Living at the Edge:
The World of Lyonel Feininger

On April 29, 1906, Lyonel Feininger launched his comic strip, The Kin-der-Kids, with a charming caricature of himself as puppeteer and the caption, “FEININGER THE  FAMOUS GERMAN ARTIST EXHIBITING THE CHARACTERS HE WILL CREATE.”  A tag affixed to his ear by a loop of string identifies him as “your Uncle Feininger.”

Self-Portrait (Selbstbildnis) (1915, oil on canvas, 39½” x 31½”), Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Skip ahead nine years and Feininger, now a successful and “serious”¹ fine artist using oil on canvas, reveals a decidedly different aspect of himself.  No longer the impish uncle introducing his rag-tag crew, he seems to scowl angrily at a visitor’s intrusion or perhaps the adult in the mirror’s reflection.

In a wide-ranging retrospective, Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, the Whitney Museum of American Art chronicled Feininger’s evolution from cartoonist to painter and printmaker, early adopter of photography for its own qualities and for preparatory studies, and in later years, a proponent of abstraction in the service of the spiritual.

The conflicting tugs on Feininger’s psyche originated in his childhood.  Born in 1871 to a German emigre and civil-war-veteran father and a German-American mother, Feininger spent his first sixteen years living in Manhattan’s East Village.  Raised in an environment permeated by the sounds of German compositions played by his parents, accomplished musicians, by age nine he was studying the violin with his father and by twelve, performing.

Both his parents believed in the power of music to act as a conduit between the artist and a beneficent almighty, a tenet that found its way into Feininger’s art.  He wrote as an adult of his “‘unbounded faith in the goodness of the Almighty’ and in art’s capacity to express it,”² and he strove to create work in the service of those beliefs.

Frequently left alone by what he would later refer to as his “‘almost hypothetical parents,’”³ who traveled abroad to perform, young Feininger spent many hours with his running buddy and life-long friend, Frank Kortheuer, observing trains in Grand Central Terminal’s rail yards and ships on the island’s two rivers.  They sketched what they saw and used their drawings to enrich the stories they told each other about the two fantasy kingdoms they devised and inhabited, and continued to embellish over time.

A Group of Houses and Figures (c.1949, painted wood, dimensions variable), Art Institute of Chicago, © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Like many a child left to his own devices, young Feininger found comfort in imagined worlds like these, where events unfolded and characters acted in ways he could control.  That childlike delight in conjuring alternative worlds and their inhabitants, “like something out of a fairy tale,”⁴ animates his most engaging work–the comic strips and early paintings–and finds literal embodiment in small wooden toys he carved over the years (between about 1920 and 1955) as gifts for his and others’ children.

Well into the exhibition and in their own gallery, in one large central vitrine and four smaller peripheral ones, these handcrafted figures populate streets and houses amid other architectural structures, trains and animals.  Here the visitor encounters Feininger at his most charming and whimsical.  Not surprisingly, many of the objects make appearances in his paintings, prints and drawing, perhaps indications of an ongoing desire to find a way back to a childhood paradise lost.

And lost it was, precipitously, when at age sixteen Feininger was shipped off to Germany to pursue a career in music.  Despite the boy’s superficial obedience to his parents’ wishes, evidence suggests some subterfuge.  The facts are fuzzy, but apparently upon arrival, when learning of the absence of his intended music teacher, the teenager gathered up the drawings he had been unable to leave behind and applied to art school.  He gained immediate admission and quickly excelled.

The rest of the story unfolded, though not quite chronologically, on the white-box walls of the Whitney.  Opening in a large room with the artist’s early paintings–his first forays into the world of fine art–the exhibit announced its focus on Feininger’s oils on canvas, which began about 1906.

The tale of the career that Feininger abandoned at age 35, one in which he achieved prominence as a cartoonist and illustrator, remained tucked away in an easily-missed gallery, on the left, of mostly comics, a few cartoons and several illustrations.  For much of his life, Feininger entertained himself and others with caricatures and then, during his first few years in Germany, parlayed his hobby into income-producing commissions from a humor magazine, hoping to save enough money to return home.

