red waves of sky..

Interestingly, Heckel - a founding member of Die Brücke - was profoundly influenced by Munch.  Yet until the end of his life he vociferously denied any influence whatsoever by the Norwegian master. 

Max Beckmann at the Busch-Reisinger Museum

Last week between meetings we had a couple of hours free to visit the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, located just across from Harvard Yard.  This gem of a museum has a fantastic collection of German Expressionist art and sculpture.  The first painting the visitor encounters is Max Beckmann's 1927 Self-Portrait in Tuxedo.  This iconic portrait from the late Weimar Republic depicts the modern man: confident - even arrogant - gazing directly at the viewer, calmly holding a lighted cigarette.  The formal attire of the tuxedo only adds to the feeling of superiority.  Here is a man who clearly has arrived.  And yet, there is something out of place in the face.

Years later, when addressing his first art class in the United States, Beckmann said:

 If you want to reproduce an object, two elements are required: first, the identification with the object must be perfect; and second, its should contain, in addition, something quite different. The second element is difficult to explain. Almost as difficult as to discover one's self.  In fact, its just this element of your own self that we are all in search of. 

It is the shadow across the eyes and the upper half of the face in Self-Portrait in Tuxedo that brings this "second element" into play.  The viewer sense that the man is an impostor; the formal dress is a form of camouflage, allowing him to observe the world from the sidelines- unnoticed.

How did the painting and the other treasures from the Weimar era find their way to Harvard.  When Self-Portrait in Tuxedo was first exhibited in 1927 it was immediately recognized as an important work.  The famed art critic Julius Meier-Graefe acquired the painting and it was put on display - in its own room - in the National Gallery in Berlin.  But Beckmann, along with many other great artists, was considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, so Self-Portrait in Tuxedo was displayed in the infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst Exhibition in Munich.  After that, there was no longer a market for Beckmann's paintings in Germany, so many of these invaluable paintings were sold at fire-sale prices to art dealers abroad.  Harvard was lucky to acquire this painting - along with many other works by great artists such as Franz Marc, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1941.  The Nazis' hatred of modernist art (see my review of Artists under Hitler) was the best thing that ever happened to American museums and art collectors.

It is interesting to compare Self-Portrait in Tuxedo with another painting - Self-Portrait with Horn - which Beckmann painted a decade later in exile.  In Self-Portrait with Horn Beckmann is no longer the self-confident, aloof artist in the tuxedo. He is in a strange dressing gown that has a timeless, harlequin-like quality. The hunting horn, as well, appears as if from the distant past. The artist is staring off to the side expectantly, waiting for an echo of the horn call he has just sounded.  Has he sounded the alarm of the war to come?  But the artist seems enveloped in silence; the warning will not be heeded. The artist's huge hand is suspended at the center of the frame, its creative work is powerless to penetrate the silence or stave off the horrors to come. 

This painting can be viewed at the Neue Galarie in New York City, just a few steps away from Central Park, where Max Beckmann keeled over a died of a heart attack in 1950. If you are not able to visit these museums to see the paintings, you can visit the Max Beckmann pages at the amazing Web site Artsy, which has images of Beckmann's work and of all the great artists.

The Strange Case of Emil Nolde

The art world is in an uproar with the discovery in a Munich apartment. of over 1,000 modernist paintings that had been stolen by Nazis. Many of the paintings were last seen at the infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") exhibition in Munich.  Presumably, some of the rediscovered works are by the great expressionist painter Emil Nolde.  Nolde was well-represented at the Entartete Kunst show with 27 paintings; his religious work Christus und die Suenderin was argueably the centerpiece of the entire exhibition and was singled out for special scorn by the Nazis.  Thousands of Nolde's paintings were subsequently removed from museums and galaries in Germany, and the Nazis issued a Malverbot to the artist - a prohibition of painting (which Nolde fortunately ignored by creating thousands of exquisite watercolors).  Fortunately, many of Nolde's works found their way to the United States, and I first encountered his art at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University.

Because Nolde was persecuted by the Nazis, he enjoyed a reputation as something of a rebel in postwar Germany.  The central figure in Siegfried Lenz's great novel Die Deutschstunde (The German Lesson - see my review), the artist Max Ludwig Nansen, is modeled on Nolde. 

Although Nolde is labeled as an expressionist painter, he didn't have much in common with his peers, and, in fact, was expelled from the expressionist group Die Brücke. German Expressionism was primarily an urban movement, inspired by the kenetic energy and chaos of the city.  Nolde was most at home on the deserted coast of Nothern Friesland by the border with Denmark.  It was here that he produced his most famous land- and seascapes distinguished by their intense colors. Nolde was strongly influenced by a 1913 trip to the South Sea Islands, and it seems almost that the colors of Guaguin have been poured into the wind and fog of the North Sea.  The colors bleed into each other in an almost crude way, but the emotional power of the paintings is driven by Nolde's amazing technical control. 

