Weimar art delivers a historical sucker punch
Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 Tate Liverpool
Interwar Germany is a historical moment we all feel we know, with its rampant inflation, unbridled sleaze and the rise of Hitler. Thanks not least to the musical Cabaret and the novels of Christopher Isherwood that inspired it, as well as endless documentaries, the edgy, decadent atmosphere of the Weimar Republic is so hard-wired into the collective imagination that you may not feel you need to travel to Liverpool to see a large exhibition on two of its iconic artists. Trust me, you absolutely do.
This is, in fact, two substantial exhibitions by artists whose worldviews couldn’t be more different – the photographer August Sander and the painter Otto Dix – but which seen in tandem deliver an evocation of a time and place that will stop you in your tracks.
Sander began his great life’s project in the mid-twenties: a mass portrait of his countrymen, which he called People of the Twentieth Century.
From bankers and architects to circus performers and beggars, all are subjected to the same impassive, evenly focused gaze, and grouped into social categories: Farmers, Skilled Tradesmen, Industrialists and so on, ending with what he called The Last People: Idiots, the Sick, the Insane and the Dying.
Many of these images have become classics: a stylishly androgynous secretary with a touch of Cabaret heroine Sally Bowles, a burly pastry cook stirring a sauce. But it’s the cumulative effect of seeing all 150 of the portraits in this exhibition that is compelling, giving us a truly ominous sense of being drawn into another world. Whether they’re relatively well known artists – the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann and the composer Paul Hindemith – or a blank-faced brother and sister standing in a driveway or a Turkish mousetrap salesman, Sander’s people appear locked into their social minutiae, defined not by their hopes and passions, but their clothes, furniture and the accoutrements of their work.
The pre-war Germans are often thought of as a people who became guilty by failing to question what was happening around them. Sander shows us those people in a work that feels in retrospect like a huge but still understated moral accusation. Contrastingly, beside Sander’s austere humanism, the painter Otto Dix gives us rampant Weimar sleaze in street and brothel scenes crowded with figures hideously disfigured by war, aged crones selling sex, randy sailors and the odd murdered prostitute thrown in for good measure. Three years serving as a machine-gunner on the Western Front left Dix determined not to run from horror, but to “experience all the darkest recesses of life”. His images can appear deliberately careless and cartoonlike, indifferent to bourgeois niceties such as “good drawing”, but enlivened by queasily sumptuous colour and a deliciously dark sense of humour: an image of two emaciated whip-wielding whores is called Dedicated Sadists. Dix saw himself as part of a quintessentially Germanic worldview – typified by Renaissance masters such as Lucas Cranach and Dix’s idol Hans Baldung Grien – which focused on the grotesque and the lumpenly physical in contrast to the idealism of the Italian tradition. This manifests itself here in a series of meticulously detailed but sinister portraits in a mixture of tempera and oil – a renaissance technique that Dix perfected. The lugubrious profile of photographer Hugo Erfurth is echoed by that of his enormous Alsatian dog, while in Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin the actress looks challengingly back at us, a worn but still feisty Marlene Dietrich-figure in red suspenders. Whether she’s the ultimate predatory Weimar vamp eager to draw us into her deathly embrace or simply an emancipated older woman, what she wants is left ambiguous.
This is an exhibition with an atmosphere that will stay with you for days. Weimar Germany may now be a distant epoch, but on this showing its art is still capable of delivering a sharp jab to the solar plexus.