Family circumstances intervened and mandated a two-year stint at a Jesuit college in Belgium after which Feininger managed to convince his father to finance his art education.  Soon turned off by the staid academics with whom he regularly came into conflict, the young artist struck out on his own and, by illustrating stories for a Berlin publication, raised enough money to travel to Paris in 1892.  Combining time in front of art-class nudes with on-the-street sketching, the 21-year-old artist ignored the groundbreaking work being produced at the time by Monet and his ilk.

Wee Willie Winkie’s World, from The Chicago Sunday Tribune, November 25, 1906 (Commercial lithograph, 23½” x 17 13/16″), © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Back in Berlin after less than a year, Feininger found work for an American publisher  and then as a cartoonist for a weekly humor magazine.  His illustrations were soon published by others and in 1906 he was approached by the Chicago Tribune to pen a comic strip.  The Kin-der-Kids were born and following that, Wee Willie Winkie’s World.

Feininger reinvented Sunday comics.  He broke through the traditional rectangular frame, filling the spaces around them with decorative elements that enhanced the mood of each episode.  In the borders of the strip of November 25, 1906 (pictured above), roosters perch atop art deco style houses while a centrally located, sideways-glancing sun menacingly flashes its teeth.

In Wee Willie Winkie’s World, a small child describes to Uncle Feininger his impressions of a world where everything in the outsized landscape–trees, clouds, houses and even a locomotive–sports a face and occasionally limbs.  At turns his surroundings amuse, awe and threaten him.

In one episode, Wee Willie Winkie notices a row of dormer windows in a house roof.  To the imaginative child, “There is one tiny garret window, like a squalling little baby, with a drowsy, grumpy old nurse next it, who seems to say:  ‘Let it squall if it will;  I’m tired and can’t be bothered.’”⁵ Such is Wee Willie Winkie’s experience of adult’s attitudes toward upset children and a hint at what it was like for Feininger when his parents tossed him unceremoniously into a foreign land.

In a Village Near Paris (Street in Paris, Pink Sky) (1909, oil on canvas, 39¾” x 32″), © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

The rich fantasy life that sustained the artist as a youngster and brought him fame and prosperity as a cartoonist remained a vital source of imagery even after he moved on from illustration commissions and comic strip creations.  The pedestrians going about their business In a Village Near Paris (Street In Paris, Pink Sky) (1909) step right out of Uncle Feininger’s imagination and onto the canvas.

By 1906 when Feininger was finally able to afford a second trip to Paris, the garish colors of Fauvism had been around for a while and Cubism was coming into its own.  That year Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the death of Cezanne inspired a memorial retrospective in his honor, making his radical ideas about painting more widely available.

Carnival in Arcueil (1911, oil on canvas, 41.3″ x 37.8″), © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago.

The influence of the Paris art scene followed Feininger back to Germany and appears in paintings like Carnival in Arcueil (1911) where the yellow of the buildings complements the violet of their roof tops and of the viaduct, setting up a visual vibration that enhances the action of the paraders who march off the canvas in the lower left.

In a departure from the gaiety of many of Feininger’s fanciful pictures, Untitled (Deserted Child) (1915)–a watercolor produced during the war years–depicts atop a hill three men with walking canes, outfitted in brown suits and turning their backs as they walk off, two to the left and one toward the background, while an orange-colored man heads off to the right.  They leave behind a small, seated, blue figure positioned at the base of the hill, bent over by its contours and the booted foot of the central adult, a reflection of the artist’s position during World War I.

Weighed down by the constant news of the deaths, injuries and psychological traumas suffered by many of his artist friends, Feininger was unbearably torn between his loyalty to Germany and his status as an American citizen.  While some of the work he produced during those years, like Untitled (Deserted Child) and Self-Portrait (Selbstbildnis) (pictured above), suggest this emotional state, others reflect the minimal impact the war had on the practical aspects of his daily life.