What is interesting about Nolde's biography is that the painter, although persecuted by the Nazis and even deprived of his livlihood as an artist, was loyal to the Nazi cause to the bitter end.  HIs troubles, he claimed were based on a "misunderstanding" and Hitler was simply misled by those around him in rejecting Nolde's art.  A letter by Nolde which was recenly discovered in Switzerland makes clear where Nolde's allegiance lay:

"Den Nationalsozialismus verehre ich als die besondere und jüngste Staatsform, die Arbeit ist zur Ehre erhoben. Und ich habe den Glauben, dass unser großer deutscher Führer Adolf Hitler nur für das Recht und Wohl des deutschen Volkes lebt und wirkt und auch dass er in ernsten Sachen von Grund auf die Wahrheit wissen will, [...] und trotz allem, was in jüngster Zeit gegen mich unternommen worden ist, bin ich stets und immer im In- und Ausland für die große deutsche nationalsozialistische Sache mit vollster Ueberzeugung eingetreten. Ich habe den Eindruck, dass meine um 1910 geführten Kulturkämpfe gegen die herrschende Ueberfremdung in allem Künstlerischen und gegen die alles beherrschende jüdische Macht, jetzt nur noch wenigen bekannt sein möge."

(I have the utmost respect for National Socialism as the most special and modern state, work is elevated as something honorable. And I firmly believe that our great Fuehrer Adolf Hitler lives only for the justice and well-being of the German Volk, and when it comes to the most serious matters is ony interested in the Truth.  And, despite everything that has recently happened to me I have always stood for the great German National Socialist ideal with the strongest conviction.  I have the feeling that everything I have done since 1910 in my cultural struggle against foreign influence and against the power of the Jews is known to but a few.")

History is replete with artists and writers of genius whose ideas we find repulsive today; Leni Riefenstahl, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Celine come to mind.  In the case of Nolde, there is nothing overtly political about his work, and his aesthetic sensibility was certainly quite different from the Blut-und-Boden style advanced by the Nazis.  I will be waiting impatiently to find out what lost works of this great artist have been found in the Munich apartment.

 

 

 

Oscar Bluemner's America

Exactly 100 years ago an art exhibition opened in New York City that would change forever America's appreciation for painting and also mark the beginning of the American modernist movement.  The International Exhibition of Modern Art in The Armory Show, an exhibit at the 69th Regiment Armory on 26th Street was seen by over 100,000 New Yorkers and introduced the works of Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Matisse, and many others.  The show also included works by a number of American painters, such as Edward Hopper and the painting Hackensack River (see below) by the German-American artist Oscar Bluemner. 

Bluemner was close friends with the German-American photographer and pivotal modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, and was himself in the vanguard of American modernist paining.  For years his work was largely forgotten or ignored, but that changed in 2005 when the Whitney Museum for American Art featured an exhbition devoted to his art: Oscar Bluemner - A Passion for Color.  Now the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey is running an exhibition of Bluemner's paintings of the town of Paterson (through June 17, 2013). 

American modernist art was heaviy influenced by French painters, and American artists flocked to Paris to experience the new styles.  Blumner, along with another Stieglitz protégé Marsden Hartley as well as the German-American painter Lyonel Feininger belonged to the small group of American painters who found inspiration in German Expressionism, and spent time in Berlin and Munich.  All three artists were heavily influenced by the Blaue Reiter and their symbolic use of color.  Both Feininger and Bluemner had the sensibilities of architects (Bluemner worked as an architect before turning to painting full time in 1910).  Buildings dominate Bluemner's paintings, often factory buildings on the outskirts of town where industry intersects with nature.  But Bluemner's factories are not the drab, soot-covered structures of the Ashcan School, but rather bright red, vibrant monuments to working class vitality.  While Feinigner sought to capture panes of light in his paintings, Bluemner painted blocks of color.  Color was the focus of his aesthetic:

"I am convinced everyday: pure color, thin color, clor only, starting with color, for the sake of color, feeling of color, through color, and expressing life or nature, the impossible-to-render phenomenon." (Oscar Bluemner 1911)

 

Blumner's first one-person exhibition was at the Falerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912, the same gallery that introduced the expressionist group Die Brücke that same year.  But Bluemner's paintings failed to sell.  Nor did his participation in the Armory Show, or even a one-man exhibition in New York put on by his friend Stieglitz produce many sales.  Bluemner fell into poverty and was destitute by the time he took his own life in 1938.

In 2011, Blumner's 1915 painting Illusion of a Prairie, New Jersey (see below) sold at auction for $5.3 million.

