Exhibition of the week Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany, 1919-33
Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk). Until 14 July 2019
The term “magic realism” is normally associated with Latin American literature, but in fact it was first coined to describe a style of visual art that emerged in Germany between the Wars, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. At the time, artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann – many of them war veterans – were creating work that kept one foot in the real world, but which also showed how reality had been warped by “the chaotic politics and economic hardship of the era”. As this free-to-enter exhibition at Tate Modern demonstrates, the style was not much concerned with beauty. Instead, it bared “the scars of war”, depicting the physically and mentally “disfigured” character of post-armistice Germany. The show charts the period fromv the end of the War to Hitler’s rise to power, bringing together about 70 works that are full of “energy and rage”. The circus and the cabaret are recurring motifs: Weimar’s artists were fascinated with their mixture of “fantasy and reality, glamour and dissolution”. Much of what we see here is “profoundly unsettling”, but it is a “fascinating” experience.
This is not a show for the faint-hearted, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Grosz’s Suicide (1916) gives us a smartly dressed man who has just “blown out his brains” in the middle of a street, his face fixed in a “skull-like rictus”, while a prostitute looks on from a window. Elsewhere, many pictures depict “female corpses” and horrendous murders: two “broken necked” women in high heels hang from a ceiling in one disturbing watercolour by Rudolf Schlichter, while Dix’s “crazed” etching Lust Murderer (1920) imagines a knife-wielding “psychopath” surrounded by “dismembered female body parts”. Horrific though these are, they are unquestionably powerful. However, the same cannot be said of everything here; too much of this exhibition is taken up by “drab and humdrum paintings” by “second-rate talents”.
I disagree – this is “a truly revelatory voyage through art and history” that gives space to many overlooked painters of the era, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian: the “biggest discovery” is Jeanne Mammen, whose “liberated and hedonistic” images of women nearly steal the show. But it is full of “astonishing” works, which hold up “a mad mirror to a mad world”. The Nazis banned many of these artists as “degenerate” – not just because they were avant-garde modernists, but because they “really did revel in the perverse, the decadent, the depraved”. Their art is “still shocking today”.