The Green Bridge II (Grüne Brücke II) (1916, oil on canvas, 49⅜” x 39½”), © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Feininger continued to labor at his oil paintings and The Green Bridge II (Grüne Brücke II) (1916), a remake of an earlier version, demonstrates the mastery he eventually achieved.  Brush strokes are deliberate, colors are thoughtfully layered, and the artist has fully developed his characteristic style of indicating form with gradations of tone across each surface, dark meeting light wherever one plane turns into another.

Entering the sixth gallery of the Whitney exhibit, the visitor meets Feininger after he joined the Bauhaus, one of many organizations that sprouted up after the war, when the establishment of a German republic sparked new optimism for the country’s future.  His new status as faculty member, with its accompanying studio space, served as a tonic for the war-wearied artist, providing him with financial stability.  In 1921, disillusioned with the Bauhaus’s shift away from nature, Feininger was relieved to be freed of his tedious teaching duties and to accept the appointment as head of the school’s print workshop.

Nearing his fiftieth birthday, Feininger began to incorporate into his paintings an awareness of Cubism and lessons learned about light from his experiments with photography.  In a tour-de-force of color and contrast, the awesomely beautiful Church of the Minorites II (Barfüsserkirche II) (1926) epitomizes the unique qualities that set this artist apart from others.

Like many of Feininger’s paintings from this time onward, the Church of the Minorites II brings to mind the geometric elements and luminescent clarity of stained glass windows.  In this oil on canvas, the artist portrays the figures with the same angularity as the forms of the church and, by miniaturizing them, establishes a humbling effect similar to that engendered by the interiors of many towering cathedrals.  Here he comes closest to fulfilling his quest for the spiritual in art.

A few years later, Feininger painted Calm at Sea III (Stiller Tag am Meer III) (1929), another example of his singular vision.  Using variations on the primary colors of red, yellow and blue, he has taken two sailboats and created an abstract study in stillness.  Indicative of the relative obscurity of this artist, few images can be found online for referencing, providing yet another motivation for seeing the exhibit and/or buying the excellently written and lusciously illustrated catalog.

In 1933 when Hitler came to power, Feininger–despite having a Jewish wife–was initially enthusiastic about the possibilities such a strong leader offered Germany.  After awhile, unable to maintain his denial of the dangers of Nazism, and determined to keep his art a central focus, he sought refuge in a seaside village that he knew well from previous visits.  Though producing few oil paintings between 1932 and 1936, he continued to express himself in drawings and watercolors, finding solace in his peaceful surroundings.

By 1937, realizing that as a modern artist and an American it was no longer safe to remain in Germany, and invited to teach at a college in the United States, Feininger fled back to his country of origin, where he would reside until his death in 1956.

Docking in his hometown after fifty years abroad was disorienting for the 66-year-old adult.  Where once low-lying buildings had brought visual access to rail yards and docks, now canyons flanked by tall buildings limited the view.  In an effort to get his bearings, Feininger once again sought comfort in scenes of boats on water.  Paintings done years later in his eighties have the ephemeral quality of a late Turner, depicting light on water and sky, in search of the sublime.

In the last gallery of the Whitney show, sharing the walls with more familiar subjects were new ones of Manhattan skyscrapers.  Returning to New York seemed to have stirred to life the imaginative child for whom the city had once served as playground.  Like the young child that had been drawn to trains and boats, the now much older one looked up at towering buildings, the new emblems of progress.

In a small and simply rendered watercolor, Untitled (Manhattan at Night) (1937),  the artist places the viewer high above the street looking up at a powder blue sky punctuated with four twinkling stars between office buildings covered with rows of lit windows.  Overwhelm turned to wonder.  Inspired by the Manhattan cityscape, Feininger recovered the playfulness of his earlier years.  Buildings took on cartoon shapes again and in Moonwake (1945), a gigantic figure walks among the houses.

Uncle Feininger reappeared with watercolors done in the fifties of odd looking creatures called “Ghosties” (1954).  Most notably, in a watercolor and ink of Montmartre, Paris (1938), two cartoon characters, looking for all the world like Boris and Natasha of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame, approach each other from opposite directions on a night-darkened street.  One longs to see the next frame of this nascent comic strip.

______________________________

¹ Barbara Haskell, Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, 2011, 24.

² Ibid, 3.