 

Lyonel Feininger at the Whitney

If you plan on being in New York City between now and October 16 you'll want to see the Lionel Feininger Exhibit at the Whitney on Madison Avenue (Lionel Feininger:At the Edge of the World).  The Whitney is the premier museum for American art, and it is fitting that they put on this major exhibition of Feininger.  Lionel Feininger was born in New York but did most of his important work in Germany until Hitler forced him to return to New York in 1937.  The Nazis confiscated 400 of his works, and he was included in the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) Exhibit that same year. 

The Whitney Exhibit covers Feininger's entire career and puts his versatility as an artist on display. He was a first and foremost a painter, but was also a brilliant photographer, architect, illustrator (he drew cartoons for the Chicago Sunday Tribune), printmaker, woodcarver, and even composer - his 17 fugues will be performed this fall in New York. 

His early paintings in Germany fall squarely in the Expressionist mold, depicting city scenes - often carnivals - teeming with people as buildings appear to lean in over them. Some of the recurring images of colorful musicians seem to anticipate Marc Chagall.

WIth Cubism, and then later with his relationship with Walter Gropius and the formation of the Bauhaus School, Feininger found his style that would secure his place in modernist painting. He had the sensibility of an architect and could distill a landscape or seascape into discreet building blocks of light and shadow. The crowded scenes of humanity of his Expressionist days gave way to paintings with one or several miniature, abstract angular figures intersecting with large translucent panes of color, reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's tiny human forms beholding the vast expanse of nature's glory.  And just as for Friedrich, painting for Feininger was primarily a spiritual endeavor, “a path to the intangibility of the divine.”  In an earlier era Feininger would have been a builder of cathedrals, and, indeed some of his greatest paintings such as Barfüsserkirche II are of the interior of churches. 

Feininger's seascapes and church interiors follow the same schema: harmonic planes of blue- or red-hued light punctuated with patches of shadow draw the eye upward to the vaulted sky-ceiling. 

As the Whitney show presents, this schema would prevail for the two decades of Feininger's most productive period until he was forced to flee Germany.

Only after he returns to New York do we see some subtle changes in Feininger's painting. The artist focuses on two subjects: the skyline of Manhattan that surrounds him, and the Baltic Sea of his memory's eye.  The blue paint of his Blauer Reiter days seems to dominate (blue being the color of spirituality -Kandinsky), but the paintings seem enveloped in shroud of mist with the edges of the light-panes bleeding into the deep sea.  There is definitely a natural progression from Feininger's late paintings to the Abstract Expressionism that dominated the New York art scene at mid-century.

Feininger finally achieved recognition in the US in 1944 with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where, appropriately, he was paired with the modernist painter from Maine -  Marsden Hartley.  Like Feininger, Hartley had discovered his artistic path with Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich before the Great War. 

Return of the Nazi Aesthetic?

Aryan-looking athletes dispassionately staring into the glorious future, standing before sculptures commemorating past victories of the fatherland; in the background Albert Speer-inspired neo-classical architecture. Something out of Leni Riefenstahl?  Actually, these are posters seen in Moscow promoting the 2014 Winter Olympics:

"Without doubt the authors of this advertising were inspired by Nazi art," said Ekaterina Degot, a well-known art historian and former curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery.

When the billboards were put up, the Russian art collective Voina, itself known for its controversial painting of a 65-metre penis on a drawbridge in St Petersburg, tweeted: "On Pushkinskaya Square opposite Gap, there is a huge advertisement, openly fascist in style, for elite housing in Sochi."

Degot and others said the style and pose of the subjects in the images was heavily suggestive of Nazi art which stresses racial purity and superiority.

Somehow this is all very fitting for Putin's Russia.  But I have to hand it to the creators  - a design firm in St. Petersburg called Doping-Pong.  Their cool realism has more in common with Neo Rauch than with the bombast of the Nazis.

 

Marinetti's Century

Last weekend I spent a day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Once again I encountered Umberto Boccioni's exquisite bronze sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. It stands on a pedestal in the center of the room and everyone entering is immediately drawn to its beauty.

Boccioni's piece represents the most perfect realization of Italian Futurism, and today marks the 100th anniversary of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, originally published in Le Figaro.  The Manifesto is a masterpiece of bombast and hyperbole.  Marinetti glorifies the velocity of modern life, represented by the automobile:

"We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

And already in this manifesto Marinetti intimates his later embrace of pure fascism with his aestheticizing of warfare:

We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

All of the modernist movements of the 20th century can be traced back to Marinetti and his Manifesto: Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism all grew out of this ode to dynamism.  But perhaps the purest successor movement was German Expressionism. Painters such as Kandinsky and Kirchner display the same infatuation with motion and color as Boccioni and Severini, and the poet Ernst Stadler could have been under the influence of the Futurist Manifesto when he wrote his 1913 poem Fahrt über die Kölner Rheinbrücke bei Nacht where the speed of the train and the explosion of lights bring the poet to a state of frenzied ecstasy.

