Why 1933? What made Germany susceptible to fascism--for that matter, what made Germany receptive to the Hohenzollerns and Bismarck? Is there something in German culture that perennially leads to autocratic aggression? These are the questions which the artists of the Weimar Republic, that butterfly-fragile democracy which governed Germany between World War I and Hitler's ascension in 1933, were beginning to ask themselves; and they are also the questions which we inevitably ask of Weimar art.
But we must not simply raid the Busch-Reisinger Museum's current exhibition, A Laboratory of Modernity: Image and Society in the Weimar Republic for traces of blonde-beast barbarism. It would be philistine. After all, the Weimar republic was something of a laboratory of modernity--it represents a self-conscious break with the culture that nurtured Otto von Bismarck and his moustached ilk. In 1926, in fact, the Reichstag voted for a censorship program that would suppress Schmutz and the alien, commercial cosmopolitanism that are so prevalent in Weimar visual culture.
Appreciating the Weimar exhibition in this historical context is essential. In fact, The Laboratory of Modernity exhibition was actually organized to complement Eric Rentschler's Weimar Cinema class (German 155). The works themselves are usually not beautiful. Karl Hubbuch's drypoint, profile portrait of The Schaefer Sisters shows the ugly sister fastening a necklace around her prettier sister's neck. The sisters are ably sketched, but their averted gaze, their isolation on otherwise white paper, and the blunt utility of Hubbuch's composition combine to give the viewer a queer sense of detachment, which prevents wholehearted admiration while simultaneously intensifying the clarity of appreciation. Like most of the other drawings and photographs exhibited at the Busch, The Schaefer Sisters "clicks" for the viewer just as later Abstract Expressionist pieces "click"; unlike abstract images, however, the presence of a clearly portrayed object confounds any attempt on the museum goer's part to detect feelings of abstract communication or inspiration. Pieces such as Max Beckmann's hollow-eyed Self-Portrait and Lyonel Feiniger's playfully interpretable Hairdresser's Dummy with Mr. and Mrs. Feiniger have the modern emphasis on form which mark their contemporaries in architecture and design, but their stubborn focus on people as objects indicates a less artistic goal-politics.
The above pieces are actually among the least political of the exhibition. A number of photo montages, primarily by John Heartfield and El Lissitzky, take up Soviet propaganda, Hitler and Weimar politics with a style that anticipates, but far from outshines, contemporary artists like Barbara Kruger. Their montages are busy, uninviting, but important. Heartfield's One must have a special disposition toward suicide. It illustrates the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg by the Freikorps--an event which put an end to any realistic hopes for a Communist revolution in the Weimar Republic. Heartfield lays Liebknecht's mordant head among a sea of German newspaper clippings from anti-Communist papers, subtly picturing the Freikorps in one corner. The effect is a man drowning in newsprint--a valid object of sympathy, but probably not what Heartfield intended. Although this piece is perhaps the least presentable of the exhibit's montage collection, even it expresses what is most important about Weimar montage: a photograph, the medium of realism, is cut, so that slavery to photo-realistic reproduction is defeated as its own inception.
Instead of representation, instead of abstract beauty, Weimar visual cultural does...what? It is political, but it is more than simple propaganda--Heartfield and Georg Grosz each have their Hitler caricatures, but the meat of Weimar thought is elsewhere. Technology is everywhere: in the medium of photography, in Bauhaus design, in the mannequins of Josef Albers and Oskar Schlemmer, in the pipes and puppets in the portraiture section. The noisy whirligig of modern technology is both embraced in dada photo-montages of basketball-headed humanoids and controlled through the neat, organized designs of Herbert Bayer's movie house and exhibition pavilion, diagrams simultaneously full of primary color and filled with stark black lines. In responding to industrialized modern culture so precociously, Weimar visual culture was not simply concerned with making images, it was all about using images.
The mannequins, the frightened dada, the busy montage, the cold Bauhaus design: All this could be funneled into some superficial critique of the continuities between Weimar culture and fascism. But such an approach would ignore peculiar versatility Weimar artists showed in reacting to and using these new modern themes.
The Busch-Reisinger exhibition does an adequate job of presenting the complexity of Weimar visual culture. There are no flagship pieces; not one oil painting graces the show (where is Christian Schad?). Copious books have been placed in the hallway outside the exhibit to bolster the scanty offerings. There is a characteristic Georg Grosz sketch of men and women walking about, greedy and mean, but it feels like little more than a twig compared to the corpus of Grosz's works. The same is true of the representation given of Beckmann, Feiniger, Albers, Schlemmer and other Weimar stars. The only artist who has enough pieces in The Laboratory of Modernity to shine within its gray walls is L'aszl'o Moholy-Nagy, whose work finds a place in each of the exhibits three sections: "Montage," "The Modern Subject" and "Urban Visions." For a period that is already more academically interesting than anything, a more generous sampling would have been appropriate. Additionally, most of the pieces come from Harvard-related museum or library holdings, giving the show a scrappy feel. Yet the exhibition can stand on its own. It's not great for Sunday gazing, but for history and art theory lovers, it's a lot better than all that Monet in the 21st Century stuff that's been going around.
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