³ Ibid, 2.

⁴ Overheard comment at exhibit in front of The Green Bridge II.

⁵ Wee Willie Winkie’s World, The Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 16, 1906.

Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
(212)570-3633

Catalog available.

Art For Our Time:
German Expressionism
at Galerie St. Etienne & MoMA

Max Pechstein, Dancer in the Mirror (woodcut, 19-7/16″ x 15¾”), © 2011
Max Pechstein/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

The stars must have aligned over New York City for a niche gallery and major museum to concurrently exhibit drawings and prints by German Expressionist artists, all taken from their extensive holdings.  Galerie St. Etienne, a venue that specializes in Expressionism and self-taught art, planned its exhibition, Decadence & Decay: Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, well in advance and not in connection with The Museum of Modern Art’s German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse.  The shows offered viewers two very different perspectives, but only at the gallery could art lovers walk away with a favorite–once they’d left some money behind.

Accompanied by a catalog primarily written by curator Starr Figura and heralding the digitalization of the museum’s 3,400 plus Expressionist works on paper, the exhibit at MoMA set out to define, illustrate and track the rise and fall of the movement in Germany and Austria from 1905 with the formation of the artists’ groups Die Brücke in Dresden and–several years later–Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, until the confiscation and destruction by the Nazis of hundreds of works of “degenerate art” in the late 1930s.

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Bowler Hat, (1921, drypoint, 12¾” x 9¾”), courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, NY.

The Galerie St. Etienne showcased the work of three Weimar-era artists who did not identify strongly with any one group and whose most powerful images lean toward the left of the political spectrum.  In Jane Kallir’s concise and informative essay accompanying the checklist, she distinguished between these “Verists,” with their uncompromising images of the underside of life, and the “Magic Realists” with their revival of Italian classicism, well suited for the Nazi propaganda to come.  (See review of the Guggenheim’s Chaos and Classicism show.)

Erich Heckel, Portrait of a Man (1919, woodcut, 18-3/16″ x 12¾”), © 2011 Erich Hecke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Germany.

Expressionism, as originally conceived, emphasized “personal expression” and was “characterized by simplified or distorted forms and exaggerated color.”¹ Prints–especially woodcuts–and other works on paper became the media of choice, allowing for spontaneity, experimentation and wider dissemination.

The (almost exclusively male) artists presented in both shows are celebrated for their development of printmaking as an artistic form in its own right, but Berlin-based Käthe Kollwitz preceded them by over a decade with her series, A Weavers’ Rebellion (1894–98), soon following it with her Peasants’ War (1902–08).

Although the MOMA exhibit displayed a fair number of Kollwitz’s works, including all seven of the woodcuts that make up her poignant commentary War (1921-22), the main text of the catalog fails to give her the same biographical treatment afforded other prominent artists.  Readers will find only descriptions of her work and, oddly, a first mention of her (p. 29) by last name only, implying a prior reference where none exists.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Winter Moonlit Night, (1919, woodcut, 12-11/16″ x 12-5/16″), © Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer, Wichtrach, Bern.

The art of Die Brücke (The Bridge) members reflects their counter-cultural attitudes.  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner seems to have been the de facto leader, attracting like-minded artists and their friends to his studio to celebrate chaos with decoration and dancing.  Both there and at their favorite beach resorts they cavorted nude and sought to “bring art and life into harmony with each other.”²

Franz Marc, Riding School After Ridinger (1913, woodcut, 12-13/16″ x 14¾”), The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

The prime mover of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, Vasily Kandinsky (mythic father of abstract painting), had a similar interest in the ethereal.  Author of Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1913), Kandinsky and his cohorts, Franz Marc among them, revealed in their work a “fascination with themes of spiritual rebirth and cosmic conflict.”³

Oskar Kokoschka, Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1909, oil on canvas, 30⅛” x 55⅝”), © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/Pro Litteris, Zurich.