Not as well known is Marinetti's political influence on the German avant-garde painters and writers, for Marinetti saw Fascism as the political expression of modernism. Some of this was already apparent in Ernst Jünger's 1920 book Storm of Steel (in Stahlgewittern), in which the horrors of World War I combat were transformed into a mystical, aesthetic experience.  But the connection between Marinetti and German artists was much deeper, as the art historian Regine Reinhardt discusses in an interesting piece in Freitag.  Reinhardt writes about Marinetti's embrace of National Socialism, and as late as 1934 it seemed like modernist art had a future in the Third Reich:

Die relative Marginalisierung hinderte Marinetti jedoch nicht daran, im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland die futuristische Kunst als die faschistische Staatskunst zu präsentieren. 1934 nahm Marinetti eine Ausstellung futuristischer Kunst in Berlin zum Anlass für diese Darstellung. Die Allianz von künstlerischer Avantgarde und Faschismus schien zum damaligen Zeitpunkt auch in Deutschland noch möglich. (The relative marginalizing (of Futurism) did not prevent Marinetti from presenting futuristic art as the fascist state art of National Socialist Germany.  In 1934 Marinetti attempted to make the case at an exhibition of Futurist Art in Berlin.  At that time an alliance between the artistic avant-garde and fascism seemed like a possibility even in Germany.)

Of course, not long after this the Nazi functionaries rejected Modernist art totally, and those painters and writers - such as Emil Nolde and Gottfried Benn- who had embraced the Nazi movement now found themselves persecuted as "degenerate " (entartet).

Marinetti and his Futurists fared much better in fascist Italy. And even though he couldn't stand German painting in the Third Reich, he did appreciate the Nazi art of total warfare, and even followed the German army to Stalingrad.  Unfortunately, Marinetti died before he could witness the most sublime realization of his Manifesto: the mushroom cloud.

Max Beckmann in New York

If you hurry you can still catch the Max Beckmann exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. This small gem of a museum is located just across from Central Park, a stone's throw away from the sidewalk where Beckmann keeled over and died in 1950. The museum is famous for its collection of Austrian painters - especially Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, - but for now some of the greatest Germans from the Weimar era have taken over the third floor.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is Beckmann's Self-Portrait with Horn, which he painted in exile in 1938.

Of all the self-portraits Beckmann painted, this is his most enigmatic - and his most melancholy.  Like the other painters represented in the exhibit - Otto Dix, Kirchner, Christian Schad, and Georg Grosz,  - Beckmann's artistic sensibility was shaped by the horrors of the Great War. In Self-Portrait with Horn Beckmann is no longer the self-confident, aloof artist in the tuxedo. He is in a strange dressing gown that has a timeless, harlequin-like quality. The hunting horn, as well, appears as if from the distant past. The artist is staring off to the side expectantly, waiting for an echo of the horn call he has just sounded.  Has he sounded the alarm of the war to come?  But the artist seems enveloped in silence; the warning will not be heeded. The artist's huge hand is suspended at the center of the frame, its creative work is powerless to penetrate the silence or stave off the horrors to come.

Beckmann towers above his peers in the exhibit.  The artists have been categorized as belonging to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement of Weimar painting, but Beckmann was never really a member of any school.

The Beckmann exhibit only runs until September 1, but Self-Portrait with Horn is part of the Neue Galerie's permanent collection (the museum acquired the painting in 2001 for $22.5 million), so presumably we will be able to view it in the future.

As a bonus for visitors to the museum, there is a room of wonderful photographs of Beckmann, Dix, Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Lyonel Feininger all at work in their studios.

Marsden Hartley and the Volk

Maine has been the home of some of America's greatest painters such as Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and - my personal favorite - John Marin. But these artists were not from Maine; as we say here: they were from away. In his watercolors Marin captured the beauty and violence of Maine's rocky seacost, but he was a New Yorker, dividing his time between Manhattan and Maine. Marsden Hartley is the one great American modernist we in Maine can call our own. Hartley (1877-1943) was born in the central Maine city of Lewiston, and he died in Ellsworth, Maine.  He aspired to become known as "the painter from Maine" and sought to capitalize on the Maine brand as a popular tourist destination. His work is today seen in the context of the American Regionalist movement in painting, which celebrated the diverse landscapes and people across the country.  Hartley desired to see his name attached to Maine just as Georgia O'Keefe's name is connected to New Mexico, Thomas Hart Benton's with Indiana and Missouri and Grant Wood's with Iowa. But Hartley was much more complex than the folksy, backwoods persona he sought to cultivate.  And, in fact, the greatest influences on his art came not from his fellow American regionalist painters but from Germany.  This is what the art historian Donna Cassidy explores in her very interesting book: Marsden Hartley: Race, Region and Nation.