An extraordinary loan of early 20th century art from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is now on view at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth.
This is actually the second overlapping major exhibit from the art museum in Berlin. Early in May I viewed a smaller selection of paintings at the Neue Galerie, a short distance from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This recently-closed ‘New Objectivity’ exhibit featured some of the same painters (such as George Grosz) as the one here in Texas.
Grosz was a key exponent of the unflinchingly and socially critical Verists, one of the two philosophies that exemplified the New Objectivity movement in Germany that arose after World War I. It was a major break with the Expressionist movement, and is worlds away from the Impressionist works that still remain the most popular paintings with the public.
Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945, the title of the Kimbell exhibit, covers the period of both World Wars. It is, however, marked particularly by what happened to the artists and art dealers in Germany in the late 1930s and during the subsequent war years 1939-1945. Many of the artists whose works are on display here had dozens or even hundreds of works on display in German museums until Hitler came to power. His Nazi goons labelled much German art of the previous decades as degenerate. Thousands of works were stripped from gallery walls and destroyed. Some were saved, and among these precious few are the ones on view now in Ft. Worth.
Those who made and sold such works were also at risk. Like many scientists, such as Einstein, these people also fled Germany before the outbreak of war in 1939. Some went further west in Europe, where they came under Nazi rule again when countries were occupied; others made it safely to England or the United States. The art on display here thus gives us a unique look into a 35-year period that saw the creation of forms of art unlike any other: an efflorescence of creativity utterly smashed by evil. [Anyone looking for parallels today does not have to look far. On May 30, 2025, the U.S. National Portrait Gallery Director was fired. Does diversity= degenerate?]
There is actually of mix of styles on display, something for everyone. The lead photo shows three completely different styles in close proximity. The largest work on display is a fully Classical nude bronze. Titled Descending Man, it was cast in 1939-1940 by Georg Kolbe. This was the sort of male idealized statuary commissioned by the Nazi government.
On the wall behind it are two utterly different styles that actually convey similar messages. As the war ended in 1945-46, Horst Strempel created Night over Germany, which exposed the great crimes of the Third Reich. The central panel (partially visible at left here) depicts a concentration camp, and the right shows the terror of a hidden Jewish family. The work was so astoundingly controversial that it remained in storage for decades, and has only rarely been seen.
On the right of the bronze sculpture is Germany, Awaken! by Karl Kunz. Done in 1942, the title is taken from the anthem of the Nazi storm troopers, “deftly turning the phrase as a warning and call to action against the very forces that had first employed it,” to quote from the exhibit catalog. The work was considered so dangerous it was not shown publicly until 1975, and was given by the artists’ son to the Nationalgalerie in 2015.
In the work, Kunz assimilated motifs from Picasso’s war protest Guernica. “He translated the interior of this monumental painting into an image of urban destruction.” It depicts a scene of devastation that was too horrific for at least one figure, who we see falling from a tall building. Below are a dying man, woman and child, signifying the death of the German people. According to the catalog, the scene “may have been inspired by the bombing of automotive factories in Augsburg in April 1942.”
Not all the artists here were Germans. There is an example of a Picasso from 1909, two works by Paul Klee (Swiss-born), the 1945 masterwork The Great Metaphysician by the Italian Giorgio de Chirico (which he falsely dated to 1916 to make it more valuable!!), and a vibrant depiction of a windmill by Jacoba van Heemserck, born in the Netherlands. These and other ‘foreign’ artists were featured in Berlin galleries; Jacoba’s work was sold in a gallery called Der Sturm (The Storm) in Berlin. It was owned by Herwarth Walden, who left Germany in 1932 after threats from the Gestapo. Unfortunately, he decided to flee to Moscow, where he died in a prison in 1941. Other German gallery owners whose portraits are shown in the exhibit are Heinrich Thannhauser (who created a display in Munich of more than 90 works by Van Gogh in 1908), and Alfred Flechtheim. Thannhauser died of a stroke in 1934 attempting to flee from the Nazis; such was their hatred of Thannhauser that they confiscated the holdings of not only his German galleries, but the gallery run by his son in Paris when they invaded the French capital in 1941. Flechtheim’s portrait by Otto Dix exaggerates Jewish features to an extreme degree, the very stereotypes the Nazis used to attack him. He fled Germany in 1933 for France and then England where he died in 1937.
Not all is doom and gloom here. The liveliness of the Weimar Republic is best exemplified by Otto Moeller in his 1921 painting City. The city, of course, is Berlin. As the catalog states, “Rhythmically staggered rectangular fields form a façade pattern that optically protrudes and recedes.” This dazzling of the senses perfectly captures in art what was portrayed so famously on film by Cabaret. Here, Moeller takes the key elements of Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism to evoke the great metropolis.
Treasures abound, including The Green Girl by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1915), Portrait of Rosa Schapire by Walter Gramatte (1920) and the 1928 painting Sonja by Christian Schad, which graces the cover of the excellent catalog. This work is considered to be an icon of the New Objectivity school. Be sure to buy a copy of the heavy 249-page catalog in the Kimbell gift shop. It includes a fascinating chapter by Dieter Scholz on the Nationalgalerie, of which he is the Curator. His 23-page chronology is essential for a proper understanding of the works on display, as it places them against the framework of German life and politics. Throughout the book, each painting or sculpture is given a full page, perfectly reproduced in colour, with facing commentary. It was expertly printed by Friesens in Manitoba, Canada.
This is not your typical art exhibit! Inextricably bound up with these works is the history of Germany itself, so no matter what your opinion is of the art, visiting this exhibit is essential for anyone interested in charting the rise and fall of a democracy, and its consequences. One correspondent I recently read stated that “We seem to going, on a large scale, through the kind of mass societal collapse that occurred at the end of the Bronze Age, and again in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, with greater unlikelihood of anything emerging this time that can save us.” The exhibit at the Kimbell may very well be seen by some as a Requiem not only for the Weimar Republic in the 20th century, but of the Western world in the 21st century.
Roughly 2/3 of the 70 artworks here have never before been seen in the U.S. The exhibit closes at the Kimbell June 22, and then travels to Albuquerque and Minneapolis.
Link for the Kimbell exhibit:
https://kimbellart.org/modern-art-politics-germany
and an extensive commentary can be read at:
https://kimbellart.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/Germany%20Large%20Print%20Booklet%20ENGLISH.pdf
Link for the New Objectivity exhibit (which ended May 26, 2025):
https://www.neuegalerie.org/exhibitions/neuesachlichkeit
Link for the new exhibit in New York City (on display until May 4, 2026):
https://www.neuegalerie.org/exhibitions/germanmasterworks