Egon Schiele, Standing Male Nude with Arm Raised, Back View (1910, watercolor & charcoal on paper, 17⅝” x 12⅜”), The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

In Austria, two unaffiliated Viennese artists, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, created images aimed at “the facade of complacency and conformity that dominated”⁴ the culture of their city.  More inclined to compete than band together, they produced a far more unsettling brand of Expressionism.  Hardly idealistic or other-worldly, their work confronts the viewer with overtly sexual and violent images, insisting on spotlighting the darker reaches of the human psyche.

Displayed in the first four galleries at the MoMA show, the pieces by Kokoschka and Schiele stand out among those of dancing nudes and idyllic nature blithely executed by their German contemporaries.  The advent of World War I erased any such disparity among most of these artists.  Forced to confront the uglier aspects of human nature, they responded in various ways.  Many of them served in the military.  Of those, none escaped physically or psychologically unharmed.  Several were killed in action.  A few committed suicide.

Stepping into the next room, one encountered a dramatic shift in subject matter that reflected this altered European landscape.  Kirchner, that espouser of all things beautiful, produced a lithograph depicting a sex murder, an emerging theme at the time.  In his Murderer (1914), a black-suited man stands over a nude woman bleeding from a gaping wound in her neck from which blood trickles down to her crotch where it pools, then spreads to provide much of the color in the print.

Kirchner’s lithograph shared a wall with Night (1914), a drypoint by Max Beckmann of what might be a murder in a brothel.  A man’s body, still partially on the bed, slides onto the floor where a stream of blood runs from the back of his head.  Nearby, an overturned nightstand spills objects onto the floor.  Two women and a man look on with mild interest.

Otto Dix, Skull, 1924 (etching, 10⅛” x 7¾”), © Otto Dix/2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Moving along, viewers entered a gallery at the far end of which hung images of war’s brutal reality.  Not since Francisco Goya inked his print series, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), has another artist captured the nightmare of armed conflict like Otto Dix did in his series of etchings, Der Krieg (War).  As an artilleryman for the duration of the war, the artist learned first hand about the horrors and deprivations of trench warfare, relying on drawing to maintain some semblance of sanity.  Years later he observed, “You have to have seen people in this untamed state to know anything about them.”⁵

MoMA mounted, salon style, all fifty prints of Der Krieg.  In four uneven rows, the etchings depicted trench warfare in all its gory:  Those still living fight amid corpses strewn across lunar landscapes.  People lose their minds: a woman with a crazed look kneels over a dead baby; a boy with an ash-blackened head stares with wild eyes.  Prostitutes stroll along streets and men seek relief from women they pay.  Body parts hang on trees, and skull and limb bones accumulate in piles.  At night, a man comes over the rim of a trench to stab its unsuspecting occupant in the chest.  War cripples trudge along in a line, bringing to mind John Singer Sargent’s painting of mustard gas victims, Gassed (1918).  Broken bodies hang from a bombed-out building while in front of it a bloody-headed baby leans on the corpse of a woman.  Drunks fight in a bar.  A bright rising sun mocks two soldiers crawling on their hands and knees, leaving skeletons behind them.  Three rigid legs of a gutted horse point skyward.

Otto Dix, Bombs Are Dropped on Lens (1924, etching, 11¾” x 9⅝”), courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, NY.

Several of Dix’s War prints also appeared at Galerie St. Etienne.  These, displayed at eye level, afforded a more intimate viewing experience than was possible at the MoMA show.   Also at the gallery were two drawings, Grenade Trench with Dead Men and Man Reading in Foxhole (both 1917).  Sketched on site using the side of a black chalk crayon to create broad, dark marks, they bring the viewer into the trenches with Dix.

No stranger to war’s tragedies, Käthe Kollwitz directed her energies toward exposing the hidden casualties of war:  the parents asked to offer up their children.  Having lost her son early in the conflict (like many caught up in nationalistic fervor, he had quickly enlisted), she suffered acutely from his death.  Her belief in the futility of war finds expression in her series, War, all seven of which appeared in the MoMA exhibit.

Exploiting the expressive power of black ink set against wide expanses of white paper, these woodcuts feature mothers attempting to protect children threatened by the demands of a war machine that would devour them.  In The Parents, an elderly couple form a compact monumental unit; the father, one arm raised to cover his face with a gnarled hand, embraces his wife, who bends over to bury her head in the crook of his other arm.  Their grief is palpable.

