A new exhibition explores the world of ugly art
Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33 Tate Modern
Consider this tragic scene. A man in a smart bottlegreen jacket, his face already fixed in a skull-like rictus, has blown out his brains on a city boulevard at night, knocking off his bowler hat. Behind him, another suicide hangs from a lamppost, as dogs roam bloodred streets.
Meanwhile, in a window, a naked prostitute displays herself like some implacable goddess surveying the victims sacrificed in her honour. In the distance (a bitter irony, this), a church presides over the whole godless spectacle.
This is Suicide (1916), an unforgettable painting by the German artist George Grosz, which appears in the first gallery of Magic Realism, a new, free, display at Tate Modern featuring almost 70 artworks created during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933). Although Grosz’s picture was painted during the First World War, its despairing vision of a world in turmoil prefigures the prevailing tone of German art after the conflict, which was violent, bitter, intense.
During the Twenties, a new form of scorching, cynical realism came to the fore in Germany, reacting against the emotional Expressionism that had held sway in avant-garde circles prior to the war. As one critic put it, referring to the movement, which became known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”), paintings like Grosz’s were “not likely to be acceptable to those who want art to be pretty”.
Not half: don’t wander into Magic Realism expecting pretty. Yes, there is an enormous, visionary canvas, from 1920, of a blue-robed gardener holding a watering can, by the little-known artist Harry Heinrich Deierling. Peaceful and bright, it expresses a shattered society’s yearning hope for regeneration after catastrophe. But Deierling’s note of optimism is the exception.
As well as Grosz’s Suicide, the display contains a phenomenally lurid and putrid crucifixion, a watercolour of a bruised beggar collapsed on a buckling street, and several violent images featuring female corpses. These are so viciously misogynistic that, hidden away in a corner, they come with their own warning: “This room contains works that some visitors may find upsetting.”
Some visitors? Anyone not upset by Rudolf Schlichter’s perverse watercolour of two broken-necked women in high-heeled leather boots hanging from a ceiling needs locking up. It looks like a scene from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Nearby, we encounter Otto Dix’s crazed, provocative etching Lust Murderer (1920), the fine-art equivalent of a slasher film, which depicts a grinning, knife-wielding psychopath in a suit, surrounded by dismembered female body parts, some still spurting blood.
Schlichter’s picture and Dix’s print are both representative of the theme of “lustmord” or “sex murder” that became commonplace in Weimar art and literature. Turbulent times produce turbulent art, I suppose. Artists such as Dix and Grosz were the canaries in the coal mine of their society: they sensed dark forces abroad in their homeland, and their art, for all its over-the-top, grotesque qualities and elements of caricature, played a quasi-documentary role, revealing the ugly, chaotic “reality” that they saw around them. Dix’s stunning etching Butcher Shop (1920), for instance, transforms a prosaic, everyday scene, as an errand boy pops in to buy a cut of meat, into a maelstrom of barely suppressed violence and menace. The fat, thuggish workers who brandish axes and knives are probably veterans brutalised by their experiences during the war. They look as porcine as the carcasses that they are chopping up.
This queasy, upsetting realisation that things are out of joint finds memorable expression in Albert Birkle’s extraordinary portrait of a circus acrobat called Schulz – a standout image in the first gallery.
Birkle zooms in on his characterful face, as he appears to stagger backwards. His eyes roll upwards, his hair flies about, his flesh is creased with concentric lines, like ripples in a pond. You sense at once why Schulz appealed to Birkle: this isn’t a portrait of an individual, but of a battered, punchdrunk nation, unsure which way is up, which down.
The circus wasn’t the only form of popular entertainment that Weimar artists were drawn to. A gallery towards the end explores the ambiguous nocturnal netherworld of the cabaret.
Max Beckmann’s Anni (Girl with Fan), a nostalgic evocation of a nightclub painted in 1942, features a slender-necked girl in a purple dress glancing past the silhouetted form of her male companion, straight at the viewer. It’s a moment of illicit flirtation, in which the viewer is complicit.
Most of Magic Realism – which takes its title from a term coined by a critic in 1925 to describe the new trend in German art (eventually, “New Objectivity” won out) – showcases the collection of George Economou, the Greek shipping billionaire, with a few works owned by Tate, such as Grosz’s Suicide, sprinkled in for good measure. Alongside New Objectivity’s wellknown triumvirate of Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, the year-long display features many artists, such as Birkle, who will not be familiar.
I wish I could report lots of exciting new discoveries. The truth, though, is that, especially in the middle section, where we find a wall of stiff, flat portraits, there are too many drab and humdrum paintings by second-rate talents.
A lot of the artists borrow over-liberally from De Chirico and Picasso. Their work functions primarily as a social document of Weimar Germany, rather than as good art – a notion confirmed, by implication, in the wall texts, which concentrate on the period’s history.
Still, any opportunity to reacquaint oneself with the frenzied, white-hot vision of Dix and Grosz should not be missed.
The hard-hitting art in Magic Realism may not charm or delight. But, as the lurching uncertainty of our own times only seems to increase, it remains as urgent and relevant as ever.
Until July 2019; information: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk
‘During the Twenties, a new form of scorching, cynical realism came to the fore in Germany’