On the brink of catastrophe

Christian Schad 'Self Portrait 1927'. Photo / Supplied

The scene is a city square, ringed with crumbling buildings. A group of young artists stand surrounded by fresh paintings, seeking admittance to the academy. The academicians, besuited and bearded, ignore the protest as they file into the building.

Rather than the eerie vacuum of a De Chirico piazza, this space is charged with noise and tension and conflict. The artist, Felix Nussbaum, has included himself and some of his friends and rivals standing in Pariser Platz in Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate looming over them, symbols of authority crumbling round them.

The Mad Square made a big impression on curator Jacqueline Strecker in Berlin 20 years ago. It was on top of her list of works to borrow when she put together a survey of modernity in German art in the first decades of last century, which has opened in Melbourne after a run at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales.

"I did have that concept of The Mad Square very early on. I saw the painting in the Berlinsker Gallery when I was studying there and I used it as the title for my PhD because it really did have that double meaning of craziness," Strecker says. "That helped me in the selection because there was such a huge pool of work to choose from."

The ideas of modernity and the metropolis underlie the show, which starts with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's move from Dresden to Berlin in 1911 in search of new subject matter and audiences for his Expressionist art.

That's why his Woman in a Hat is included in the show, a modern urban woman pushing against the constraints of the frame, and not the painting of three bathers owned by the New South Wales gallery, which fits more into his earlier work.

There's a lot of territory to cover - Expressionism, Dada, Constructivism, New Objectivity, the Bauhaus, work done by artists drawn to communism and by Nazi supporters like Emil Nolde - whose work joined the rest in the Degenerate Art shows which bookend the exhibition.

A film Strecker includes of the 1933 Degenerate Art show in Dresden (there is no known film of the 1937 Munich show) shows the extraordinary creative energy the Nazis tried to snuff out.

In many cases they succeeded. Nussbaum, the painter of The Mad Square, had his study residency in Rome terminated by Joseph Goebbels because of his Jewish ancestry. His exile in Brussels turned to terror when Belgium was occupied and he died in Auschwitz in 1944.

As well as a core of about 30 paintings, the exhibition includes works on paper, prints, photographs, sculptures, decorative arts, furniture from the Bauhaus, street posters and magazines.

Seeing early editions of Dada magazine, with covers by John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann, creates a visceral thrill.

"To me, they seemed a crucial part of the thing and they never come out of storage. I think they encapsulate not only the formal inventiveness in text and image but the whole cheekiness of the movement," Strecker says.

Many of the formal innovations were picked up by the mass media or reflected media propaganda during the war.

"The fact that artists then turned it round and subverted it made people look at the world quite differently. It did create a new awareness."

The artists had been changed by World War I.

Certainly, in the 1920s, Germany was considered in Europe, and all over the world, as an incredibly sophisticated culture, intellectually and creatively, and it was a magnet for people.

"There is no way you could do a Franz Marc story of creation, an idealistic yearning for utopia after experiencing war," she says.

The war changed Germany, but change was already happening with increased urbanisation.

In the 35 years to 1910, the population of Berlin doubled from one million. It doubled again by 1920.

It was not just Berlin. Important things were going on in other regions, like the Dresden Expressionists, Max Ernst's iconoclastic Dada experiments in Cologne, Max Beckmann in Frankfurt, Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, the Bauhaus in Weimar, collecting together Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, Swiss and Dutch.

"This show is about Germany and the diversity of movements that flourished in different centres. It's very easy to get the idea the 1920s were all about what was happening in Berlin and it's not really the case. You could say Berlin was the centre for performing arts, film and music, but the visual arts had very interesting manifestations everywhere," says Strecker.

"Certainly, in the 1920s, Germany was considered in Europe, and all over the world, as an incredibly sophisticated culture, intellectually and creatively, and it was a magnet for people. They came because it was a place for the exchange of ideas."

It's the inclusion of ideas and experiences outside of painting that makes the show fascinating.

Much of the work is invested with a kind of psychological intensity, an attempt to respond to the terror and uncertainty of the times, to make art out of trauma.

There are disturbing representations of women, such as the 1924 Rudolf Schlichter watercolour Sex Murder.

"We haven't shied away from those tough themes. The violent representation of women and sexual violence against women is so much a part of that period, not just in the visual arts but in the literature and films," Strecker says.

"The naked form becomes a site of ideological struggle for an artist like George Grosz, so all these anxieties about living in a modern age, the male artists do play out on those representations of women. I wanted people to come away with a sense of that.

"In the George Grosz watercolour The Powder Puff from the Barry Humphries collection [a depiction of two women seen from the rear preparing themselves in front of a mirror], the fact he put that fox fur over the shoulder in such an obvious way draws attention to the fact the women had become creatures of the modern age with what they had to do to survive, they had become effectively animals.

"It was also quite liberating that women could take on these new sexual identities in the 1920s, so there are two views."

She also highlights Rudolf Schlichter's The Embrace, a pencil drawing of two women on a floor, also from the Humphries collection.

"The scene of great violence between two woman is an extraordinarily daring subject that I don't think you would find many artists representing today.

"I am constantly drawn to that work because it is so beautifully drawn but at the same time there is this terribly sinister subject."

In contrast, the Bauhaus section includes more formal experiments, pure abstractions, the intense colours of Kandinsky and the spiritually charged lines of Paul Klee.

"If you look at the way in which art from this period such as Dada has profoundly influenced contemporary culture, one area is performance art," Strecker says.

"I pick that up a little in the Bauhaus section as well, with photographs that show the performances. They combined serious artistic endeavour with having fun in a fantastic atmosphere. I love the way they were able to work across media, they were not confined in any way, they really got artistic collaboration."

A revelation in The Mad Square is Neue Sachlichkeit or the New Objectivity, not so much a movement as a contemporary description of the sort of portraits being produced by younger artists through the 1920s who stepped back from some of the more extreme distortions of the war years to paint highly crafted portraits of friends, colleagues, collectors and fashionable women.

There are several portraits by Otto Dix, who did not flatter anyone except himself in his portraits, George Grosz and Christian Schad.

Max Beckmann is represented by Young Argentine, which he painted from memory after spotting a young man sitting in a Swiss hotel and turned into a portrait of disillusionment and melancholy.

Strecker says it's the part of the exhibition she's most proud of.

"Those works are the most representative of that style and I think people here may have never encountered it before. That is something to take away, an insight into a whole new style of art."