In another woodcut from War, The Widow II, Kollwitz places the viewer behind the thrown-back head of a foreshortened body of a woman holding a baby draped across her chest.  Her eyes, in a face that appears upside down to the onlooker, suggest those of the living dead.

Max Beckmann, Lovers I (1916, drypoint, 9⅜” x 11¾”), courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, NY.

On a wall perpendicular to the one with Kollwitz’s woodcuts, MoMA displayed all eleven of Max Beckmann’s lithographs of war’s aftermath, straightforwardly titled Hell.  Characteristic of much of this artist’s work, the prints overflow with chaotically jumbled figures who chat, orate, sing patriotic songs, go hungry and torture others.  Breaking through their pictorial boundaries, many of these images demand deliberate and sustained focus for full comprehension, requiring more than casual viewing.

George Grosz, Saxon Miniatures (1921, ink, 26″ x 19⅝”), courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, NY.

Another critic of post-war German society, George Grosz excelled at the equivalent of scathing political cartoons.  At the Galerie St. Etienne, one found a generous selection of these works on paper.

In Saxon Miniatures, Grosz reveals his view of German manhood.  By positioning figures from background to foreground, he suggests a kind of evolutionary timeline, beginning with a withered old man and moving forward with a military man, then a cleric, and ultimately, a Saxon tribesman armed with a club.

Grosz’s 1921 ink drawing, Let Those Swim Who Can–The Heavy May Sink, speaks to the deprivation suffered by the less fortunate members of post-war Germany.  Grosz poignantly depicts a wrinkled man clad in slippers, jacket and slacks, with a cravat tied tightly around his neck.  Leaning over to rest his skull-like head on one arm while gripping the cane that supports him with the other, the occupant of this small room containing little more than a bed and a couple of chairs looks to be dying from starvation.

In addition to many of Grosz’s works on paper, the MoMA show included two of his 1917 paintings, Metropolis and Explosion.  In both, predominant red tones, heightened by occasional blues and greens, heat up exploding urban views.

In the vertical Metropolis, floating men in suits hurry across the canvas while two bare-breasted women dressed in stockings are destined for a different kind of business.  In the other painting, the eponymous explosion shatters glass, tumbles buildings and scatters lives, an apt metaphor for the hit taken by any society engaging in war.

Like much of the art in both shows, the eleven lithographs comprising Beckmann’s Trip to Berlin (1922) highlighted the chasm between those who benefit from armed conflict and those who suffer because of it.  In this series, shown in its entirety at MoMA, Beckmann juxtaposes The Theater Lobby with Tavern, and in Striptease, unhappy, mostly-nude women attempt to entertain a well-dressed but inattentive audience.  The Disillusioned in formal wear sit around a table while The Beggars in the street look for handouts.

Otto Dix, Apotheosis (1919, woodcut, 11⅛” x 7⅞”), courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, NY.

Apotheosis, a 1919 woodcut by Dix bridges past with present in its elevation to godhood of a bare-breasted, corseted woman wearing black stockings and heeled boots.  Spinning around her in a cubistic array, heads and appendages of men share the background with pieces of buildings.  Dix seems to be addressing both the commodification of sex and the increasing pace of life brought on by industrialization and the growth of cities.

Flash forward.  The mechanical morphs into the digital.  Wars rage, sex sells, cement spreads, rich and poor collide in urban settings.  One wonders how Grosz and Dix would react to 21st century life.

Kollwitz died in April 1945, just months before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fortunate to be spared witnessing the blood-hued dawn of the nuclear age.  What images would she have created in response to such mass murder that might have moved viewers to better safeguard this precious gift of life?
________________________________
¹ Starr Figura, German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, 2011, 10.

² Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig (1913), quoted in German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, 11.

³ Figura, 18.

⁴ Ibid, 90.

⁵ Quoted by Dietrich Schubert in Otto Dix, 2010, 37.

Decadence & Decay: Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz
Galerie St. Etienne
24 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
(212)245-6734

German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
(212)708-9400